Okay, I admit it: every time I think of Capcom I can’t help but think of Street Fighter. I know, I know, life moves on, but you know how it is right? With their more recent release of Dead Rising not particularly impressing me I wasn’t sure what to expect from Lost Planet, although to give them their dues they hyped it up just enough for me with some nice CGI trailers that made their way around pre-launch. So, what does it all boil down to – or in this case chill to?

You play Wayne, an inventively named amnesiac who spends the game looking for a huge bug named ‘Green Eye’ who squashed his father. The aforementioned bugs are known as Akrids, who appear to have had bit parts in Starship Troopers previously or at least are some distant cousins (what a great Christmas get-together they must have). The planet of residence is E.D.N III, which is freezing cold subject to constant snowing. Hey, we like setting ourselves challenges when taking up residence on alien worlds!

It does mean, however, that you get some nice atmospheric settings in the game. As you make your way around the world you have a little gauge that constantly depletes registering how much T-ENG (Thermal Energy) you have left. Every time you kill an Akrid they drop T-ENG for you to replenish your stock with. If the gauge reaches zero you end up doing your best impression of a human choc-ice. It’s really convincing.

The graphics have been polished really nicely, with all the snow and the gradual build-up of ice on your outfit chillingly believable. Some of the attention to detail will leave you staring like a muppet whilst you get thoroughly abused by the native alien life forms. My favourite experience was the first time I saw a huge bunch of Trilids, a type of flying Akrid that looks like a bony fish and is attracted to light. They were all flying around in a cave, which looked rather pretty so I stopped to have a good stare. No one told me the Trilids nose-dive towards you when they spot you, and in an attempt to jump out the way I fell off a ledge to my untimely death. Luckily, you’ll pick the energy weapon soon after and like me you can enjoy both admiring and destroying beauty at the same time.

Something to be said of enemy intelligence is that these days it’s really hard to match some standards that are being set throughout the industry. I can’t really say that the game opened my eyes to anything new, with the typical kind of AI tomfoolery dampening their environments and nicely designed animations. Occasionally, interactive objects are added in for a different way of killing your opponents, but I found it a lot easier to simply shoot the critters than wait for them to fall into my cunning trap.

Ultimately the entire game is about you kicking some serious alien arse. To be fair though, I didn’t get bored of it. Capcom are among the kings of the arcade, so much so that in some areas of the game you find yourself firing at things all over the screen, but are acutely aware that you’re killing things a lot better than you should be. Not only do you have shed loads of weapons to Kapow and Kersplat aliens with, you get access to varieties of Mechs. The cool factor is you can chop and change the weapons they hold and sometimes the Mechs can transform into more useful, agile forms. Even if these are left in extremely dubious planted places, they’re still a lot of fun to use. You’re always well-endowed with a grapple that lets you jump up to ledges for a vantage point.

Jamie Christopherson has done great work to give the game such a dynamic atmosphere through his music. From theme to scream I felt totally engrossed. That and the sound of a Akrid crashing down next to you really puts things into perspective. The voice talent is a little off in places, but I didn’t pickup the game with high standards of a storyline so I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

I’ve left off talking about the controls until now due to feeling the urge for a little gripe. Just a small one. The controls are based upon a first-person perspective in a dominantly third-person game. You’ll need to get used to this, but like me you’ll probably find that at times the controls can lack precision, even with the games auto-aiming element. Step into a Mech however, and all you can think about is roaming around blasting things so this doesn’t really matter in the long term. What really bites is you don’t get any real form of interactive tutorial at the start. I’m all for being thrown in at the deep-end but lobbing grenades instead of reloading meant I had to pause the game to grab the manual. For a story-driven game, that was a disappointment.

I’ve walked away from the game with a wide blood-lust induced grin to say I’ve enjoyed ridding E.D.N. III from those pesky Akrids.