Lost Planet 2
Lost Planet 2 is made to be a co-op game, and even though it does give you the opportunity to replace friends with AI companions I get the feeling that this is not really the experience the developers had in mind so I will not say much about it. The multiplayer focus means it lacks most of the story and characters and some of the level ingenuity the first Lost Planet had, so it would not be a fair comparison.
Other than that, Lost Planet 2 has it’s fair share of issues. The AI is downright horrible, a lot of the time they just stand around waiting for something to happen. The visuals are nice, but far from eye-popping. The levels are often incredibly linear in terms of where you can go and how you can deal with obstacles, at other times finding out what to do is very hard. Weapon placement is uneven and like so many other third-person action games it has too sluggish movement to do precision jumping but still penalizes the player heavily for failing platform challenges. Lost Planet 1 had some of these as well.
I do still like the game, though, as most of these deficiencies can be chalked up to the game being sort of an arcade experience where the focus lies in providing shooting mayhem. It is not perfect, but traveling on foot or in mechs and using a myriad of weapons to fight everything from hordes of small critters to huge monsters is fun. Maybe I should place more sophisticated demands on my entertainment and perhaps this is what reviewers have done since both games have received lackluster reviews, but when enjoying myself I find it difficult to write down a game because it hasn’t kept up with all of the latest design trends.