After many years, I decided to finally finish Lost Planet: Extreme Condition from my Steam library.

In this game, you play as Wayne, a soldier boy that fights against the Akrids to restore their colonization on the new EDN III planet. Meanwhile, a secret project is being developed, in which all life on the planet is erased, after which a small selection of settlers can rebuild a new green planet. You discover this plan and need to stop the project.

In its core, Lost Planet: Extreme Condition consists of 11 levels, each with the same principle. Get to the end, fight a boss and proceed to the next level. The story and cut scenes are well done and the voice acting is great. The action in this game is intense and stuff blows up all the time while you blast away Snow Pirates, NEVEC Soldiers and Akrid. This could be some movie from Michael Bay. The Boss battles are brutal and the amount of carnage that takes place on the screen is insane. Sh!t flies towards you from every angle, you get stomped, thrown into the air, while you yourself, empty round after round.

The shooting mechanics and controls work well and the satisfying flash of orange when you headshot an enemy from afar feels very rewarding. The only issue here is the fact that you only need one weapon for this game, the Plasma Rifle. This thing has infinite ammo, shoots 20 lightyears far and always hits. This thing makes any other weapon obsolete.

The graphics in this game are still amazing. Back then this was Crysis material, but even now, it still looks stunning. The only problem with the visuals is the explosions, snow, debris and smoke, that constantly block your vision while in combat. Then you get insane boss animations where the boss throws everything it got on you and the game can’t handle it. He slams you, while the camera gets choked on the edge of the screen, debris is coming up, explosions in the background, and BAM, that’s 11 FPS for you, my friend. Afterwards, it goes back to normal. The sound effects, music and voice overs are great and deserve only praise.

So far everything was nice and dandy, until I reached around mission 4.

The special mechanic in this game is the use of T-Energy. This resource can be obtained from outposts and the bodies of killed Akrids and Soldiers. You need it to stay alive, and it is also replenishing your health when it gets low, meaning you can never really die when you have enough of it, except pitfalls and huge Akrid that can’t be killed. This is my first flaw with this game.

Then you got the stun lock. You get blasted by a rocket and get lunged into the air. Then you need to watch a four-hour long animation of our hero getting back on his feet and staying strong. The second he stands up again, another f*cking rocket enters your rectum and you fly, once again, to the moon. There were times that I could not move or do anything at all because of this. It made me absolutely furious.

Speaking of getting back on your feet. A special note must be made for the hit recovery time. My God, it is so, unforgivably slow, it takes years and years before you can move again and before that, you are bashing your keyboard like the Angry German Kid.

This stun lock, slow movement, and cheap deaths (getting into a VS and a boulder immediately crushed your sorry ass to death), continued all the way through the end. I was really done with this game and was glad that I reached the final level/boss. But, just as a final slap in the face, the game changed 100% and suddenly, I was playing Transformers, the revenge of f*ckyoutron. The VS suits that you find in the level suddenly got full Gundam and now you are a Mech, fighting another Mech in space with totally different controls. This boss is the one of the cheapest, unfair, lamest and most atrocious boss fights I have ever experienced. The only reason I beat him was by mashing buttons, like the rest of the internet told me to do.

In conclusion, the story was okay, the graphics are amazing, the cut scenes are well done, the gunplay is fair, but the mechanics, slow movement, stun locks, camera/graphical carnage with bosses and the final boss, ruined the experience for me.

Personally, I would not recommend this game.