Skate 3 and Lost Planet 2

Skate 3 is fun and definitely worth a buy. Review over.

What? Too short you say? Fine, fine, I'll give you some details. Its controls are incredibly smooth and brilliantly simple. The difficulty is spot on, entertaining new players and veterans alike. The online play is incredibly well-designed and fun, containing a variety of competitive and cooperative modes. It may not have the ridiculous and fantastic tricks of the Tony Hawk series, but the more realistic approach makes it all the more satisfying when you perform a trick that is both believable and insane. Although I question the necessity of certain features. Why do we need the ability to get off your board and beat people brainless with it? (Aside from the obvious reason of getting vengeance on an AI teammate who constantly crashes into the player in races.) Somewhat unrelated, I think we all owe the level designers of skating games gratitude. It is not easy to create a believable environment that is also fun to skate in. The only case in which I wouldn't 100% recommend it is if jobless tattooed youngsters having fun infuriate, in which case you can feel free to go back to your rocking chair on your porch chasing kids out of your lawn.

Lost Planet 2, on the other hand is an absolute tragedy. I'm not talking about the story, which is, like many, many other shooters, an excuse to shoot things. The gameplay is fairly simple, your team of 4 soldiers are supposed to...do...something. I'm going to be quite honest, I lost track of the story around the time the player's perspective shifted for the third time. The point is you kill things. You have a battle gauge which goes up when you capture command points and down when you die, when it hits zero you lose. There are giant mechanized suits, massive aliens with big squishy orange weakspots, and guns so huge they have to be mounted on two separate trains.

All of this may sound awesome, but the game itself depresses me immensely. I have never seen so many, brilliant, interesting, unique ideas be ruined by awful design. The fun combat is marred by twisted controls. Awesome boss fights are drawn out far beyond the point where they are still fun. The difficulty was at first, completely normal, but at episode 3 it spiraled out of control. There was one point at the last leg of a long, three-part battle on a train where Bluerose and I died, still learning how to work the railway gun, the aforementioned massive cannon. We were sent back to the beginning of the mission, losing thirty minutes worth of work. The sad part is that, looking back on it, the operation of the weapon was intriguing and cooperation was paramount in its use, but all I really recall from the experience is the blistering difficulty of the rest of the mission. In summary, Lost Planet 2 has the makings of an excellent, exciting game, but is defeated in a cesspool of vomit-inducing design decisions. I'd like to point out that every single problem with the game could be fixed in a patch. Not a fan of the multiplayer modes either.