Lost Planet 2

In just a few minutes, someone’s going to get shot out of the ass of a giant, fire-breathing salamander…

We’ll get to that whole ass-shooting business soon enough, but for now, I’m rushing through the mouth of a shallow canyon on the planet of E.D.N. III, traveling alongside three fellow human-controlled Lost Planet–eers. We know that on the other side of the high rocky walls, we’ll be facing down a giant, hulking, amphibious-looking thing ready to stomp our brains out. Lucky for me, the four of us have plenty of rocket launchers, and a couple of working mecha-suits — called Vital Suits, or VSs — are strewn about in the mucky, muddy dirt.

First things first. I kneel alongside something called a “data post” and start spamming the B button to activate it. Back in 2007, when Capcom’s Lost Planet dashed onto the 360, data posts seemed to be all the in-game rage — not only did they boost your all-important (and constantly depleting) thermal energy (T-ENG) in single-player, but they also worked like territory grabs in a multiplayer mode rather unfortunately named, uh, Post Grab. Whatever the reason, you were forced to frantically pound the B button until the post was fully activated.

While the frenzied spamming hasn’t changed for Lost Planet 2’s data posts, their importance has. The introduction of cooperative play means that you have a team counting on you — unless you’re stuck with a bunch of jerks, that is — and if you die, you’ll need to spawn nearby. With the size of some of the areas in LP2, data posts serve as convenient spawn points, à la Star Wars: Battlefront’s command posts, to put you back into the action quickly and where you’re needed. If you don’t activate a data post in a crucial area, you’ll leave your teammates down a man while you’re making like a chump and hoofing it from a distant spawn point.

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