So in single-player, you have a game that’s flatly unplayable.Īnd unless you actually have four friends willing to buy the game, plug into Xbox Live, and carefully coordinate a time like you were the Ocean’s 11 crew, getting a proper co-op game is well-nigh impossible. And of course, brain-dead ally AI can’t do that, and you don’t have the control over your allies that other squad shooters offer, much less the ability to hop between characters provided by smarter team games like the original Xbox’s Brute Force. That would merely be cute/annoying, but what makes it truly obnoxious is that mission after mission doesn’t just encourage teamwork, it absolutely depends on it-many chapters require coordinating players at far-distant points on the map. There isn’t even a “Start Game” option, just “Open Session,” and you have to specify that you want to be offline if you want to play without online intervention. Lost Planet 2 is so desperate to be regarded as a kind of action MMO that even when you play in single-player, your AI allies get phony online handles, complete with gangsta “a”s for “er”s.

I can certainly understand why Capcom thinks making you buy four copies of a game in order to play it is a good idea, but it’s harder to see why you should bother. What it wants is for you to convince four friends to buy the game, so you can all play it via online co-op. But that’s not what Lost Planet 2 wants you to do at all. That is, I put the disc in my console, picked up my controller, pressed start, and tried to play the game.

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