Late in the evening on Wednesday night, I was in a weekly meeting with the Lost Planet 2 team. We were prepping for the Tokyo Game Show. During the meeting I found out I’d be heading to the Capcom HQ in Osaka Japan on Sunday, just a few days away, to meet with the team and spend some time with LP2 in the dev studio by their request. Oh, and I had no passport! But it all worked out, and I made it there. 

Most of you know I was a huge LP fan before starting my job here at Capcom. In fact, I spent a lot of my free time on this very site talking about Lost Planet with you guys, and still do. As you can imagine, this trip was a dream come true. So now that I’m back home, I’ve gotten loads of new Lost Planet 2 info to tell you about, for you old fans and new. 

Lost Planet 2 has seen a ton of great changes, like the inclusion of co-op, bigger akrid, and new environments. The demos we showed at TGS have all that and more. Catch a ton of new info after the jump.

First, I’ll start off with the new desert stages we kept hidden from the public. The beginning of the demo we showed has you playing as a faction of pirates who’ve had a bad turn of luck, are a long ways from home, and are running dangerously low on T-ENG. That energy fuels the vehicles (Vital Suits and the like), some of the weapons, and can even be used to heal yourself. Without it, they’ll never make it home. They decide to fly over what appears to be an abandoned village. But hidden within the village are rival pirates, who shoot down their flying VS. After crashing, your objective is to take down the snipers, who are extremely accurate, and steal the train they have in the middle of the town. 

As you’ve seen in the demo, team work and sharing T-ENG is pretty important to help keep everyone alive. And it’s even more of a necessity here. You need to keep your team battle gauge from hitting zero. The team of enemies your fighting also has a battle gauge, and every time you kill one of them, it depletes a little. They’ll keep spawning until that gauge hits zero, that way there’s a constant supply of enemies to shoot at! 

Now I mentioned these snipers being pretty accurate. In fact, it can get pretty tricky trying to keep your head with no extra holes in it. But if one of those pesky snipers really starts to get on your nerves, and you can’t get to him, keep in mind that all the buildings are destructible. So chuck in a few grenades or rockets at the base of where he’s camping and just blow the whole damned thing up! 

There’s also a new suit for you to try out called Battle Armor. It’s new to LP2, and is basically what it sounds like. You can do everything you normally can, like roll/dodge, dash, grapple, all of it, but instead of you losing life and having to waste T-ENG to heal up the Battle Armor takes the hit for you. It’ll eventually take enough damage to cause it to break off, but until then you’re much stronger. It even has a few visual keys to take note of when it’s getting weak, like the pack on the back starts to heat up and glow red hot. 

Of course, once you’ve killed all the enemies, it’s not over. I mean, come on, that would be just too easy if we had you shoot some guys and steal the train! After you’ve shot the last enemy pirate, you’ll see a new little indicator asking you to “hold down on the D-Pad to Focus Camera.” That’s a new little feature to LP2 that keeps the action going, but lets you know something important is happening. If you hold down on the D-Pad, you’ll see the camera focus in on a plateau above the town. The buildings up there start to crumble, and from the ground burst two enormous akrid! These new akrid are tough, and shoot a couple of sonic waves destroying a couple of the cars on the train you were about to hop on. 

Now, you can keep holding down and watch that happen, but it’s actually a good time to start loading up on ammo, T-ENG, and grab any armor suits that might be around. So you’re not forced to watch a cutscene, but instead can keep the flow going by preparing for the battle. 

As you’re watching these two new akrid (who I’ll leaved unnamed for the time) you’ll notice they don’t have eyes. Instead, they have huge ears, which they spread out like large fans on the sides of their heads. They rear up on their hind legs and extend their ears making a screeching noise, moving their heads slowly from left to right. It’s like radar. They’re pinging the environment around them for any signs of movement. Once they hop down, they easily tear through the buildings. You know you’re screwed when you can’t see them heading for you, but you can see the buildings and towers collapsing as they charge through them straight to you. 

It’s easy to notice the weak spots on these guys though. The bright glowing orange spots! There’s one on the belly, and a small on on the head. It works even better when you and your friends stick on taking them down one at a time, concentrating all your fire on one of them first. But they have tactics of their own besides charging. They’ll rear up and start pinging the area, and if you or your friends make any noise they’ll howl in a pitch so high your character will cringe and cover his ears in agony. You can get out of that by wiggling the left stick. But to prevent them from seeing you at all, coordinate with your friends, and as soon as you see one raise on his hind legs, everyone stop moving! It gets strangely quiet, watching them tower over you, scanning for you… But as soon as they lower, they have no idea where you are, which makes it the opportune time to attack! 

But if you do make any noise, they shriek, make you cringe, and if you don’t evade in time, shoot you into to the air a good 30 feet with their sonic boom attack (which you can survive, barely) or worse, just trample you to death under their feet. They may be tough, but not as tough as you and your team, especially if you all work together. And besides, we give you big guns, like the VS Rifle (which I should mention now has a zoom). 

Now, you can take out these two akrid and then take the train, or there’s another way to beat the level. You can activate 7 data posts scattered throughout the map. Those data posts will lower the draw bridge for the train tracks so you can take the train out. But I always find it more fun to shoot my way out. =) 

However you manage to get the train is up to you. But once you do the story doesn’t end there… I’ll fill you in on what happens next tomorrow. 

If you have any questions, ask away in the comments to this blog and I’ll try to answer them tomorrow when I talk about the train battle, or on thursday when I talk a bit about customizing your character and the fun of multiplayer.