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Lost Planet 3 is a tremendously boring game masquerading as a slightly interesting one. A backwards-looking game in many ways, Spark Unlimited's prequel returns to both the icy wastes and single-player focus of the first game in Capcom's weirdly resilient series, which has made it to a second follow-up despite never troubling the sales charts or particularly wowing reviewers.You return to the iced-over planet of E.D.N. III in the clunking workman's boots of Jim Peyton, a salt-of-the-earth everyman type who, naturally, is just doing this for his family. "This", in the case of Lost Planet 3, means stomping about in his 30-foot mech like a gigantic, robotic odd-job man: mending frozen machinery, planting siphons in order to harvest the series' plot-driving T-Energy, and engaging in an awful lot of pest control. The pests in this case are Akrid, the bestial cannon fodder whose bodies run on Lost Planet's plot-juice and who clearly don't think much of Earth's industrial expansion to and exploitation of their home world.
It's while Lost Planet 3 establishes all this that the game reaches its delirious high point of slight interest. Peyton's I'm-just-an-ordinary-guy-me shtick might be a touch laboured, but it's more or less convincing. He is pleasant if bland company: one of the more likeable straight, white, young, male and power-armoured protagonists in a genre stuffed full of them, his motivations bringing a touch of human warmth to E.D.N.'s chilly environment.
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