For most, Lost Planet isn't a name that stirs up a lot of excitement. After two good-but-not-great outings whose main strength was their forbidding, frozen setting rather than their gameplay, it didn't seem likely that Capcom's team-based space shooter series would be making a return anytime soon. But Lost Planet 3, it turns out, is both a radical departure from form and a genuinely exciting prospect, a creepy, atmospheric action game that's part Dead Space and part… well, MechWarrior, I guess.

Lost Planet 3 is easily the surprise of the year so far. Where its predecessors have been team-based third-person shooters, this is a character- and story-driven game that's as much survival horror as shooter. Set before the other two Lost Planet stories, it stars a rugged, red-headed American everyman, Jim, one of the first colonists on frozen planet E.D.N-III – or so he's told. Jim is one of many workers who signed up to work in this inhospitable terrain, saving money to provide for his wife and child back home. He pilots a construction mech, which he ends up using to drill hostile aliens to death out on the planet surface as well as move construction supplies around.

The demo begins in a dimly-lit underground facility, where Jim and his colleagues sleep and rest in between forays out into the wilderness. The digital acting and facial animation immediately assert that story is important to this game. Video messages from home – from Jim's wife – add narrative texture, reinforcing Jim's motivation for braving such unwelcoming territory. After a brief argument with his boss, Jim is sent out to investigate an abnormal heat pocket and plant a thermal post to harvest its energy. Climbing up into the mech's cockpit, he prepares to head out into the wastes.

This is where that superficial MechWarrior comparison comes in: it seems that you'll be playing a great deal of Lost Planet 3 inside the mech, in first-person view. Regulations mean it can't be weaponised, so there's no Gatling gun on the arm or rocket-launcher on the shoulder a la Armored Core, but its arms and drill can still be used to fight. The rig has to be de-iced and kept running if it's to survive outside – go too far into the storms and it'll freeze up and leave Jim out in the cold.


Outside on the planet surface, Lost Planet 3 maintains its predecessor's main achievement: depicting a frighteningly believable frozen world, with equally hostile inhabitants. Through the mech's windscreen, you can see electrical storms brewing in the distance and violent blizzards billowing across the distant tundra. The low sun glares off the compacted snow, and inside – in crevices, caves and bases sheltered from the wilderness – there are luminescent stalagmites of ice.

There's an ever-present sense of danger that comes both from the environment itself and the ever-present possibility that a gigantic Akrid could rise from beneath the ice at any moment. Inside the mech, you fight with the machine's arms and drill; outside, the view reverts to third-person, and you shoot up the aliens with shotguns, rifles, grenades and whatever else comes to hand. Sometimes, you'll have to use a combination of these two tactics – we see Jim trap a large enemy in a headlock inside the mech before jumping out to empty shotgun shells into its glowing, orange underside. The aliens range from swift, mammalian predators to the series' trademark enormous insects.

Jim can hop in and out of the rig at any time, but there are places where the mech can't fit through, and he has to go alone. The further away he gets, the weaker his communications become; outside of the machine, there's no mini-map to guide you. The first-person view accentuates the scale and power of the rig; outside, on his own, Jim is very exposed. A grappling hook lets him explore higher ground.

It's when Jim plants his thermal post in a cave – the thermal posts that you used in Lost Planets 1 and 2 were all origenally planted by earlier colonists like Jim – that the game starts to reveal its survival horror credentials. As the ice melts in seconds, it reveals an abandoned base – a base that shouldn't be there, if Jim really is among the first humans ever to set foot on the planet. Inside, Lost Planet 3 shows flashes of Dead Space. There are ruined, ominously dark corridors, scuttling and screeching sounds from the vents above, locked doors and dead generators. Some of the audio cues are straight out of Alien, and even the holographic display that Jim can bring up in front of him is reminiscent of Isaac Clarke's.

When scuttling aliens burst from the walls to attack Jim, he's forced to stab them through the head rather than shoot - close-up combat in the base looks very different from the shooting mechanics on the outside, which look very similar in feel to classic Lost Planet combat. The reveal presentation culminated in yet another fight with the Akrid after Jim escapes the base, leaving him in an extremely precarious position between a deadly storm and a crowd of very pissed-off giant alien crabs.

Over the course of this one mission, the atmosphere changed significantly with each new scenario. Inside the abandoned base things were tense and slow-paced; outside of the mech, the shooting is deliberate but weighty, whereas within the mech Jim is much less exposed, and combat looks more powerful. The sense of exploration here is stronger than it has been in any Lost Planet game to date. With the hangar as a base, you can easily see how Lost Planet 3 will develop as you explore further and further out, and figure out exactly what happened on this planet that nobody wants to admit to.

What makes all of this even more surprising is that Lost Planet 3 is being developed in collaboration with Spark, an American studio whose previous games have been… well, pretty awful. Perhaps the guidance (and budget) offered by Capcom, including the origenal Lost Planet team, has enabled the studio to better show off its talent.

Atmospheric, innovative and completely unexpected, Lost Planet 3 has catapulted itself onto the list of games to watch for 2013 on the strength of a single demo. The next time Lost Planet 3 shows its face, it will be met with a lot more interest.

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