Lost Planet 2 Preview

The ice has melted, replaced by lush jungles and deserts

The players stand around the corpse and do victory dances - one claps, another cheers. It all feels very World of Warcraft, actually, or, even Monster Hunter, Capcom's phenomenally successful four-player PSP title. Takeuchi, however, denies using the game as inspiration: "We do get that question a lot, actually. Lost Planet 2 is at its heart a shooting game. So, although it might seem to be similar to Monster Hunter, if you actually play it you'll probably see that it plays very differently. It wasn't that we consciously tried to make it like Monster Hunter as we were developing it. We're just looking for ways to make a four-player cooperative experience more interesting. However, when you do get to play the game, if you enjoy playing through the four-player coop I think you probably will enjoy Monster Hunter as well."

Despite Takeuchi's comments, the Monster Hunter/Phantasy Star feel is unavoidable. It's not simply down to the four-player third-person shooting either. Much of it has to do with the way the game is structured. At the end of every chapter, which will last between 10 and 15 minutes, there's a boss fight, which, once defeated, will drop question mark boxes containing juicy prizes. Then you'll get a results screen detailing each players' rating - once digested it's on to the next chapter. There's no drop-in and out feature, but you will be able to join a party before and after each chapter. Once a chapter is completed you'll be able to play it through again, too. And while your character level and equipment will remain persistent throughout every single mode in the game, offline and online, you'll switch between different groups and locations as you move through the six "interconnected episodes". Yes there will be traditional storytelling cutscenes before and after each one, but the emphasis here is clearly on loot hunting.

One question that remains unanswered is just how tactical the boss battles will be. With no class system in place, it seems that boss fights will require players to coordinate areas of attack rather than play traditional tanking/ranged dps/melee dps roles. The salamander boss fight, for example, allows players to actually get inside the monster and attack from there. One player would shoot the spikes on its back, forcing them to fall down into its digestive system, then the player on the inside can add more damage. “You won't be able to stay inside the enemy forever," Takeuchi explains. "As you can imagine, it's a living creature and living creatures, you know... what they eat also has to come out as well! You'll only be in there for a limited amount of time and you have to try and find a weak point while you're in there. Probably once you are, shall we say... expelled from the enemy, it's probably not going to be something you're going to enjoy.”

Lost Planet 2 looks great - we can't wait.

There are questions surrounding the story, too, which we know little about. Takeuchi describes it as an "omnibus", where in each scenario you play with different characters in different factions in different locales across the planet. Once you get to the final stage everything will come together. In terms of plot, Takeuchi goes into a little detail: "We mentioned that the thermal energy is a very important part of the gameplay, but it's also important to the story. On the planet there are many different groups of snow pirates who are struggling for their own survival. So the game takes place in a world where there is only limited resources, limited thermal energy. One of the important parts of the story will be how people compete for this limited resource. So you can probably imagine a similar thing in the real world with oil. You will see the story take place from many different perspectives, from many different groups, and all of that will be brought to a conclusion in the final chapter."

He adds: "Gameplay wise one of the important things is how you cooperate with your teammates, how you do things together and survive together. That's also going to be an important theme in the story – how different groups survive and compete with each other. Particularly if you're in Europe, which has a very rich history of lots of different countries struggling for power and survival, you'll probably see a little bit of that in Lost Planet 2.”

Capcom, then, is clearly taking Lost Planet in a brave new direction. It feels as if it's fusing traditional Japanese mechanics seen in the likes of Monster Hunter and Phantasy Star (item hunting, coop gameplay, big bosses) with more traditional Western mechanics (third-person shooting, in-depth character customisation). The result is a game that should, at the very least, broaden Lost Planet's appeal. The first game had some high profile problems: the control system wasn't everyone's cup of tea and repeatedly getting knocked down by enemy fire frustrated many, but at this early stage Capcom has demonstrated a willingness to listen to those complaints, to make Lost Planet, frankly, more fun. And when you add four-player co-op and giant player-crapping salamanders to the mix, well... what can possibly go wrong?

Lost Planet 2 is due out for the Xbox 360 this winter.