So I just finished playing the Lost Planet multiplayer demo on xbox live and I gotta say its pretty cool. I love the aracade-y feel and mechs or "vital suits" are awesome. Luckily for those not fast enough to snag a robot, there are at least 4 types of grenades that are really cool, including a frisbee grenade that I manadged to kill someone with from all the way across the map.

However, as much as I love it there are a few note worthy problems. One is that, contrary to what gamespot says, Mechs are a bit broken. You pretty much need a team of dudes to take one down or one guy who is very far away and happend to have an antitank weapons and has line of site. And thats just normal mechs who generally have one instant kill long range weapon. However, if you schiesty you can trick 'em out with rapid fire machine guns and bigger lasers. On one accasion, a guy managed to get his tricked out mech with a chain gun and rail gun on to our spawn point and ran wild for about 3 minutes until people were able to hurt him enough to cause him to eject.

The other problem is the team game system. The idea it first seems is to controll the most data points, which are scattered across the map. Great idea right? However this seems to effect little the outcome of the match. Our team controlled 3/4 of the data points and this did NOTHING for our score. All that matter is the battle points (or something that sounds like that) which you get from smoking fools, but not from data points. Team slayer is fine, but it gets confusing when your not sure what the objective is.

The last flaw is one that has been eliminated from modern shooters because of their recovering health system (thanks HALO!). However, because you do not recover health in Lost Planet Multiplayer, even if you survive a firefight, your dead as soon as you see another guy. This makes it very difficult to go more than one kill for one death and makes the game almost feel like a cycle. THis can be stopped by just sniping, but that ruins the game even more.

However, its still a bunch of fun, and while it may not top gears of war, its gonna be pretty sweet come january.