Lost Planet 3: Good Combat Mix
In this third iteration of the Lost Planet series, Jim Peyton is introduced. This is a third-person shooter game and prequel tale that is set about 50 years before the original. Jim is a utility rig pilot who leaves Earth to take on a hazardous but lucrative contract on E.D.N. III. Working for Neo-Venus Construction (NEVEC), you, as Jim, are one of a select few pioneers at the Coronis base surveying the unchartered terrain and obtaining samples of the planet’s natural energy source, Thermal Energy, which NEVEC believes will save Earth’s energy crisis.
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While under attack from E.D.N. III’s indigenous Akrid, your utility rig falls down an icy fissure, leaving you unconscious and injured. You awake to find yourself in what appears to be a secret base that’s hidden beneath the planet’s frozen surface. You’re rescued by one of the base’s inhabitants, Mira, the daughter of So’ichi (the Snow Pirate leader), and you soon realize that NEVEC are not the only occupants of E.D.N. III. With this encounter, new truths about the foreboding planet and the colonial history are set to be unveiled.
Overall, Lost Planet 3 gives you up to approximately 15 hours of single-player campaign gameplay. It reminds me of movies such as Pochahontas or Avatar. There’s a pretty good mix of combat since you get to drive a 40-foot-tall mech and jump in and out of it to blast away at the monsters. The regular on-foot combat looks fairly basic and really doesn’t have any notable weapons to make it particularly special. The mech combat is definitely more interesting, but it’s actually just a piece of mining equipment, not military grade. It’s easy to forget that while you’re playing.
Lost Planet 3 is rated T for Teen by the ESRB and retails for $59.99. Find it at your nearest Best Buy or Amazon.com.
Click Chick’s Mobile App of the Week: Candy Crush Saga
There are a zillion knockoffs of Bejeweled, and now my favorite one is Candy Crush Saga. It seems as if my entire family has become addicted to this now-popular game. With Candy Crush, you replace the gems with the candies … and you get the idea.
The gameplay is simple: Just swipe the two candies to switch their positions, and you have a predefined number of moves in which to score as many points as possible. You score points by lining up at least three in a row (or five in an L) of any of the like candies to crush them. As you crush the candies, random fresh candies drop from the top of the screen to fill the gap, so this makes it a little difficult to strategize beyond using special super candies sometimes created in the process of candy crushing.
It’s a well-executed, casual game that does a good job of keeping you occupied for hours. Best of all, it’s free (with optional in-app purchases) for just about all platforms.
