Has anyone else downloaded the two level demo of Lost Planet, Capcom's Xbox 360 sci-fi shooter? Set on a frozen planet populated by snow pirates and hideous insectoid monsters, it's a third-person action romp with a single player quest and multiplayer online mode. It's also devastatingly generic.
Okay, the visuals are astonishing in places. The way your character's feet sink into the snow as blizzards blow flakes around you. The astonishingly realistic explosions. The intricately detailed glacial majesty of the environments. All as you would expect from a next-gen machine.
But the gameplay is pure this-gen. Actually, it's more-or-less previous-gen. Pick up (extremely familiar) weapons, blast aliens, encounter bosses sporting clear weak spots, activate computer terminals, pick up bigger weapons, sneak about a bit, shoot a bit more.
There were a couple of nice touches - the way you could either clamber into huge mech walkers, or take off their enormous machine guns and use them as your primary weapons. The way your energy bar is always going down and must continually be topped up (but guess what? energy orbs come from... yes... dead enemies). I also liked the flying aliens that swoop at you in formation - not because it was an interesting idea, but because it looked cool.
The game was well-received at E3. It's also an important release for Microsoft, coming as it does, from a key Japanese developer. But from the admittedly limited demo, this looks like game design by numbers - a visually superior version of early PS2 survival horror shooter, Extermination.
Perhaps I'm being naive, but I keep expecting new ideas from the big next-gen titles. I keep thinking they're going to show me something I've never seen before, something more substantial than lovely hi-res visuals.
But no. There is nothing in the hardware specs of the next-gen machines that facilitates good ideas. They have to come from somewhere else. It's not good enough to point at the Katamari Damacys of this world as evidence that innovative thinking is still going on. Innovative thinking must be applied across the board, across the spectrum of genres, if this next-generation is to be more than a firework display.
