As I’m sure most Xbox fanboys know, Capcom officially announced Lost Planet 2, the sequel to the frigidly cold, mecha-battling, best-selling third-person-shooter. Most interestingly though, is a statement put out by Capcom’s vice president of business development and strategic planning regarding producer Jun Takeuchi’s (of Resident Evil 1, 2, and most recently, the 5th installment, fame) devotion to sequels: “Takeuchi’s approach was, you know what we’re not going to sit back on our laurels and just shit out a sequel, we’re actually going to take it up five notches. We’re not going to under invest in this, we’re actually going to over invest in this, and we’re going to build it bigger.” (from an interview with Christian Svensson)

And shit it out they won’t. With the announcement trailer came news of features being added to the sequel, which, by the way, is an Xbox 360 exclusive. The trailer, which is mostly composed of in-game footage, looks a little less like Lost Planet and more like the Gears of War series, which I couldn’t be happier about. GOW has implemented a fantastic use of the over the shoulder view, incorporating both fast paced action and tactical maneuvering. And as enjoyable as Extreme Conditions was, something always felt slightly off (repeating cycles of explosions kicking your ass) when you weren’t inside a mech. But with this hopefully slight change to bring a more tactical feel to the game is welcomed with open arms.

Following the co-op trend of the past 8 months or so, Lost Planet 2 will include four player cooperative play over Xbox Live to “clear mission objectives with friends” states Capcom at their official press release of the game. Whether this means the actual story will be co-op or not is still unknown. The fact that they use “mission objectives” leads me to believe that the story may not include cooperative play, or it may go down the awful Too Human route and completely rip any form of plot away from the game and leave you with an empty shell of a game. But even so, “meching” it up with two or three of my friends sounds pretty sweet, especially if they’ll be some massive 8v8 Vital Suit deathmatches available.

However, Capcom is not Silicon Knights (developers of Too Human), and with Jun Takeuchi producing the game, I’m sure LP2 will meet gamer standards and soar far above them.

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