Hot damn, that’s a good video game! Well, cold damn really. Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is the new third-person shooter for the Xbox 360. But this little slice of magic has a twist. In LP: EC you’re on the planet of E.D.N III, a space rock covered entirely in ice, battling not only other people but also giant bug creatures called the acrid. As if dodging bullets and cockroaches from hell wasn’t bad enough, your survival is heavily dependant upon how much thermal energy you have stored in a battery. Should your battery reach zero, you freeze like Windows 98.

You play the amnesiac character Wayne Holden who is on a vengeance-driven search for Green Eye, an acid-spewing bug of Godzilla-like proportions. It seems the only thing he can remember aside from his name is that the green eye killed his father. Don’t you just love that plot moving selective memory? After being beaten by the green eyed monster Wayne is left frozen in his VS (it’s a mech-suit). Luckily snow pirates find him and for the first time since 2003, the word “pirates” is used and Johnny Depp is nowhere to be seen. Not to worry kids, Edward Scissor hands may not be around to be emo as hell, but Wayne does a good enough job himself with his new love interest Luka the snow pirate. From here on in it’s all about a conspiracy involving Wayne’s father hunting down rival pirates and killing bugs.

The game play is pretty standard: you use shotguns, rifles and missile launches to dispatch anyone who’s not on your side or is not a main character. There are also some special weapons like plasma rifles lying about and if your particularly grim you can dig around in the snow to discover weapons left behind by the dead.

Another neat feature is your amazing spider powers. No, Spiderman isn’t in the game but your use of the grappling hook is reminiscent of the wall crawler. The game is both single and multiplayer, the multiplayer being compatible with Xbox Live. In both of the game modes, there is a “T-Eng” (Thermal Energy) meter below the character’s health. This counter goes down continually in the cold, and can be refilled by collecting heat. How do you do this? Well it’s simple; kill enemies and suck up their warmth like a Skywalker in a Tauntaun. Activating data posts or shooting oil drums can also replenish T-Eng. The T-Eng is used to refill Wayne’s health in the single-player mode, and is used to power energy weapons such as plasma rifles.

The graphics are amazing and the game really makes use of those next generation features we all keep hearing about. At one point in the game I came across a sub boss I didn’t feel like fighting so I lured him to a cliff and let him fall in and used my zip line to walk away unharmed.

I highly recommend this game, highly! It’s just a good game, and for those of you who are aware of such things as Viva Piñata, you know there aren’t many good games around anymore. So if you got the extra cash pick this one up.