BitSnark

As promised earlier, Capcom have unveiled the identity of the mystery game via XBOX Live that was to be announced today as none other than Lost Planet 2.

Revealed through the nearly nine minute trailer, is gameplay footage as well as an interview with director Kenji Oguro. In regards to the setting, Lost Planet 2 will retain the planet from the first game but events takes place some 15 years after the events of the original title. As a result of this much of the snow that was prevalent in the first game has now melted giving way to tropical jungles and lush rainforests.

Indeed one high point of the trailer actually shows the characters swiftly travelling to an encounter in the jungle via a boat which is taken down a river.

These characters also form the basis of the sequel’s storytelling; as opposed to just unfolding the story from the perspective of a single character, players now get to see the story affect a group of what Oguro termed ‘Snow Pirates’.

From what was seen, the gameplay appears to stick closely to that of the original; retaining the third person perspective and the bug destroying action (the massive Akrid that appears at the end of the trailer is proof of this). But one thing that was mooted for this sequel is supposedly co-op, something that makes a lot of sense giving the group storytelling mechanic and also the seemingly mandatory addition of co-op to any action game that gets released these days.

Visually the title looks superb, much of it being attributed to the newest version of Capcom’s multiplatfrom Framework engine. The exhaustively named development tool allows optimisation of code across a number of platforms without the need to work individually on each version’s code, thus elimination the need to create manual optimisations which would increase overall development time.

This also means that the title should hit all three formats – 360, PC and PS3; although Capcom have yet to formally announce the PS3 version at this point.