Perhaps the game's greatest claim to fame is its frequent boss battles versus the giant akrid that often loom above you. Eventually, the action settles into a better rhythm, and you begin to pick up on Lost Planet 2's various delights and quirks. They take just a few minutes to complete, too often coming to an end just as things appear to be picking up. The early levels have some weird pacing idiosyncrasies.

Lost Planet 2 is absolutely stunning on the PC, particularly if you own a video card that can handle its fancy DirectX 11 effects, yet it runs surprisingly well on a medium-powered machine, even with many of the options cranked up. Over the course of the game, you will rush through the desert on a roaring speeder, defy gravity in the blackness of space, and bring down a giant akrid from the inside. There are plenty of beautiful vistas to take in and many attempts to vary the pace. In other levels, red light bathes industrial corridors, lightning flashes brightly above a turbulent sea, and cyclones sweep across the desert plains. Some frigid areas hark back to the original Lost Planet, including the prologue, which features great Lost Planet standbys: giant mechs known as vital suits (or VSs), enormous aliens called akrid with glowing orange spots (hint: shoot them!), and snow flying everywhere. You sprint through a number of diverse locations, and fantastic visuals bring the planet of E.D.N. This sequel offers up a lot more variety than its predecessor.

This still isn't the sci-fi shooter to end all sci-fi shooters, but it's a gorgeous technical achievement and a substantial package that will provide a comfortable home for action junkies looking for something a little different. For that matter, so do the mouse and keyboard controls, which are smooth and intuitive as long as you turn off aim assist and tweak the sensitivity sliders. And yet a variety of tweaks and fewer communication gaffes make a big difference in Lost Planet 2's overall playability. The package still sports a number of flaws-a dumb and puzzling story, silly online rewards, and a reliance on frequent knockback attacks to create difficulty. How refreshing, then, that developer Capcom has addressed some of the shortcomings that plagued the console release, making the newly released PC version noticeably more enjoyable. Lost Planet 2 on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 was a good example of how messing up gameplay basics can render a gorgeous and full-bodied third-person shooter hopelessly un-fun.

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