At its best Lost Planet 2 is a sort of inverse Shadow of the Colossus.
It is a game that allows you to not only climb up its monstrous behemoths, but inside them, dishing out damage to the creature's organs as fellow gamers continue the attack from outside.
Packed with stunning graphics, four-player coop, and a high-level of character customization, Lost Planet 2 is shaping up nicely.
It is, Jun Takeuchi told us last week, a Japanese developed game that they believe can succeed in the West.
The presentation opened on a lush world, one far more detailed than the original Lost Planet. A group of people sit in an odd assortment armor and helmets on a pontoon boat, the world around them blurs slightly as they bump across a marsh.
The game is running in four-player coop mode on a PC, not Xbox 360, we are told.
The men arrive in a jungle, a mostly black jungle, but when a player activates a data post the jungle turns a bit green. As the players work their way through the jungle there are plenty of signs they are in a living world. Giant bugs fly by, over the shoulder of one character I see a distant pool of water, a large centipede like creature swimming throw it. The jungle itself is thick with foliage, all of it bending and swaying as the team walks through it.
The team attacks a large red creature with claws.
Takeuchi says it is important to cooperate with your team mates to take down these creatures. One of the men throw an incendiary grenade, blowing off the arm of the creature.
The game has a lot of new weapons including the much requested flamethrower, new vital suits called power suits and shuriken grenades. You can also now dash in the game and the development team tweaked the camera system to make the player appear bigger on the screen, Takeuchi says.
Because Lost Planet 2 was developed with MT Framework 2, the team was able to create much bigger, badder bosses than you saw in the original game, Takeuchi says.
The team loads up one of these boss battles, pitting the four players against a giant horned toad with six legs and a nobby tongue it uses to attack.
Three of the players work on the creature from all sides while the fourth player, the one whose camera we are watching, works his way up the back of the creature. As the ground attack continues, the player starts hacking at the spikes on the creature's back. The size of the creature, the simultaneous attacks happening from the ground, the constantly swaying field of grass, all combine to deliver a cinematic, epic moment in the game.
But it can't hold a candle to what happens next.
The developer climbs down the creatures back, moving around its giant feet to position himself in front of the creature. Then he jumps in its mouth and appears inside the creature. Inside this giant frog the player is surrounded by fluids and flesh. As he walks down what must be a throat you can see organs pulsating in the distance, beyond rows of bones, perhaps a rib cage. It's an entire organic level.
"You need to be careful," Takeuchi says. "There are smaller akrid living inside this giant one."
A swarm of them move up the body cavity and attack the player.
"By attacking the boss from the inside it has an effect on what happens on the outside," Takeuchi says.
As the player attacks he continues to work his way down, through the body, suddenly the character slips and starts sliding, the screen goes black for a minute and then he shoots out of the back of the giant creature back into the outside world.
"If you're not careful the character can end up like that." Takeuchi says.
After a few more minutes of cooperative attack the creature shudders and starts to die, health packs spews from the body and then the grotesque skin of the giant frog begins to blacken and melt away, leaving behind a colossal set of bones.
"This kind of graphics is only possible with MT Framework 2," Takeuchi says.
Of course the game isn't just about this monumental boss fights. There is a detailed story and an entire world to fight for.
"The basis of the story in the game is about the different groups of snow pirates that exist on the planet of Eden 3 and how they fight and struggle for thermal energy," Takeuchi says. "Thermal energy is a limited resource and there are lots of people competing for it. You can think of it as oil in the world we live in.
"As you play through the game you will see the story from many different perspectives. By playing through to the final chapter you will see how all of these different groups and facts combine, that is one of the big themes of Lost Planet 2."