With so many sequels at E3 looking just like their predecessors, a game like Lost Planet 2 is a delight to play on the show floor. Gone is one of the main features of the original (enormous snowy wastelands). In its place is a lush, beautiful jungle. The epic battles against large insects with glowing red spots returns, but the way these enemies are taken down is an entirely different experience.

Lost Planet 2 is eschewing a traditional single-player campaign and replacing it with larger-than-life four player battles. Apparently, the single-player game will have bots, but on the show floor four people could work together to take down a six-legged monstrosity. The last game had some of my favorite boss battles of this generation, but playing with other people was even better.

In a large canyon, the creature shuffled around as we tried to take it down. For a size comparison, the humans wouldn’t even reach up to its ankle. I sat on a cliff and fired rockets at the orange spots on its legs as the three other strangers shuffled around the ground. I felt invisible, but the monster eventually made itself to my position. I had to get out of there, so I got in a mech and hovered away.

None of us could really communicate since the show floor was extremely loud and our TVs weren’t placed in ideal locations, so we couldn’t really work together as a team. I was feeling gung-ho, so I flew on the beast’s back and tried to maintain my position. It was like that scene in Starship Troopers where Johnny Rico rides that big beetle before throwing a grenade in tough shell. There was one glowing orange spot on its back, and I blasted it to eternity. There wasn’t much else to do on top of the world, but the view was spectacular.

Another breath-taking place to be was under the six-legged creature. Being down there is undoubtedly a bad spot since it’s so easy to be stomped out, but the avoiding each appendage proved to be genuinely exciting. One annoying thing carried over from its predecessor is how characters stumble when something heavy stomps nearby. It’s realistic, but it slows down the action and takes the control out of the users’ hands.

The legs of our adversary could be blown off in a spectacular cloud of fluorescent orange, but those eventually grew back. At one point, the beast fell to its stomach and we all took turns throwing explosive things into its mouth. Despite some solid shots, we only got the bug down to about half of its health due to our lack of teamwork. If we had been able to co-ordinate we could have taken up position on separate cliffs and done a fair amount of damage. However, blowing off the critter’s legs without back-up proved to be a foolish endeavor. We got out asses kicked, but we had fun for all of it.

In the previous game, the gooey orange thermal energy emitted from the enemies was crucial to surviving due to the frigid weather. Now that things have warmed up, these are now used for ammunition rather than life. This is a good way of keeping the glaring weak spots on enemies intact, while also maintaining the impressive visual effects. However, I have to admit that seeing that globs of orange in a vibrant jungle isn’t as visually arresting as it is on a frozen tundra. This is a negligible complaint since the graphics are far superior to its stunning predecessor. Best of all, things moved smoothly even when all sorts of crazy stuff was happening on screen.

The single-player campaign was not on the show floor, so it remains to be seen what that experience is like. Whether this can be nearly as engaging as playing with actual people seems questionable, but I’m holding out on judgment until it comes out in 2010 for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. With a movie in the works, the Lost Planet series could get huge.