On the back of the packaging for Capcom's first game on Xbox 360 since the triumphant Dead Rising, it declares that this is the 'coldest, toughest action' on the console. Consider yourself warned. With a first level alone that takes no prisoners, Lost Planet is a challenging, at times brutal shooter that drips with astonishingly strong production values.

It's set at a point where humanity is under attack (again). Quite savage attack as it happens, by a race known as the Akrids. To say that the Akrids range from quite small to ridiculously huge would be fair, and that stacks the odds completely against you.

To level things up slightly there's the small matter of your Vital Suit (or VS Suit). This is where the game starts to straddle the third person shooter genre alongside the mech games of old (such as MechWarrior), which sections of Lost Planet effectively dedicate to both.

The shooter bit is fairly routine, but by upgrading your VS Suit you can turn into one Hell of a mechanical beast, which you'll need to be to stand a cat in Hell's chance of taking out the enormities you're pitted against. You'll need to keep it fuelled, though, with the Thermal Energy left behind by the Akrids. You've really got no choice but to kill them.

Surprisingly, in either shooter or mech guise, the game plays at a reasonably modest speed that rarely lets you outpace the action. This has a notable upside, as Lost Planet positively encourages you to engage in some ferocious firefights that are impossible not to relish.

What's more, the developers clearly know this, and they ramp things up with some staggering set pieces that are deliciously entertaining to be a part of, and while effectively you're looking to do little more than exploit the weak points of your enemies, there's a real adrenaline rush waiting to be experienced. Even when the battlefield becomes awash with smoke, leaving your vision impaired to the point of uselessness, you can't help but forgive it.

But the rest of the game's faults you'd be far kinder to gloss over. The stringent path through Lost Planet, for instance, occasionally teases you into thinking you've got a few options, but actually you don't have any that make any difference of note. It's restrictive in where you can go, sometimes in what you can pick up, and ultimately in what you can do. It seems that the mechanics of a good old-fashioned 2D shooter have been applied to something that looks and feels so far beyond that.

The end result is a terrific old-fashioned shooter beset by frustrations, but it almost gets away with it due to the sheer cinematic scale of it all. Yet with a fairly tough difficulty level and a few too many annoyances, we wonder how many players will still be around to see the end credits role.

In some ways this is an incredible showcase for the multimedia talents of the console. Yet surprisingly, it's married to quite an old-fashioned game. Overall it's good, but nothing more.