Lost Planet 3 is out August 27, and while I'd like to be excited for the series' return to the single-player story-based action that put EDN III on the map, an extended demo at the San Diego Comic-Con cooled me on the prospect. 

The first warning signs came early in the game's development, when it was announced that the game would be developed by Spark Unlimited. These are the guys who brought us some of this generation's biggest FPS duds, including Turning Point: Fall of Liberty and Legendary: The Box. These games, while intriguing in concept, fell completely flat when it came to both gameplay and story, and were critically and commercially panned.

Still, Spark's been in development with Lost Planet 3 for several years at the least now, and based on what I had seen at last year's Comic-Con I was at least willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. 

I put my hands on the controller for an extended demo of a mid-game mission on the final day of this year's Comic-Con, and while the game immediately established itself as superior to Spark's prior work, it also didn't do much to hold my attention thanks to a series of design, writing and AI issues that have basically no chance of being ironed out by the end of August.

My mission had me defending a stationary drilling platform from the monstrous Akrid as it penetrated the crust of the planet in search of the heat energy that serves as the primary resource in Lost Planet. The Akrid came in several shapes and sizes, but none of them were particularly fun to fight. Small Akrid crawled up in droves, but were dispatched with a shot or two. Bigger, lumpy Akrid sniped at the drilling platform from afar, but again could be taken out with one well-placed shot from a sniper rifle. Larger, dog-like Akrid proved to be a nuisance, as they pounced at me and absorbed shotgun and rifle blasts like salivating sponges.

A massive boss Akrid reared his ugly, crab-like head at the end of my demo to put my skills to the test. Like many of the classic Lost Planet bosses, this guy had to be tackled in stages. His glowing weak points made for an obvious target - or they would have, at least, had the game been better about informing me which ones I was supposed to be shooting at. I spent a good five minutes whittling away at two glowing spots on the creatures arms without dealing any real damage. Turns out I was supposed to be shooting the glowing spikes off of the creature's back, but the game didn't give me any feedback as to whether or not my shots were doing any damage so there was no way for me to know that. 

After taking out the spikes on the crab's back, I could then focus on its arms. I finally shot off both of the creature's arms as it got them stuck in the environment with wild swinging. The crab was still coming at me, though, so I had to dodge around its attacks and shoot it in the back again to kill it. The whole fight was poorly orchestrated and the creature's tells were all but nonexistant, so it was again quite difficult to figure out if what I was doing to the thing was having any effect.

Worse was the creature's AI, which apparently grew tired of me mid-battle. After I had already shot the creature for around five minutes, it just turned around and walked away, disinterested. I was able to stand in one spot picking away at it with a pistol until the thing was almost completely dead.

I also had issues with the core mission design. Whenever the drilling rig got too damaged, I had to step in and fix it manually. This played out in the form of a minigame in which I had to rotate both sticks until I found a sweet spot on each of them, and then hold the sticks in that position until the rig was fixed. But sometimes the minigame wouldn't initiate at all, leaving my character standing there defenseless. Other times he would clip into the rig, forcing me to mash buttons until he managed to escape from the level's geometry. 

Issues like these forced me to question Spark's mastery of a lot of basic action game components, even as the game impressed me with its solid visuals and generally decent gunplay. 

Aside from the gameplay, I also got the sense that Lost Planet 3's characters might be a bit much to deal with. The support character feeding me intel over the comms unit was grating even for the short time he was in the game, and characters spoke with diction that seemed oddly inhuman. It felt like a game translated from another language at times.

I'm not going to say one way or another whether Lost Planet 3 will be worth a buy - that's impossible to tell after playing just one level. But at the moment, you might want to keep your distance and wait for the reviews to start dropping before committing to getting lost on the icy EDN III one more time.