iLounge has posted a review of the latest addition to the iPod game line-up, Lost. Based on the popular television series the game allows players to take the role of Jack Shephard in sequences pulled from the first two seasons of the show. Lost only managed to bring home a letter grade of C+ from iLounge.

Like the TV show, Lost tells the story of a group of plane crash survivors who land on a tropical island full of dangers—some natural, some apparently supernatural. By touching the Click Wheel lightly in eight directions, you control Jack Shephard, a generally benevolent surgeon, as he runs through scenes taken from the first and second seasons of the show. Though the artwork is entirely two-dimensional—flat images presented from an isometric top-down 3-D perspective—it’s some of the best 2-D art yet seen on the iPod, putting to shame the similar but more cartoony graphics in Electronic Arts’ earlier Mini Golf. Similarly, though the iPod’s controls aren’t the most precise for action games, Gameloft hasn’t made the action so precision-dependent that the Click Wheel stands in the way of your fun. Pushing boxes, dodging wild animals, and stealthily avoiding detection are all intuitive, rather than frustrating, and entering a certain mysterious numbered code is appropriately tense, if not visually thrilling.

Fans of the series should know up front that only a handful of characters from the show are fully recognizable from digitized close-up images and dialogue: Kate, Sawyer, Hurley, Locke and Sayid make appearances, as do anonymous members of the island’s mysterious Others, and a number of other survivors are shown in less detail during rescue and exploration levels. The game does spoil, in a light way, a number of events that took place on the show, but it also ignores side stories and skips most of the details that would make viewing the show compelling. The star attraction here is, again, the art; from scene to scene, the backdrops Gameloft picked are surprisingly detailed and interesting.

iLounge: Lost For iPod Review

iTunes Store: iPod Games

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