It’s awesome when you can support a game that doesn’t have a trillion dollar Slurpee campaign behind it. For our office, Earth Defense Force has always been that game. There’s nothing grandiose or eye catching about the title on paper, yet it still delivers on every conceivable level. It’s a mystery why there aren’t more games simply focused on delivering nonstop thrills, wave after wave of giant enemies, and a ridiculous amount of upgradable weaponry that any person who’s played a game in the last ten years can easily understand instantly?! Outside of the tongue-in-cheekiness of the recent Bulletstorm, EDF stands almost alone.
It’s campy, wildly over-the-top, and completely devoid of the pretense other games use to pad their own self-importance. Quite frankly, it’s so simple; it makes every bad game look stupid. The EDF series is everything that’s awesome about games distilled to its essence, and 100% trimmed of fat.
Go and pick up Earth Defense Force 2017, if you can find it, and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. Calling the formula straightforward is a goddamned understatement: Shoot massive alien insects, earn bigger, better guns, shot bigger aliens and insects, repeat (and you will) FOREVER!
That said, Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon already contains all I basically want from it: More of the wonderful same. Of course it’s also taken into account additions made to other AAA titles in the past few years and tossed them in there with reckless abandon, and it’s all the better for it. Deadlier guns, more enemies, active-time reloads, and jet packs are just a few of the amazing enhancements I’d probably take for granted in just about any other game. Added turrets, tanks and mech suits are nothing if not gratifying, in this case however, finding/calling them in time can save your always outmatched, bug-hunting ass.
More importantly, EDF: Insect Armageddon is brining something the last US title sorely lacked to PS360. Mulitplayer, or more specifically, co-op! You know all those Horde/Survival modes all games are adding these days? The ones you end up playing 700 times longer than the actual campaign? That’s basically all Earth Defense Force is already. So, I can honestly, unabashedly proclaim that throwing more real life super soldiers into the fray, which almost instantly and instinctively fosters perfect squad-based cooperation without really trying, was easily a highlight for my time at PAX East.
Westerners have missed out on a couple entries in the series, and that needs to change, people. I have no idea where the hell where EDF: IA takes place in the story, but it really doesn’t matter… 300 new weapons, added armor, more big shit to kill online and off? That’s all I require from what’s, IMO, the unofficial Starship Troopers game I’ve always wanted.
Above: “Kill ‘em all!”
Oh, but if you wanna know why I’m preordeing a title launching at $20 less than the average game, try and find a new copy of the last EDF game… Yeah, it’s nice to champion a smaller title from time to time, but it’s more important to know that once gamers slowly become more aware of this magical gift from Japan, it’s relatively small stock tends to disappear completely. A sealed copy of the four-year-old EDF: 2017 can fetch TWICE what it did brand new, and I’m not gonna let that happen to me, dammit!
Mar 15, 2011
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