Seven years ago, Earth Defense Force 2017 set the tone for the perfect b-level game. It had problems, but they were fun problems that served to accelerate the insane circumstances surrounding its objective. Your only mission in every mission was to kill everything in sight; along for the ride were awful collision detection, dated visuals, questionable physics, the bizarre lack of online play, zero acknowledgement of mortality, and a thoroughly unclever recycling of assets. It was great in spite of itself, and somehow translated into one of the more inventive loot-grinds of the previous console generation. Earth Defense Force 2017 was the equivalent of a gun safety demonstration where the instructor accidentally shoots off a finger; it’s not what you signed up for, but you’ll have a story to tell for life.
With Earth Defense Force 2025 replicating almost all of 2014’s inane quirks, it becomes a question of whether or not the development team at Sandlot is doing any of this intentionally. If they’re discarding logical direction in favor of focusing what they believe is important, that’s admirable. If Sandlot’s development budget prevents them from addressing long-standing issues, it’s understandable. If they’re essentially releasing an amplified version of the same game from seven years ago at a higher price tag, that may be a problem. Whatever your point of view may be, Earth Defense Force 2025 bares issues as damaging as they are lovable. How they’re actualized depends entirely on what you expect from your formerly-budget-priced, now-higher-priced budget-shooter.
Here’s quick, direct-from-my-notes list of the first ten things I found new or notable in Earth Defense Force 2025:
-
Friendly soldiers will wall-hack but their bullets don’t pierce walls.
-
NPC’s locked in idle animation as the spider web takes them.
-
Missions still close down before you’re able to collect loot.
-
Getting stuck in a spider web with no reasonable clue how to extract myself.
-
Spider-web pulling me against building. Can’t move.
-
Exact same NPC voice is overdubbed to simulate a group-shout.
-
The pause when you kill one wave of Ravagers and the game loads in another.
-
Everything feels the same as 2017.
-
Loot grind remains satisfying.
-
Loading times unreasonable.
These goofs and glitches used to be adorable and endearing. They still might have been had Earth Defense Force 2025 brought anything substantial along with its festival of trouble. At its core, you’re still a soldier killing giant Ravager alien bugs, robots, and UFO’s. You’re still reliant on loot drops of weapons, all dependent on your selected level of difficulty. Armor drops still stack into a cumulative armor level. Environments are still modern Japanese cities, terse countryside, and brown holes. There are still an incredible number of twenty minute missions, each boasting a slightly different load-out from the menagerie of Ravagers. Earth Defense Force 2025 works as well as Earth Defense Force 2017 ever did, but there’s not enough new here to justify its fifty dollar price tag.
For its part, Earth Defense Force 2025 adds an additional three character classes alongside the default Ranger. Wing Diver returns from her cameo in Earth Defense Force 2017 Portable, while new classes Air Raider and Fencer are added to the mix. Wing Diver, in particular, plays much differently from the default solider. With a focus on aerial abilities and a jetpack tied to her ranged energy weapons, it adds a clever element of strategy alongside her inherent verticality. The melee focus of some of her weapons also presents a challenging risk alongside her weakened armor. The Fencer boasted a divergent sent of controls that made him feel more like a robot from Virtual On than a member of the EDF, while the Air Raider’s focus on explosives requires a more methodical approach to inducing chaos and destruction.
The problem with these new classes is their complete lack of balance in Earth Defense Force 2025’s structure. With the possible exception of the Air Raider (I could never stop blowing myself up), they’re all more fun than the default Ranger and can dramatically change the way the game is played. Unfortunately, they’re almost useless as anything but a support class. The Wing Diver is too weak to deal enough damage on her own, while the other two are laser-focused on specific functions. A dependence on others isn’t a bad call for a class-based shooter, but Earth Defense Force 2025 isn’t a class-based shooter. It’s a mindless third-person shooter, one that incorporates classes but doesn’t actually affect any of them.
Play by yourself and it’s still the same fever dream. Play with someone else and it’s all supposed to change. Alongside differentclasses, Earth Defense Force 2025’s other new feature is online multiplayer. This, as best I can tell, is the only way for EDF veterans to enjoy what Earth Defense Force 2025 has to offer. Blasting-up bugs with three friends or strangers transcends the monotony of casually shooting alien hoards, allowing the game to function the addictive loot grind it so desperately aims to be. Increasing the difficulty and getting higher-leveled weapons in the name of creating the most savage chaos and destruction known to man is the best possible way to experience Earth Defense Force 2025. The game will still almost crash as it drops frames, but in EDF land that’s considered an acknowledgement of your efficiency in destroying everything you touch.
Of course, playing with others arrives with its own caveats. Friendly fire in a game about causing as much carnage as possible seems like a terrible idea, and unfortunately its one Earth Defense Force 2025 embraces with mindless aplomb. Another incongruous and puzzling facet of the online game; your offline and online classes share different stats. Imagine my supreme disappointment when my bulked-up Wing Diver with six hours of solo missions under her belt didn’t exist when I tried to play online. It’s almost poetic; the game shoots itself in the foot as soon as it stumbles onto something that might actually work. That’s such an Earth Defense Force thing to do, but – as is our theme – what evolved from ironic to legitimate enjoyment seven years ago is just annoying and insipid now.
Your ultimate response to Earth Defense Force 2025’s particular set of skills depends on your expectations. Its audience is divided between those who interpret it as a so-bad-it’s-good romp of cataclysmic destruction and those managing to extract a bit of fun from the core loop of loot-grinding. I understood either approach with Earth Defense Force 2017. I do not understand doing it all over again. Even train wrecks aren’t fun to watch the second time around.
