Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon
Aliens are attacking the earth and their main tool of destruction is giant bugs, ala Star Ship Troopers. You are part of lighting squad an elite group of commandos who work for the Earth Defence Force. That is basically the entire story. The game drops your squad of three into several areas pursuing similar objectives over and over until the game is finished. Some of the missions do change things up a bit towards the end but essentially you are just clearing each area of all enemies.
Normally I complain about repetition in games but I barely noticed it in Earth Defence Force amid all of the chaos happening on screen. The game starts off by pitting you against giant ants and over the course of a few levels new enemy types are introduced, like giant spiders, flying hornets or what appear to be giant walking robots.
Yes amid all of the giant insects are alien robots that are treated as bosses and can be a pain in the ass to take down. The difficulty builds quite well over the game with the introduction of each new enemy. For most of the game the swarms of enemies you face seem barely manageable but the closer you get towards the end the more bat shit crazy things become. The game just throws everything at you all at once in the later levels creating a lot of run and gun moments.
By the time you reach the later levels of Earth Defence Force you should be much better equipped than when you started. As you kill enemies you earn experience that can be used to purchase upgrades to your armour. The four armour types that can be upgraded and changed between missions are jet, battle, trooper and tactical. Each one has their own special abilities and uses in battle. Jet acts as the flight/sniper class, trooper is the all around solider, tactical is similar to an engineer while Battle is the tank class. Experience gained for killing bugs can be used to purchase new weapons and upgrades for a particular class. There are a large variety of weapons for each armour set and some are particularly inventive.
Reloading in Earth Defence Force borrows the active reload system from Gears of War. Each weapon has a different amount of leeway on when the active reload needs to be hit, creating an interesting dynamic between weapons.
There is a progressive levelling system for each armour with eight levels. Once each level becomes unlocked, better weapons become available and that armour gets improved attributes. In addition to levelling up armour through experience points, each boss drops loot when defeated. When playing campaign with two other players online this creates a race for the loot which is a random upgrade for any armour set. This is the first cooperative loot drop game I’ve played since Too Human and it is an experience I didn’t realized I missed.
Upgraded weapons and armour are not your only tool for taking out the swarms of insects. During different levels you will also be granted access to tanks, turrets, mechs and gunships. These are particularly efficient at helping to destroy the city that the game takes place in. Almost all of the buildings, vehicles and objects in the game are destructible. You can bring entire skyscrapers down while giant tarantulas are crawling upon them.
When I said that almost all of the buildings are destructible, there are some buildings outside the boundaries of the level which are not. Earth Defence Force gives off the impression that it is an open world game when it is really more of a large open area. Once you start blowing up all of the building in an area you begin to see that the levels are actually closed off. For those who do not have such destructive tendencies the game constantly has you moving from waypoint to waypoint so that you never realize this limitation.
Aside from the campaign there is also a survival mode that is really hard and throws a ton of enemies at you. Thankfully survival mode can be played with up to six players online, while the campaign can only be played with three. Survival is a wave defence that gets progressively more difficult. The main drawback of survival mode is that you cannot use your levelled up armour from campaign nor do you gain any experience from killing enemies.
Earth Defence Force has many redeeming qualities in the gameplay department but there are some fairly funny bugs that add a bargain bin flair to the game. Some of the larger enemies will phase through buildings or get stuck in them. The frame rate will drop drastically when too many explosions are happening on screen. Enemy drop ships will literally just appear in the sky out of nowhere and begin to drop enemies. These things just made me smile in a kind of so bad its good sort of way.
I really appreciated some of the funny banter during the campaign that demonstrated that game doesn’t take itself too seriously which could have been a flaw with this type of title. One major criticism against Earth Defence Force: Insect Armageddon is the length. Its predecessor, Earth Defence Force 2017, had over fifty levels that were twenty minutes in length. Insect Armageddon only has fifteen, though they are structured much better. With some armour levels only unlocking at higher difficulties the argument can be made that this is a game meant to be played over and over again.
For all of the minor flaws to the utter lack of trying to reach the graphical and presentation benchmarks set by other games this generation, Earth Defence Force: Insect Armageddon is a lot of fun to play. The simple shoot, run, reload mechanic is fun while playing with cooperative partners. There is something intrinsically satisfying about defending the Earth from giant alien bugs that will make me want to continue putting this game in for months to come.
