Earth Defense Force 2017

"Ravagers Must Die!"

Crack compulsive arcade shooter by budget Japanese developer Sandlot. Vaguely updated to 360 from its budget Simple Series PS2 origins, Earth Defense Force 2017 is the third game in the Chikyuu Boueigun series, and possibly even a pseudo-remake of the first game.

Save the Earth from giant insect bastards! You take control of a silent, slender almost androgynous suicide soldier; the only chap (or chapette) with chops enough to halt the space alien onslaught. All post war sci-war enemy archetypes are present and correct: giant insects, giant robots, giant alien gunships, giant flying saucers, giant kaiju monsters; anything and everything giant and aggressive - and you get to trample the lot with a spiralling, daft little arms race. It's like stumbling hero-first into the midst of a playable Inoshiro Honda B movie nirvana.

Players are aided throughout by enthusiastic lemming-alike CPU teammates that spout nonsensically pulpy war-cliche slogans any chance they get. Voice acting is almost uniformly awful, although the melodramatic radio chatter on later levels does wonderfully compliment humanities last-ditch attempt to thump the monsters once and for all - there's a real sense of player directed heroism almost entirely missing from expositional cut-scene heavy big budget drama gaming. The final psychedelic mothership confrontation ranks alongside the cream of ‘all-or-nothing' final boss encounters, as the player creeps closer to the psychotic disco ball death machine, tearing through subordinates as they go.

Vehicles pop up too, although they're rarely as entertaining as running headlong into a crowd of spitting, hissing spiders and detonating a rocket point-blank. The helicopter in particular is anti-user friendly, with its mess of unworkable counter intuitive controls. The jet bike is vaguely useful for speeding, and the giant Matrix Revolutions / Geoff Darrow alike mech suit has a decent armoury of rockets and flame throwers even if it lumbers along at snails pace. The tank however does prove useful in slightly prolonging your health bar and giving immediate access to constant shell turret for harder close encounters.

Kill an enemy and they'll drop a flat little 2D icon (or three) - a health, weapon or armour pick-up. Health keeps you fighting, armour accumulates and adds to your overall health bar after clearing the level (adding a JRPGish component for higher difficulty levels, sooner or later you'll have to go farming), and a weapons pick up that randomly bestow a new arm upon you. The higher the difficulty level the better the weapon. Winningly each weapon is accompanied by a daffy little techno synopsis detailing how Ravager technology has altered and mutated the arms industry. There are a good chunk of barely usable also-ran gimmick guns that make up the research path necessary to get to the screen wiping Inferno difficulty drops. EDF's gun timeline is a superb touch. The usefulness of the guns also evolves over the 5 difficulty levels, there's very little need for anything other than a bullet wall assault rifle and rocket launcher combo on the first two or three; but once you get to the last two: Hardest and Inferno, filling up those two gun spaces requires serious thought about what enemies the level will have you fighting. EDF's 170+ guns are a real joy, from welding torches to rocket pod sentry gun drops, through to everything clearing shoulder-launched (barely) sub-nuclear warheads.

EDF 2017 is the first of the series to be published in the US, Chikyuu Boueigun and Chikyuu Boueigun 2 are available on PS2 in Europe published by Essential Games as Monster Attack and Global Defence Force respectively. Both are hamstrung by inferior framerates and a lack on an unbordered 60Hz display mode. Problems this 360 version almost entirely avoids. Chikyuu Boueigun 3 / Earth Defence Force 2017's generation leap allows for denser enemy spam and a more reliable (although never perfect) frame rate and that's basically it. There's a shade more polish on the menu front-end, but the 360's techno-umph is entirely aimed at spawning and tracking as many giant ants as is possible. Although it's not all progress; the second game featured a jetpack pilot alternative character, and a wider variety of Boss encounter enemies both sadly lacking from this third installment.

Cities crumble to dust after only the briefest of pummeling, nearly everything is explodable and you're never penalised for any buildings demolished / lives lost. Mission objectives never ever stray from inter-stellar genocide - no stealth interludes, or babysitting death-bating idiots here, it's annihilate bugs and robots for 50+ levels; Earth Defense Force 2017 is as pure as Space Invaders. There's very rarely ever a second of gameplay that isn't you shooting enemies or rolling wildly across the level on your way to shooting enemies. It's a jarringly welcome contrast to other Japanese big budget 'exclusives' like Lost Planet that require the players to endlessly trudge vast vistas to get a whiff of combat.

Fun on lower difficulties, dangerously obsessive on the last two as you are forced to adopt enemy and terrain specific tactics and weapon sets. Earth Defense Force 2017 is a micro-budget masterpiece.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 12/17/07

Game Release: Earth Defence Force 2017 (EU, 03/30/07)