Earth Defense Force 2017

"A simple but sublime blast 'em up"

Many will balk at the very idea of Earth Defence Force 2017. It is a game where essentially you shoot giant insects and giant robots… and not a lot else. Its plot can be fairly accurately summed up with the sentence “giant bugs attack earth”. The biggest and most meaningful decision you'll have to make in this game is whether to select a combination of a machine gun and a rocket launcher or a machine gun and a missile launcher. Despite being on Xbox 360, there are no Live options. The voice acting, at its very best, can be described as “laughable”. The graphics, whilst conveying a decent sense of scale, are functional at best. Of the games 53 missions, no less than 53 of them contain the simple goal of destroying absolutely every enemy. There are no escort missions; no stealth missions and the occasional vehicles you come across can be succinctly summed-up as useless.

So why, pray, is this one of the best games I've ever played?

If the above wasn't enough to lure you into a false sense that this might be a poor offering, then the early levels might. You'll see a tiny handful of fairly badly animated ants, kill them with ease, wander around for a few minutes until you found the next group of them, rinse and repeat. Slowly though, it begins to add more ingredients to the mix. Next there will be spiders. Then robots. Then giant death ships. It all begins to add up unto you realise that you've spent the last 3 hours destroying wave after wave of enemies with your gun that is essentially a rapid fire rocket launcher. Oh and a good 15 minutes of which will have been spent laughing maniacally at the screen.

It's seldom that you see a game so happy to wear its arcade credentials on its sleeve with no pretensions of depth. The last I can think of was the 1999 Rage title “Incoming” and even that wasn't a patch on this. The Defence Force series began life as a budget priced Japanese PS2 title (which recently saw the light of day in the west as Global Defence Force – be sure to check this out, it's just as good) but after it gathered a cult following, the series moved to 360 with this sequel. Whilst graphically it's not a massive step up from it's predecessor (although this is also a testament as to how good the PS2 version looked as much as anything), the scale of things as mentioned has been expanded and some of the textures look very nice.

It's a shame the sound design doesn't quiet match up though. Aside from the (enjoyably) bad dialogue, the surround sound never seems to match what's happening on screen, which makes for rather an odd experience. Thankfully none of this really matters in the thick of the battle – and boy is this battle thick. Even on the easiest difficulty setting, by the end the levels will be filled with enemies. On the harder settings this happens much sooner.

Sadly the achievements are an uninspiring bunch, with just 6 available in total – 5 for completing the game on each setting (which will take no less than 50 hours) and 1 for finding every weapon. In the end this doesn't really matter though – this is pure gameplay through and through, a massive victory of substance over style. Buy this and you'll never look at a can of RAID the same again.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/08/08

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