Earth Defense Force 2017

"They Came in a Mothership, They Are Going Home in a Body Bag."

So the year is 2013 and world receives an intelligent extraterrestrial signal from space finally proving that we aren't alone in the universe. Not quite sure if these beings are friendly or hostile the world governments create a military division called the Earth Defense Force in 2015 to be trained to defend the planet in the worst case scenario. 2017 the aliens have arrived to Earth and action is being taken to welcome them and begin what they hope is peaceful talks with these beings… to bad that hope is merely wishful thinking.

From what you just read you may be thinking that this sounds like the most cliched alien invasion scenario of all time. Well guess what? You are dead right. Welcome to Earth Defense Force 2017 a low budget title where all your cheesiest B rated alien invasion movies are made interactive for your enthusiastic enjoyment. The game is pure cliche as you are put into the role of not even an individual person but just some random no name person in the Earth Defense Force and your mission is simple kill and destroy all aliens in your sights. Yep you know when you watched those cheesy movies how there was always that futile effort by the army to go against the monster or alien invaders, well guess what you are one of those soldiers.

This game is pure 3rd person shooter. The game is mission based and each mission is progressively more difficult and challenging and every few missions something new is usually thrown up into your face to increase the difficulty. The gameplay is fairly simple pick two guns of your choosing and go into the mission and blast away whatever they put in front of you. As you kill enemies they randomly can drop kits to repair your armor or they can drop armor pieces that will increase your maximum armor amount slowly over time as you collect lots and lots of them. These increases stay on your characters file for all the difficulty levels so you actually will want to start on easy mode and work your way through all the difficulty settings in order to build up lots of health for the harder settings. Also you can get weapon crate drops which contain a random weapon to collect, which its strength is based on the difficulty level you play on. There are 150 weapons in the game to collect and each difficulty has exclusive weapons to it. So if you want to collect them all you need to play all the difficulties to do so. The weapons themselves range from assault rifles, sniper rifles, shotguns, rocket launchers, missile launchers, grenade launchers and some random special weapons that include anything from flame throwers to turrets. Some weapons are just plain out right better than others and some weapons actually have various uses. Like a rocket launcher that sprays out a dozen rockets in a spread fashion for attacking mass enemies or one slow reloading missile that does insane damage. Each weapon usually comes with its own pros and cons and what is a great weapon for one stage may not be so hot on the next. The large array of weapon choices means that you have practically anything you need for any situation and more than enough variety to keep from getting bored.

The first few levels of the game especially starting off on easy or normal will probably seem dull and corny. Your initial enemy you encounter is really weak, and doesn't look very threatening. Now slowly over the course of a couple missions you will start to notice they are getting a bit more difficult and aggressive and then eventually new stuff will be introduced that will simply take the game into hyperdrive. The sheer amount of chaos that can happen at anyone time on screen is simply epic. The size and scope of some of the stuff you will be battling is just incredible to experience. The game gives a very satisfying sense of destruction when you kill stuff and destroy things. Which reminds me to let you know all buildings in the game, everything is destructible. Whether by you or the invaders, buildings bridges… can all be taken down with relative ease. So let the demolisher in you out if you want, level cityscapes if it pleases you. The game also sports some vehicles to use from a mech like robot, a tank, an attack chopper and a star wars esque hover bike. All these vehicles are very hard to use but if you can master any one of them they can be very helpful. There are a lot of missions in this game to keep you busy for even one play-through for quite a few hours. But the game actually has several difficulties and is intended for you to repeat the game on them; Easy, Normal, Hard, Hardest, and Inferno. Inferno is so difficult that you may need some help, which is why the game sports a split screen co op mode for your enjoyment with your buddies. Sadly the game is a budget title and the creators apparently couldn't afford to put online co op in the game or any sort of online feature at all. This is really sad as this game just screams online mode. Perhaps a sequel will have it if there is one.

Graphically this game is good and bad. Most of the game looks like a last gen title with great resolution. Some of the stuff looks so generic and bland but this is mostly destructive buildings, cars and things that you probably won't be focused on and probably won't last long enough to matter. But the game makes up for this lack of next gen graphics with incredible draw distances that let you see and shoot things miles away across the city and the sheer number of stuff on screen at once shooting and exploding will blow you away. How about a horizon line filled with countless giant insects or a sky filled so thick with space ships you can't see the sky itself? There is some slowdown but it's actually warranted in my book when you have this entire cityscape, with 50 some odd machines and 10 EDF members all firing and exploding and dying all around you with buildings crumbling.. the occasional slow down is forgiveable and quite frankly I'm impressed it does it so little. Now the spaceships and robots look fantastic, at least I think so and the explosions are just epic until you experience a 100 ft tall robot exploding in a blinding large flash just feet away from you in this game you just can't fully appreciate how utterly perfect they got the explosions.

The game sounds rather corny, with silly b rated scripting and melodramatic voice acting at times. But it's not horrible and in some ways it's very funny. The menu sounds and such give a very old school arcade like feel. I felt the guns and explosion sounds were done very well and couldn't ask for anything better. Again it's a low budget game so its pretty basic for the most part in this respect.

This game is simple and mindless action with a cliched plotline but it's just pure addictive and challenging fun and even more so with a friend. There is a lot of game here to play and the game is very cheap. I think it sells now for like 20 bucks new. If you like action packed games or want something incredibly fun to do with a friend buy this game. It's just incredible fun. Fast becoming one of my favorite games of this generation.

Score: 9/10

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/03/08

Game Release: Earth Defense Force 2017 (US, 03/20/07)