Earth Defense Force 2017

"Alien Giant Ants Want to Eat your Head"

"You want me to go out there and fight a giant four legged robot that is over 200 feet tall that drops ants the size of houses, 50 feet tall attack robots, and alien fighter jets, and all you are giving me is an assault rifle? This is bull ****!"

Yes, this is the feeling you will get when you play Earth Defense Force 2017. Now the first thing you will notice about this game is that it mostly takes place in Tokyo and other urban or suburban Japanese locations, complete with HUGE maps of realistic cities and tall buildings with details as small as coke machines, mail boxes, and small bicycles parked on the sidewalk. This game has you being the leader of 'Storm 1', a squad of special trained soldiers, known as the E.D.F., designed to be the first line of defense against alien aggression after there was confirmed signs of alien life in the early 21's century. The aliens show up in the form of giant flying saucers and a massive sphere known as their mother ship that appears over the skies of Tokyo. The aliens are code named 'Ravagers' and no sooner do they arrive than you realize they are not here for tea and cookies.

The game play is simple. Each level you have the choice of changing your equipment, only able to have two weapons at any given time. Your weapons consist of assault rifles, rockets, shot guns, grenades and grenade launchers, sniper rifles, missile launchers, and special weapons (Flame throwers, mines, sentry guns, etc.) Then you choose your mission (53 in all) and choose your difficulty. The difficulty effects how much damage you take from getting hit, how easily your fellow troops die, and how much damage your enemies can soak up before getting fragged. As you fight, your enemies drop various items, such as small and large health containers, armor pickups that add a little bit to your total heath at the end of the level, and weapon pickups that give you random weapons at the end of the level, the strength of said-weapons depending on the difficulty of the level, higher difficulty, stronger weapons.

Some of the complaints I've heard about the game is that the graphics are not up to snuff with other 360 games... well that may be because the game was originally designed for the PS2 in Japan and was redesigned for the 360 later on. Regardless of that, it definitely has a next-gen feel to it when fighting out in the open, but levels that involve you going underground are muddy and dark and lack any real graphical polish since it's taking place underground. The game can be intense at times, such as when hundreds of giant ants come crawling at you and you pump clip after clip of rifle rounds into them and they keep coming. The game suffers from some slowdown, but that usually comes from when there are MASSIVE explosions and hundreds of very active characters on the screen at once and thousands of projectiles being fired off in every direction. The voice acting is hit or miss most of the time, the team members having very corny voice acting with just a few honest to goodness lines here and there, though the guy who voices the commander over the radio is a quite good. The weapons are pretty specialized, and there is no good all around weapon. You have to decide what you really want to have on a mission and weapons usually always have trade offs, like good firing speed for bad range, or good accuracy for low clip size, or good power for bad reload time. Enemies range from cannon fodder to just friggan jerks. The ants are simple minded but come in mass, and the giant robots are few and far between but can dish out massive amounts of punishment, take a lot of damage, and can be a pain to hit with anything other then bullets since their fames are so thin and easily able to be missed by rockets.

The best part of the game in my opinion is the feeling that you are really in there, feeling surrounded when you are the last one left and are surrounded by gun ships, or the feeling of how small you are when fighting the massive ant-generating saucers, or how cramped you are in the underground levels. Also the shear amount of destruction you can cause is breath taking. If it is there, it can be blown up or destroyed. The downside is that the game is simple, you see red dots on the map, you follow your way to them and shoot them until they are no longer there. The game can be beaten in a week and the only replay value comes from playing the same missions over again but at a different difficulty. Some levels are fun but others, like the nest raids, are just annoying and long. The underground levels can be so huge and complex that you can get utterly lost for a long time. Also something that can be a pain is that while the enemy cannot suffer friendly fire and your own fellow troops cannot hurt you with their fire, you will lose more troops to your own fire then from the enemies since when firing at a swarm of ants, troopers tend to run into your line of fire and drop dead as your machine gun blows their head off.

This game is not for everyone, but it does have a lot to offer for people who love fast pace shooters on massive scales with lots of enemies and odds stacked against them. The enemies are massive and so are the firefights. There is a co-op mode that lets you play all the levels with two players which can be a GOD SEND when dealing with massive amounts of enemies. The best part of the game is that right out of the gate it is 20 bucks cheaper then most other games for the 360 right now. Its a budget title but you are getting more then you pay for.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/02/08

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