EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 4.1 The Shadow of New Despair

 


The EDF franchise is long running sprawling all the way back to 2003 with 'Monster Attack'. However, the first few games were never avalible outside Japan and not in english. Well EDF 4.1 is really a Remaster of the Third game, EDF 2025, and its the earliest iteration of the series avalible on Steam so thats where I chose to start. I had previously played the Spin-off 'Insect Armageddon' which isn't a part of the mainline series, but it seems similar enough.

EDF 4.1 is a fully cooperative online campaign. I played 2 player online the whole campaign with a buddy. It's got all sorts of difficulties and goes all the way up to "Inferno" but by default it suggests you play on Normal, which we did. First impressions are good, but strange. The game does not have conventional mechanics in almost all regards. It's a weird, half janky Japanese budget shooter, but its also packed full of charm and unique innovative ideas. Everything about the game is just janky and awkward, atleast on the surface. The main menus and interface is absolutely cracked, no mouse cursor, the controls barely work, menus ontop of clunky menus, arrow keys popping up accidental promps. Its such a mess, but you start to get use to it, and it starts to become a charm of the game. The game has an absolutely insane amount of missions, 98 of them in total in cooperative. The way these missions work is very simple: You get a brief description telling you what kind of enemies to expect, then it just drops you straight into a giant battlefield arena where your only objective is to kill everythig. That's pretty much every single mission, for all 98 missions. Sometimes you'll have to blow up respawners, either in the form of ground tunnels, or in the form of giant ships, but thats pretty much it. Some missions you get these psuedo boss fights with some novelty gimmick mechanics like getting into giant mechs, but its few and far between. I really like how minimalistic and arcade the mission system is. Its very pick up and play. You can easily just jump in and do 5 missions and stop if you wanted to. They're all pretty short too so the pacing feels really fun most of the time.

When I said the mechanics are not conventional I mean it in all sorts of ways. For instance, the 'armor' system completely perplexed us for half the game. The enemies drop all sorts of pickup boxes, Red armor boxes, Different types of health boxes, Weapon boxes etc. It took us quite awhile to figure out what all these things did as its not obvious at all. You have a health meter, and a Armor meter. For half the game I thought the armor meter meant how much armor I had (obviously) and picking up the Red armor boxes was suppose to increase my armor. Well, the armor meter never dropped below full, so it was really confusing. Turns out the way it really works is the game has sort of RPG mechanics. The red armor boxes do nothing when you pick them up mid mission - however, after the mission ends, it tallies up how many armor points you collected, and then increases your max health! Very strange. So the armor meter is really just there to tell you what your max health is. So what this means is, as the game progressively gets harder and harder, you need to make sure to be collecting these red armor boxes to increase your max health permanently for the next mission, or else your health will be so low it will become impossible. Strange system, but once we realized that it was a fun goal to try to pickup these things.

The other boxes that drop are Weapon boxes, again, for quite a few hours we were confused what this stuff did. Because when you pickup these boxes, nothing happens. You get no notification, all you get is a little bleep sound. Well, similar thing as the armor boxes. You pickup these weapon boxes, and after the mission its like it rolls a dice and you start to unlock different weapons. These weapons can be various levels, like more RPG mechanics. So you constantly want to be picking up these weapon boxes too to unlock new and more powerful weapons. Theres a lot of them, too. You have all sorts of categories. Rifles, sniper rifles, Missle launchers (Lock on homing), Rocket launchers (standard), Shotguns ,Grenades/grenade launchers, Special weapon category which is all sorts of weird shit like healing guns and weird plasma guns that cant reload. Yeah, theres a ton of weapons to choose from, and you'll constantly be unlocking new ones and playing with all sorts of different things. For each category of weapon, its like theres 20 weapons inside of it. It was really fun constantly unlocking new weapons and switching your kit in and out trying out all the possibilities. You can carry two weapons, and they have infinite ammo, because of the extreme amount of enemies the game throws at you.

Ontop of that, you even have multiple classes to play as. You have the typical soldier, which the game suggests you play the whole game as first, you have this Wing Diver class which has a jetpack and controls completely different, has its own weapons, and everything shares a cooldown. Then you have this Air Raider which is a class seemingly for co-op play, where you can spawn in vehicles but other than that you have pretty lousy arsenal it seems like. Then you have this massive clunky mech-like character that has a huge minigun that moves super slow, that says is only for advanced players. Well, we played around with some of these different classes here and there, but really the way its designed is its like they dont want you switching in and out of classes mid-campaign. Its like they want you to just pick 1 class and beat the whole game with it. Because each class doesnt share health or armor or weapon pickups, so if you play half the game as Ranger and get all sorts of cool weapons and high health, then you switch over to anoher class, its like you're level 1 with no health and no good weapons so its pretty much unplayable.  No big deal though, the game seems to have a lot of replayability despite it taking almost 40 hours to complete and having 98 missions, its cool that theres so much to come back to and play through as other classes if you want.


The standard gameplay and controls of the game is very rough around the edges, but also really satisfying and charming in a unique way. It feels like a low budget PS2 third person shooter, but also that makes it more unique, its not like all the other copy paste modern shooter games. It has a Spacebar button for rolling, and this is super satisfying and fun, you can constantly roll around and move faster and break obsticles in your way, and shoot in between rolls, it becomes imperative for success in some of the harder levels, and you start to get into a sort of rhythm of rolling, jumping, dodging , diving, shooting around the levels. The weapons play and shoot in a huge variety of ways. For example in the assault rifle category you can find typical assault rifles that just shoot in an inaccurate spread with 30 round bullets, but then you can find other versions of the same sort of rifle that have 200 bullets in the magazine that shoot super fast, that shoot straight, or wild, or shoot almost like a shotgun etc. Theres all sorts of variation and no gun really feels like any other gun because they all have weird little quirks and variations that makes it fun to experiment.

The most fun thing about the combat, though, is the physics system. When you shoot with most weapons, you can see your bullets flying through the air and eventually land into your target, usually sending the enemy ragdolling with extreme force all over the place. Or blowing them into gibs, heads and limbs flying wildly across the map. Its espeically fun and noticable with the Rocket launchers, which may be some of the most fun rocket launchers in any game. The way the rockets control and physics of having to lead your shots and learn the timing and rocket speed, coupled with the giant blast radius around groups of enemeis, sending them ragdolling into the sky just never gets old.

Speaking of enemies, yeah theres a lot. The game has a lot of bugs. Get it? not technical bugs,  bug bugs. Tons of insects in this game. It starts off slow with just giant ants, but sooner than later you start to encounter really creepy spiders, bees, all sorts of ships and aircraft drones, giant robots wielding lazers and plasma rockets, dragons, all sorts of giant robot enemies etc. This game is one of the few games I can think of that just throws hundreds and hundreds of enemies at the players per mission. Another similar franchise that does anything close to this is Serious Sam. This type of gameplay is hard to find, not many games have the engine capacity or design that just throws a clusterfuck of enemies at you and see if you can survie. Usually though, a lot of the missions are carefully handcrafted and the enemies are strategically placed to force the player to mix up their playstyle and weapons to accomodate for which enemy youre fighting. For example, for a lot of the insect type enemies you'll want stuff like maybe grenade launchers and shotguns, but for the flying enemies you want high powered sniper rifles, and for the gigantic mechs you want stuff like rocket launchers and snipers. You're always having to mix up your kit and try new things and I think more often than not the game forces you to change up your strategy and it keeps it from being dull.

Theres even a handful of levels that take place deep underground inside insect hives in almost pitch blackness, these levels felt almost like horror themed. They're usually giant spiders and tarantulas too and its just creepy as hell being in a pitch black underground cave, and then in the corner of your eye seeing a giant tarantula come out of the screen towards you with its big red eyes staring right at you. It makes for some intense gameplay and I really enjoyed the change of pacing and scenery in these underground parts.


The game is not easy at all, and at times it can take away from the experience. For example it seems to frequently have a pattern where it will be like 3-4 really easy missions in a row, but then all of a sudden it will throw an excruciatingly difficult mission at you out of nowhere. Where we failed over and over until  we clenced our buttholes super tight and really tried hard and finally beat it. Then, another 3-4 really easy levels, then another extremely difficult level. Really odd pattern, its like the devs tried to make sure you werent having too much of a breeze so they kept throwing in really hard levels at you in between the easy stuff. There were a bunch of times where we all of a sudden just got stuck. The first time was around level 24, Giant Robots, when it introduced dozens of these huge mechs at us that are huge bullet sponges that took like 10 shots each with a high powered sniper to kill. Other ones I can remember are when it introduced this giant flying blue dragon that was near impossible to kill, that breathes fire ontop of you and melts you instantly. Another one was in this underground cave where right at the end you have to fight a queen bee boss but it just hides inside a cave and squirts lava on the whole screen and melts you instantly and is extremly hard to shoot at.

What's especially weird, is that the single player and co-op campaigns have slightly different level listings. Well, the co-op campaign has all the single player levels, but also about 10 random extra, extremely hard co-op levels. These take place at various points in the campaign, and just make no sense difficulty wise. One of them is like level 80 something, Legion of Monsters, and it just throws every single hard boss and enemy at you at once, including the big blue dragon thing. We could not beat this on Normal so we had to put the difficulty down to Easy for this one, luckily you can do that. But yeah basically everyone of this co-op exclusive levels are just oddly out of place difficulty wise and I would have really preferred if it was listed as some optional mission pack, rather than awkwardly crammed into the original campaign listing.

But yeah the games difficulty at times was randomly so extreme and tough that we had to stop playing for a few days. Just as we thought the game was nearing an end, around level 80, we realized that the co-op campaign has extra levels, and we have to get all the way to 98. The game is super long almost 40 hours, so yes it started to wear out its welcome around hour #25. Why is it so long? it really could have been like  5-10 hours shorter and it would not have harmed it. But the game is packed full of a unique, soulful identity that I did find myself missing it and wanting to come back to it if I stopped playing for a day or two, thats a good thing. It's just got a lot of personality to it. Theres even a bunch of AI team mates that fight along side you at times, they have really entertaining chatter and humour, the story as minimal as it is, has some entertaining voice acting, albeit the most ear-destroying lo-fi radio distortion voice ive ever heard in a game, plus theres no subtitles. Plus, how can I forget the songs you can sing? Theres a menu where you can pull up various voice commands, and theres even a list of songs you can sing. Of course we spammed the hell out of it the entire game, and I'll probably never forget that song now. The AI soldiers even will sing the song with you if you use the command, how cool is that? Going into battle against hundreds of giant insects, singing some motivational battle hymns together.

Luckily the last level wasnt too difficult, we beat it first try, because by the way things were looking we thought we'd never be able to beat it and have to put it on Easy to do so, because some of the other previous levels were so difficult. The game is pretty awesome overall, the controls feel good and the physics system is satisfying, graphics are rough around the edges but I kinda like the ps2 charm about it, biggest complaint is the random grueling difficulty spikes and bizarre / hard to understand RPG type mechanics, but after you understand them its ok. After finally beating this it just makes me want to play the whole franchise because they all seem to have co-op campaigns so its like a perfect co-op series to play through. The EDF Deploys!

7/10

Serious Sam 4

 


With Serious Sam 4, yet another almost 10 years have passed since the previous game. Will Croteam have learned from their mistakes in previous games this time? Is this the game where they set the record right?

SS4 uses a much updated and advanced engine, thats clear from the moment you start playing. The graphics stand out in a way previous games didn't. First of all whats instantly striking is that you're no longer surrounded by monotonous yellow enviornments, the game actually is really saturated and colorful. Greens, yellows, red brick walls, it has a really varied color pallette that gives it a really refreshing change from previous games. I think the first bit of the game takes place in Italy or something like that.

The levels here are whats my main concern, because like all other SS games my main complaints basically came down to the level design. Well hows the level design here?

It's funny, actually, the first few levels are almost nothing like Serious Sam levels. They play more like Call of Duty, linear levels. There's not many huge sprawling landscapes, but instead its a lot of small corridors and little villages like you'd see in more typical shooter games. You know what? I think its better, atleast this time. Unlike the previous game, where it had an incredibly slow boring start, Serious Sam 4 gets off the ground pretty fast. Before long you'll already have a Shotgun, ninigun, rocket launcher all sorts of shit, fighting bosses, being introduced to a bunch of new enemies. Most of the original enemy roster is back here in full swing, but you have some new enemies which mostly consist of, weirdly enough, almost like Left 4 Dead zombies. You have these typical zombie type enemies that run and growl at you and eat you, and you even have like the Left 4 Dead bloat thats just some big fat monster and you shoot it and it explodes guts everywhere and pukes at you. I don't mind these new enemies, but it is pretty weird how sometimes it feels more like you're playing a zombie game than Serious Sam!

Other new enemies are these vampire teleporting guys that don't really do much than just teleport around when you get close and shoot balls at you, they look pretty cool but theyre kinda annoying to fight. Atleast they add some more variety though, no real complaints. Most of the other new enemies are like humanoid soldiers straight out of Call of Duty. It's pretty cool that you now have typical first person shooter gunfights against human type enemies in more linear enviornments, it feels like a more typical modern shooter, but I don't mind it. You've got all sorts of other new enemy types, they all work pretty well and I don't have any complaints, one more worth noting is this jetpack flying orange guy that shoots rockets at you he's pretty fun.

So back to the level design. Yeah the first quarter of the game is more like a COD campaign than what you expect from serious sam, and I actually like it. Theres no bullshit or confused where to go. Actually this game introduces a objective marker. It will show you on the screen where to go now. It will also say in the top left what your current objective is. I don't care how unimmersive it is or how it doesnt let you explore as much or whatever,  fuck it, GREAT change. So rarely are you ever confused what to do in this game, its just nonstop progress and good pacing for the most part.

The first quarter of the game has you going through countrysides and palaces of Italian locations, very colorful and exciting, but then around quarterway through the game it starts throwing all of these vehicle sectons at you back to back. Like first its a 20 minute long Mech section that just sucked and was filler, then you have this weird gigantic open world level where you drive around on ATV's and motorcycles, its like a map out of ARMA or something its just this huge open world map where you kinda just drive for 20 minutes doing nothing, then come across another driving section this time in a farming harvester. Like wtf? Why is there suddenly so many bullshit vehicle sections. You ride in a harvester for another 20 minutes and thankfully thats the end of the driving sections. It just felt weird and out of place, but atleast it didnt last long.

After that you start to enter these countryside Medevial castles and like Transylvanian old villaes and stuff and its pretty awesome. The game starts to get really hard on the last quarter of the game like probably the hardest its ever been and you start to get more of the classic Serious Sam style arenas where they spawn wave after wave of enemies at you and you have to survive. Also, like typical Croteam fasion, the bulk of the game has fun short levels like 10-30 minutes, but then the last few levels all start taking 1 hour long each. It wasnt that bad this time, but why do they keep doing that shit? just keep it consistent across the board.

One of the last levels in particular is worth poinitng out. It's this snowy antartica place where you go inside a big freight ship and its almost like the first ship level in COD4. It's unlike anything else in the Serious Sam franchise and it was a cool change of scenery and the graphics were awesome. Too bad its the shortest level in the game, only like 15 minutes.


Aaand then the last level. And guess what, I called it. I said as I was doing the last level that guess what, its going to be 40 minutes of battling nonstop hordes of every monster possible, then we'll finally get to the boss, and the last boss is going to have some bullshit gimmick and dwindle all our lives down in a matter of seconds. Was I right?  Yep. We got to the last boss,it started giving us this new mechanic like grappling hooks and jumping around on this huge boss to do something we couldnt figure out, and within a matter of seconds we lost all our lives and had to start the level again. Fuck off Croteam. Why do you keep having awful last bosses? What the fuck were they thinking. So we just put it on easiest difficulty and speedran back to the boss. Turns out you have to grapple around ontop of this giant boss and jump into these jumping platforms and fly around looking for these purple crystals on the boss to grapple hook onto and destroy with C4. Its incredibly janky, glitchy, unintuitive, and just awful shit. Also theres dozens of these flying robots shooting at you the whole time that ruin your life. Its a mess. Really shit last boss, just as shit as Serious Sam 3's last boss, or worse.

Now some big new additions to the actual mechanics are, guess what? Skill trees. Side quests. Gadgets.

So its got a skill system.
Hows it work?
Well you just play the game normally but sometimes you can come across crates that have this purple thing that you pickup and it gives you a skill point
Then it opens up a skill tree and its actually pretty small. The right side is all about melee kills which is pressing E on enemies and getting a little animation killing them, pretty ignorable.
The left side is about dual wielding weapons mostly, and general combat stuff like being able to sprint while reloading. So obviously pretty much everyone is gonna gravitate to the left side.
The skill tree seems like it only has like 20 choices overall so its really not that big of a deal.

But it is crazy how the game has dual wielding now. It does change the game a lot, like its almost mandatory that you get the dual wielding stuff because some sections towards the end are just insanely hard and dual wielding helps a lot. The dual wield mechanics are fine, you seem to be a bit less accurate when you use it so its fairly balanced. It looks rediculous dual wielding chainguns and assault rifles though, I'm not sure if i actually prefer it being in the game or not. That's basically it for the skill tree. You have some novelty skills like being able to ride the bull-type enemies like a vehicle but I never got it or thought it was that big of a deal.

It's strange to see skill trees in a Sam game, because its like this is the kind of game thats supposed to get away from all that shit, but I don't mind how its done here because its so out of the way and you can't really screw it up its just like a nice little bonus feature you get to screw with infrequently. No real complaints about it.

Whats newly introduced also are Gadgets, which you can hold Q to bring up your weapon wheel which shows all your guns and gadgets. Gadgets are crazy things like Black Holes, Nukes, Slow motion, Fast running speed etc. The black hole and nukes do what you'd think, basically annihilates anything in view. The graphic for the black hole is pretty satisfying and looks good sucking up all the monsters. You get these fairly frequently and its almost a nessessity that you use them on some of the later sections because it becomes so challenging. I don't really have any complaints about this either, except for the fact that half the game I kind of forgot about them. Maybe they could have put little icons on the HUD to remind you which ones you have? The controls to view which ones you have and using them are kinda clunky. You can also find portable medkits now too, which is kinda questionable, but atleast they made the game challenging enough to warrant it.

And the last new crazy addition: Side quests.
Yep thats right. You can come across paths in the levels that highlight in blue that its a side quest, shows you what reward youll get, usually gadgets, but sometimes keys that unlock extra parts of the levels that give you more pickups. We did as many of these sidequests as possible cause they were kinda fun and had goofy little side stories and cutscenes. They usually just involve going into some arena and killing everything, or hitting a switch, or key etc. No complaints about the side quests either, they were mostly all fun and good and nice little discoveries worth exploring for. Because not always you will come across them on your own, you sometimes have to explore to find them.

Last things i'll touch on briefly are the overall weapons. Most of the weapons are back from previous games and are as good as ever, the general roster is the same its always been except this time as you progress the campaign you can pickup permanent upgrades for some weapons which add new abilites. For example late in the campaign you get a upgrade for the Laser that adds an ability to right click and shoot a straight beam that destroys everything, also for the rocket launcher you get ability to lock onto enemies. I thought it was a neat addition, nothing too crazy or involved though.

The general enemy designs are overall good, but some questionable art design choices. Like I mentioned previously the zombie things in the orange jumpsuits just look out of place, some enemies in particular the one eyed monster guys look inferior to previous models in the series, but overall the models and textures are great for the monsters and theres a large variety, but still mostly keeping to the classic roster, not going off the rails like SS2 quantity over quality.

And finally the cutscenes and story. Actually this might be the most entertaining cutscene and story of all the Sam games, the characters here are pretty memorable and silly. You have this priest guy, this conspiracy theorist nutcase, Hellfire the woman side kick, and Sam which is more wisecracking and glib than ever. It makes for a good mesh. The conspiracy theorist guy in particular says some hilarious shit , all the typical tropes you'd think of, but it just works. A lot of the cutscenes in the Italy section are laugh out loud funny with some of the characters. You see a lot of different action scenes like out of a action movie, moreso than previous games, in previous games a lot of cutscenes are just people standing around talking, but here you get to see all sorts of action frequently. The writing and jokes were more hit than they were miss.

I'm not sure why so many people hated this game. Maybe just because its buggy and has bad optimization? It ran pretty poorly for me but I'm not going to talk much about that, I'm reviewing gameplay. Though I did year that for years Croteam were hyping the game up with this "Legion" system which was supposed to be this gigantic thousands of enemies warfare, but in reality you only see a glimpse of it at the beginning of the game, and at the very end. Maybe 10 minutes total of gameplay. That apparently really disappointed people, but for anyone who hasn't bought into any hype or marketing advertising campaigns I don't see how it would be relevant.
Overall its one of the best Sam games in the series, which isn't something I  thought I would say

7/10