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