Earthfall

 

Earthfall is a budget title which is touted as a co-op 4 player shooter game, much like Left 4 Dead. I picked it up few just a few dollars on sale cause as usual I'm always willing to play some cheap shooter game, especially co-op campaign. Well it does have 3 "campaigns" but I say that lightly. The first two campaigns consists of 5 missions each, and the last campaign is a single mission. Start up the game, invite your friend to the lobby, and you're presented with a few difficulty modes. First theres the gameplay difficuly, which by default is Normal which we chose to leave it as. Next is the "Bot difficulty" at first I had no idea what to make of this. But it turns out this means that if you dont have a full human team, you get to determine how smart the AI partners should be. Weird, but OK. We left it on default as well. You can choose a character from the 4 avalible options. But none of them are appealing or have standout characteristics. It is as generic as can be. A female, an asian guy in a hoodie, token black guy, and some other nerdy guy. We started up mission one and within just 10 minutes it was like, wow, this really is just Left 4 Dead copy pasted. Right down to all the finishing touches. Like how you can see guns glow through walls, when you pick them up your character calls out ""[Gun name] "Here!". To the melee weapons, the side arms with infinite ammo, the randomly spawning primary weapons around the maps, even the damn music sounds like a dollar store version of Left 4 Dead. Thats not automatically a bad thing, I'm fully welcoming for more games in the L4D formula - but it didnt take long for the cracks to begin to show and realize how lifeless and without personality this game was.

Instead of zombies, Earthfall uses these weird monster alien mutant things...and they're just not very threatening looking, or exciting to fight against. At least with zombies its easy to make a horror vibe and scary threatening moments with creepy sound effects, and the satisfaction of using a gore system to blow them to bits. But here in Earthfall with these generic mutants theres just not much fun in fighting them. Of course you have the derivitive "special" monsters like the Tank (Beast, here) , Spitter (Cant remember what they called it here) , The jockey enemy that grabs you (Cant remember what its called here) -- pretty much every monster from L4D is recreated here, just in a way less interesting way and nowhere near as exciting to fight or easily identifiable at a glance most of the time. There is maybe one unique enemy, this blue magical floating alien thing that has shields all around it. This thing sucks. You kinda just try to shoot in between the gaps of the shields to hit hits head, then it teleports all over the place. Its a mess, I think they are creatively bankrupt. But the worst of all is the Tank. Like L4D, this game has a "Director", meaning it will randomly spawn hordes of enemies. Sometimes the mission can be very easy, mostly because tanks dont spawn, but sometimes you'll get 3 in a row making it borderline impossible. The tanks simply have too much health. You have to dump literally hundreds of bullets into it to kill it. Even if you shoot its 'weak spot'  on the back, it doesnt do much. What this means is that for most of the time playing the game, you arent able to actually use your main weapon, because you NEED to save the precious ammo in case a tank randomly decides to spawn ontop of you. The game has a decent variety of weapons, multiple different AK's, SMG's like MP% and P90, Shotguns, Sniper, all sorts of grenades, mines, napalm things, turrets chainguns flamethrowers etc...but you are basically forced to save them for when the tank or harder enemies show up, because who knows when ammo is going to show up next. The guns mostly feel OK however, like they are sort of fun to shoot and play with, but mostly the enemies arent fun to fight so it doesnt matter. You end up having to play most of the game using these shitty pea shooter pistols, spamming them nonstop. Kinda makes some medicore combat and shooting even more lackluster since you dont actually get to play with the guns on offer most of the time.

The missions consist with a very brief intro cutscene to give some context, then you get sent on a series of objectives that show up on the top left. There icons around the game world you must go to to complete these objectives, usually they arent very creative or interesting. Mostly consists of things like turning the power on, getting gas and refueling some generator, pressing a button or waiting for a door to open, using a radio for help, and a few times having to place explosives, or just surviving a few waves of enemies. Every level consists of these basic objectives without much uniquely memorable encounters. There are not really any climaxes, or crescendos in pacing and engagement, the entire experience is kind of just a steady, lukewarm excitement level. Theres not really any big epic finales or memorable standoffs. Even the last areas of the missions are forgettable and as standard as the rest.

You'll frequently come across places where you can lay down barricades, turrets, and use this gun printing machine that lets you select a gun and spawn one, if the place currently has power. I guess this is the main selling point and distinguishing feature that sets it apart from L4D? Well its not that impressive. Its really just an idea ripped straight from Call of Duty World At War, so hardly a novel concept, but more mechanics derivitive from other famous games. So what you end up doing as a gameplay loop is going to these holdout stations where you lay down a few barricades next to the gun printer (which is one of the main ways to get ammo, just spawn new guns), and infinite health stations. Then, when you finish the "survive" objective, you have to quickly get to the new objective before the game randomly decides to spawn a tank ontop of you, rinse and repeat. Luckily each mission is short, maybe 15-30 mins tops, but theres not much else to the game besides this.

On paper this might sound OK, and at times the game is mildly enjoyable. I mean, it uses Unreal Engine, which is both a blessing and a curse. Its nice because by default its hard to screw up Unreal engines base control inputs , the general good enough modern graphics, lighting, textures, models etc, the gunplay , animation handling, and general fidelity of Unreal games is usually OK - but its also a curse because these games are so damn generic usually because its so easy to create a "good enough" game since the engine handles most of it for you, if you have a creatively bankrupt developer whos having most of his job basically AI generated for him, it leaves the end result of these games without any personality or characteristics besides being souless clones of eachother.  But worse problems lay within the game than just the engine. The AI team mates are especially abysmal. We got stuck on Level 3 and could just not finish it after repeated failures. We tried bumping the AI from "Normal" to "Masterful" and could not even see a difference. All too often the AI teammates would just stare at a wall and do nothing while you're dead on the ground begging for help. Or they would charge out into a tank with no ammo and die instantly. This is some of the worst AI I've seen in recent times. There are also no checkpoints during the level, so if everyone goes down, you reset the level from the start. Which would be fine, but the terrible AI, coupled with unabalanced bullet sponge enemies, with barely any ammo, makes this a particularly frustrating experience. The pacing of the missions is all over the place. Level 3 is super difficult, because its this close quarters factory mission where you're in tiny closed off rooms, whereas basically the rest of the game is quite easy. It's just all over the place. None of the levels really follow a coherent narrative , it just feels like random maps smashed together. Hardly feels like a "campaign".

The only memorable map in the game that looks different is that one Snow map, but only because its snow and looks different is it at all memorable. All the rest are as forgettable as can be. They are servicable enough, but fairly linear and not much to them besides walk in a straight line to the next objective. Factories, sewers, city streets levels, are most of the content here.

After finishing both campaigns, there was no rewarding end cutscene or credits reel or anything. You just kind of get picked up in a helicoptor and fireworks go off for 10 seconds and thats it. Then there is a third "campaign" that consists of a single 15 minute level that was the most pointless shit I've ever seen. Why is this a thing? Why make a campaign with one single level? Were they gonna make more and just give up? Was it added in a patch many years after the game released? Who knows, the game devs don't seem like they had their heads screwed on right.

Oh, theres also a "Skill" system that....never gets used or realized. You can only see it on the main menu, and you gain perks (?) by getting an aburd amount of kills using specific weapons or doing specific things. We never cared about any of this and seemed more like it was slapped on last minute than some core integral feature of the game, again, just more pointless features made to make the game look like it has depth but it really doesn't. As if the only reason they put it in is to be able to market "Look, our game has Skills too!" - Well I'm glad the skills dont matter, cause the last thing this game needed was more generic shit rammed into it like skill trees and modern mechanics. The best thing Earthfall has going for it is that its an "oldschool" co op shooter, as in its just jump in and play, no hero's to select, no levels to gain, no weapons to upgrade or unlock. Just jump in , pickup a random weapon, and try to beat the levels. Great, that sounds fun enough. And the game does have its moments where you think, you know this isnt so bad, I like having more Left 4 Dead style games to play, this game does some things alright like the guns arent terrible and the controls feel fluid enough, the graphics are alright - just the execution of all the mechanics are so lazily done or unimaginative, the balace is all over the place, the monsters are not exciting, the story is virtually non-existent and the character dialogue/writing is cringe at best, it doesn't make for an amazing experience and at times I was almost dreading coming back to finish this game. But at least its short, and it is a co-op game you can play with a friend over a weekend or two.

5/10