Earth Defense Force 5

The EDF franchise is very long running, with many entries to its name. I started with the first ones available on Steam, namely a spinoff called Insect Armageddon which was pretty mediocre, and a main entry in the series called 4.1 which was decent and made me interested and hopeful broadly about the series. Later on I picked up EDF 5, the next game, as a continuation of the kind of co-op long lasting, arcade style mission based gameplay.

And sure enough, most things are in place from the previous game. The main menu structures are largely the same clusterfuck of options and multiplayer lobbies, although luckily its easy enough to accept a co-op invite through steam to join your friend. The structure is the same, you sit in a lobby and get a short briefing about the next mission, you can change your class from the typical soldier, to a more wacky assortment of things like a jetpack character, A Fencer which is like a tanky mech character, Air Raider among others - although both me and my friend only played the generic soldier character the entire time. We simply were not interested in other playstyles or archetypes, and the limited experience we had with them in the previous game left a sour taste. Then, from the class selection, you also can select your load-out of two weapons from a massive, slowly unlocking arsenal to choose from. All of this is the same formula from the previous game, and most likely for the last 20 years of games in the franchise. No complaints there, this is what I came for.

Though it doesn't take too long before EDF 5 opens up and shows its innovations and differences. First of all, the controls are a little different. There is now a sprint feature, and it shows this odd circle around your character while active. Not sure the purpose of that visual indicator, but its kinda ugly as hell. Although sprinting is kind of weird and janky, and I'm not entirely sure the purpose of it. Usually you just roll constantly, but this sprint feature doesn't even seem much faster, and often times gets you stunlocked or is less mobile than just rolling frantically. However, it seems like later on in the game when you get unlocks, you can use equipment which raises your sprint speed. I don't know, the whole sprint thing is kind of a mess and not that great of a mechanic. Not to mention the default control is horrible. Its Hold click in Left Stick by default, which just feels awkward and tedious so I had to change it to LB. That's about all that's really new about the general controls and gameplay, I think.

Secondly, the beginning 10-20 missions or so are brutally difficult. While true it is in line with the previous game to have absurd difficulty spikes and curves, it starts out the gate as just being annoyingly challenging. Like, the first 5 levels were OK. But then we would get stuck on like level 6 for quite awhile. This game seems to introduce much more annoying aerial enemies such as little ships and drones and it really messed us up in the beginning of the game when you have nearly no health or upgrades. We kept failing every second mission over and over that we decided to actually increase the difficulty to Hard because apparently it drops more supplies and health upgrades, but I don't think this was actually a good idea and probably just prolonged our suffering. The games early difficulty spikes got so exhausting and annoying that we would install the game, finish 3 missions or so after tedium and struggle, and uninstall the game and repeat every few weeks. This lasted a few months. We could only stomach doing a few missions per month basically. It was also faced with the knowledge that the game has 110 missions, and if we are struggling and taking so long to get past the first 20, then its not a very optimistic sign.

However, after that first initial hump, I'd say after finishing the first 25 levels the games difficulty spikes dramatically stopped being so tedious and obnoxious. Something about that first batch of missions is just off balance wise. You just don't get enough health to deal with all the damage coming your way. The game really has 3 "types" of environmental missions. There are rare indoors metallic sci-fi base corridor boxy levels, very few of them. The first level is a super boring scripted tutorial type like this. It comes up a few other times but they are usually scripted and boring with not much happening besides hallways and square rooms with enemies. Then, you have cave levels. These are more common, but also usually far too long and tedious. Its the same brown vertical twisting and turning caves that are mostly a slog to get through simply because the cave levels in particular take so long. And they tend to be vertical, you can fall off a very high part of the cave and have to spend 5 minutes climbing back up and vice versa. Then you have typical city levels, these are most of the levels.

Beyond those basic archetype of level structures, you have styles of levels that usually fall into frequent categories such as -
-The levels where you have to primarily blow up the spawners
-Other spawner levels except this time you have to blow up the openings in the ships
-More scripted type levels where you have to shoot certain places on giant ships to progress the script until it ends
-Standard kill everything levels
-City covered in spider webs and kill the spiders levels
-Boss fight levels, these are more unique and innovative here, impressively so. There are Godzilla style boss fights, this big demon looking thing, giant versions of insects like giant Ant boss, giant Bee boss, Giant spider, and so on.

This is pretty much the games repertoire. You have variations on these concepts. I don't mind it, the real issue is that there's just simply too much damn bloat and filler in the game. 110 missions. 110. Its way too many, especially for at least half of them to be derivative copy+pastes of previous levels with slight differences. At a certain point your eyes just glaze over and you're drooling on yourself half asleep barely paying attention because it feels like you're doing the same thing for hours on end. They could of cut off at least 50 levels and the game would still feel lengthy and long, and the experience would of probably been more enjoyable for it.

At least the game does mix things up and keep it fresh every so often though. Specifically the introduction of new enemies is both exciting and threatening. In the previous game, you had these annoying robots. Thankfully they are gone, and in their place we have a vast array of enemies. The usual insects of course are all here, but as I mentioned before you have a new array of flying enemies, Drones, ships, to these giant frog creatures wielding guns that are fun to fight with their gore effects, giant boss enemies that frequently show back up as ordinary enemies, and even about halfway through the game or so it throws a curve ball at you and introduces these shocking Aliens at you. The aliens look like the classic Greys. They are frightening at first, to suddenly see this gigantic alien head peering out at you. There are many types of them, first it starts off as basic alien soldiers, but as the missions go on they start to get more and more armor, helmets, and different weapons. The missions with the aliens almost feel tactical, its a great change of pace and a great addition to the game. You have to use buildings to your advantage, hide behind cover, because if you take on more than 3 at once its easy to get overwhelmed and you can die quick. So it changes the games pace from this bonkers all out action to a more methodical, strategic gameplay which is a really welcome addition to break up the repetition. These aliens are very fun to fight, although some of the later more beefed up enemies really are bullet sponges. You can blow off each piece of armor individually, blow off limbs, the level of gore and destruction in this game is great. Though not all of the new enemy types are thrilling, such as these giant enemy ships that walk around on these wavy legs. These things are pretty annoying they may as well just be the robots. Also not very satisfying to blow up.

Even the destruction of buildings is amazing. Its on par with something like Bad Company 2 for the destructibility of the environment. Almost everything can be reduced to rubble, its amazing starting off in this big city, and by the end of the mission if you are using explosives its just a flat playing field. The game is often a damn sight to behold. With all the chaos, particles, effects, corpses and their physics, flying all over the damn place. Its really a spectacle. Few games match the sheer chaos and absurdity here. Everything is just so over the top, even the simple action of shooting a car, or rolling into a car, sends the car flying across the screen. Its really quite silly, but its not bad. The game has so much player feedback in the sense of showing you that your actions do have meaning and effect, which keeps the general gameplay quite satisfying.

The games upgrade works just the same as previous, and I'm sure has been the same for the past 20 years in the rest of the franchise. You kill enemies, they drop boxes like Weapon or Armor. You collect the boxes, and after the mission ends it tells you what new weapons you unlock, and how much more your health ("armor") increases permanently. Still, I wish there was more visual feedback on picking up these boxes. Maybe something like a notification saying Armor +1 (after mission) , Weapon unlock (after mission) I don't know. But the previous game this really confused me, because I would pickup all these boxes and I would notice no immediate difference. It only takes effect after the mission, and theres no notification that it works like this. Even if you collect the same weapon box twice, it upgrades the existing weapons stat. Your gun could go from B- accuracy rating to B accuracy, and so on.

So for the vast majority of the game I would basically just use whatever assault rifle had atleast A rating in accuracy. Anything under A is far too inaccurate and the bullets fly around randomly. Then I would just look at the damage. Next, I would either choose a Rocket launcher or a Sniper. I started off with rockets, and the blast radius was satisfying. But before long I switched almost permanently to Sniper+Assault rifle combo. Seemed to work the best. I use the assault rifle for crowds , and I use the sniper when I want to be really safe and snipe things from a distance, mostly the Aliens or ships. I tried other weapons, like shotguns, but I could never use them to the same effect. There is another category called "Special" and these are all like gimmicky weapons I could never find a use for.

There is another category of equipment, kind of like a perk slot. This is stuff like increased movement speed, increased item pickup radius, and increased health when picking up health boxes. In this slot you can even equip Vehicles! Yes, you can press a button to have an airship drop a vehicle for you. Stuff like Tanks, Helicopters, Motorcycles. But I never found a good use for these vehicles, I used it once or twice then stopped bothering. Seemed like another silly gimmick, but its neat its there. Mostly in this slot, around halfway through the game you start to unlock this item that makes it so when you get shot you no longer get stunlocked. Of course for the rest of the game I used this, because trying to run away while getting shot, only to run in place, just feels awful.

Really though, the main issue with the game why it is such a slog is simply the amount of levels, and the amount of boring almost copy+pasted scenarios that get repeated. Also, the difficulty spikes. This is a list of complaints that is pretty much the same as the previous game, but at least this game does have the addition of the new interesting enemies. For a game with 110 missions, by the halfway point we were getting exhausted. It was mostly smooth sailing after the beginning of the game , Some of the mission types are bad, like having to slowly destroy this gigantic ship, missions where you do nothing but shoot at a bee hive for like 15 minutes straight with barely any indication you're doing damage, the cave missions (all of them suck), the boss fight missions while an amazing spectacle, take far too long to kill and honestly aren't much of a threat it becomes boring. The difficulty is either way too easy, or way too hard. Around mission 90 it ramped back up again, which was a welcome change in difficulty, But around 105 it became a total shitshow. Missions where it feels like it has zero thoughtful design, just throw every single enemy in the game at you at once spawning infinitely making it a total clusterfuck. We were just sick of the game by this point, after failing each mission a handful of times around this point we just decided to put the game down to Easy and finish off the rest of the game. Sucks we resorted to that, but the game could not justify sucking more hours of our time failing over and over with such bullshit levels. The second last level has you blowing up a giant mothership, slowly attacking these floating cubes. Pretty lackluster. Then, the last level you're fighting literally God, which looks like some big Iron Man robot more than anything, which was kinda lame frankly. Shoot at him for 10 minutes and he dies, then the gave just gives you a lazy Congratulations screen. Weird that in singleplayer you get a different ending screen, with text, which we had to watch on YouTube.

That's EDF 5. Largely the same as the previous game, so I don't think the EDF formula or general innovative gameplay styles are gonna change much throughout the entire franchise. I worry that every single game in the franchise will have the same complaints each time. At least the voice acting is consistently so goofy that its almost non-stop entertaining. The whole vibe is like a wacky B grade horror movie, at times so bad its good. Like one point the voice acting had us cackling, we're attacking frogs with guns, and the voice acting is like "Oh my god...they look just like us! They're humanlike!" really? frogs, humanlike? Maybe just a bad translation but things like that keep the game entertaining. So many times we would just stop shooting and listen to the voice acting and start laughing our asses off. Too bad there's no subtitles cause we probably missed a lot of it. Actually, the game got so tedious and repetitive that by the halfway point we muted the sound entirely and just listened to random albums for the rest of the game. So while EDF games are consistently an entertaining long lasting co-op experience, unfortunately it seems like its always quanity over quality in the mission department, which is the biggest hindrance to the enjoyability.

6/10