Don't expect to be blown away by creativity or complex gameplay but this game can offer hours of fun for you and friend!
In the game, you play a soldier, codenamed Storm 1. Your only duty is repel the forces of the Ravagers, which take the form of giant insects and robots throughout most of the game. Armed with dozens of interesting and powerful weapons, you spend the majority of the game running away from swarms of colossal ants and robots, unleashing your impressive array of explosive armaments from a third person perspective. You'll occasionally run across a vehicle in the form of a tank, a hover bike, a helicopter, or a Lost Planet-esque battle armor.
As far as game play is concerned, EDF 2017 controls well, so long as you aren't in a vehicle. We'll get to that in a moment. Anyway, we must admit that firing high-explosive rockets into a swarm of ants is blast. The game play stays so consistent that it might become boring for some. However, we found that the different objectives and changing terrain of each of the missions was enough to keep us playing for six hours straight, and then yearning for more the next day.
The button configurations are fairly simple. Essentially, you only have to worry about four different buttons, all of them triggers and shoulder-buttons by default. Your character can jump, fire his weapon, change weapons, and execute a weapon-specific task such as trigger C4 or zoom in with your sniper rifle. That's about it when it comes to controls. However, things tend to get a bit more complicated when you enter one of the game's four vehicles.
For some strange reason, you can invert the Y-Axis for your soldier, but the Y-Axis remains non-inverted whenever you're in a vehicle. This makes for a confusing transition from running and gunning to when you hop into a tank or chopper. Despite the strange Y-Axis problem, the tank is fairly simple to operate, as is the hover bike. However, piloting the heli can be complicated and cumbersome, as you have to continually tap the A button to keep the helicopter from plummeting downward. The Battle Armor is extremely slow and if you're not careful, you'll get swarmed by monsters that will destroy you and your armor faster then you can say "They're bugs! Very huge bugs!"
The insect-aliens look exactly like their real world counterparts, which is kind of cool and kind of weak at the same time. We think the game would have benefited from a more creative approach to what the bug aliens looked like. The giant walking machines, however, are very well designed and extremely fun to combat. To the game's credit, there can be dozens of giant monsters on the screen at one time, without any noticeable slow-downs in frame rate, even in two-player co-op. Visually, the game isn't absolutely stunning, but there's certainly a level of quality there. The textures of the game run the gamut from mediocre to very high quality, depending on what you're looking at. Weather and atmosphere is done rather well, especially on a few of the missions that take place on the beach at dawn. It's certainly an awesome scene to watch twelve enormous, iron-clad robots march their way out of the ocean and onto the beach during the pale sunlight of the morning. The majority of your weaponry comes in the explosive variety, and explosions look pretty damn good.
Sound quality is a bit lacking. Voice-over acting is laughable, and some parts of the audio samples are scratchy and low quality. The music is decent, but can become annoying after a while of playing. Luckily, you can just mute it out completely.
Buildings crumble nicely when you hit them with rockets, missiles, and grenades, but we feel they're a bit too fragile. Even the smallest explosion will topple the towering sky scrapers that are scattered about the immense landscapes. You can climb up most of the staircases outside of the buildings; just be sure you don't accidentally hit any part of the building with your weapon, otherwise then entire structure will fall apart right under your feet.
By and far, the best element of the game is the cooperative option. With 53 lengthy missions, you and a buddy can fight off the Ravagers together. Tactics and cooperation will definitely help see you through to the end of the game, especially on higher difficulty settings, where the monsters are more resilient, more ferocious, and more plentiful. A neat part of the difficulty settings of the game is the fact that playing on a higher level of difficulty will allow you to pick up more advanced and powerful weaponry. Earth Defense Force 2017 is definitely worth a rent. If you like it, we recommend picking up a copy at GameStop or EB. Last we checked, you could get a new copy for $40 and a used one for $35.