Despite reeking of a budget title, EDF 2017 is a ton of mindless fun.
Nearly everything about EDF 2017 screams budget title from the get-go. Your main character is stiff as a board above the hips (even while swimming), textures are on the generic and unimpressive side, and while you’ll see screaming citizens at the beginning of a level, cities remain unpopulated. That’s not to say that any of this takes away from the fun of pointing huge guns at huge things and killing them. Moreover, most of your attention will likely be geared towards the massive amount of giant monsters that are gunning to take you and your EDF comrades down. Even more impressive is the over-the-top carnage that ensues during the massive battles. Stray rockets cause entire buildings to crumble, or better yet, cause giant, alien dispensing UFOs to crash to the ground. Keeping with the spirit of the game, however, while these effects seem impressive from afar, you’ll notice the obvious shortcuts that the developers took to bring them to you. While a crashing UFO is cool, it’s not as cool when it sinks into the ground without killing anything below it. The ability to add a bit of strategy to the gameplay would have been awesome here, being able to time when to take an alien ship down at a point where it’ll crash on an oncoming horde of bugs would have been nothing less than boss. Here’s hoping for a better-produced sequel. While it’s easy to draw the conclusion that EDF 2017 draws all of its roots from short, but sweet arcade games is misconception. The main game spans 53 gib-filled levels that are playable on five different difficulty levels and mission objectives never stray past “kill everything in sight”. While most of your fights take place in downtown Tokyo, you’ll also venture to beaches, mountains, and even into the pits of the aliens themselves. While each level gives the illusion of being large, there’s little incentive to exploration. Useful items only fall from dead aliens and annoying invisible walls will hamper your progress, if not throw a monkey wrench into any escape plan you devise. Enough incentive is offered to play through the game multiple times, even on the horribly unforgiving “hardest” and “inferno” difficulties to collect the 150 available weapons in hopes of making things easier for you in levels to come. Playing on harder difficulties awards you with more powerful weapons. You’ll start with standard assault rifles, but soon enough you’ll have an arsenal of rocket launchers, missiles, grenades, and some questionable experimental weapons at your disposal. Some of the higher-powered weapons are neat, like a grenade launcher that fires a volley of grenades that bounce all over the place. It’s great for crowd control, but you’d better hope you’re nowhere near it when they all explode. There are also vehicles available to you as you get into the game. You’ll be able to pilot everything from a hover bike that looks like it came right out of Return of the Jedi to a mech that looks like it came right out of Aliens. There is also a tank and a helicopter, but really, the vehicles don’t really help to make things easier for you and end up being clunky and hard to control. Even more ridiculous is that the tank can be destroyed just as quickly as the hover bike, so none of these really offer you any additional protection from the alien onslaught. All of your work is better done on foot. You’ll also collect armor power-ups that will increase your overall health permanently….provided you live to see the end of a given stage. The bugs can be relentless and will try their best to surround and overwhelm you with their numbers. If you try to fight, it’s hard to know which way to turn with bodily fluids, explosions, and giant aliens all around you. The best strategy always seems to continually run backwards, keep firing, and hope nothing gets in your way.
The single player game will let you team up with groups of AI controlled EDF soldiers in an attempt to even the odds. While your teammates can take a few baddies down with them, they’re ultimately cannon fodder to both the bugs and to you as they have a horrible tendency to get in your way just as you take a shot from your rocket launcher. Thankfully, local two-player co-op is available out of the box to offer a little more hope for the intense battles you’ll be fighting. There’s also a battle mode, but it’s neither fun nor entertaining. There are only six achievements to gain as well, one for beating the game on each difficulty and one for collecting all of the weapons. A little more variety would have been nice. Earth Defense Force 2017 is a great game for those who don’t want to be bothered by annoying puzzles and just want to sit down and kill a ton of giant aliens and serves as a somewhat pleasant escape. While the straightforward gameplay, bland visuals, and even blander music and voice acting may get to some, you can’t argue that this game is just a lot of fun. The novelty of sending buildings and ships crashing to the ground with a well-placed explosive and bathing yourself in the green goo flying out of dead aliens never seems to wear thin. In addition, the whole game just oozes a “War of the Worlds” kind of feeling that brings to life everything the infamous radio broadcast tried to do back in the 40’s. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look it up. Despite its numerous drawbacks and bland production, EDF 2017 is an experience that begs to be tried once. Whether or not you’ll come back to it is a different thing.