Earth Defense Force 6 review – frozen in time (2024)

The only video game that’s proud of how many bugs it has returns with a very familiar premise but some excellent co-op action.

Earth Defense Force celebrated its 20^th anniversary last year, which means that for two decades now Japanese developer Sandlot has been churning out sequels and spin-offs, despite no sign of mainstream success or significant innovation. In fact, for much of that time they’ve merely been trying to recreate the magic of the early games, which overcame their low budget origins to become some of the most enjoyable third person shooters on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360.

Sandlot was never able to take advantage of improving technology though, or the franchise’s relative fame, and while the last few games have been an improvement it does feel very much like the moment has passed for the series. Mild success is better than no success though and so we arrive at sequel number six.

The main selling point of Earth Defense Force 6 is that it has more missions and weapons than any previous title, which isn’t very reassuring when one of the series’ key problems has been quality not quantity. But, thanks to a typically dumb plot, a slightly different setting than usual, and more enemy variety it does just about justify its existence. Which is very much the Earth Defense Force tradition.

The plot in question involves time travel, with the game starting out with the Earth all but destroyed – by aliens whose preferred weapons of choice are giant insects and Godzilla-sized robots – and humanity on the verge of extinction. The only answer is to do a Terminator and try and travel back to the events of Earth Defense Force 5, to ensure the invasion never succeeds. Except the time travel technology belongs to the aliens and both sides quickly end up in a timey-wimey stalemate.

There was probably a way you could’ve taken that story seriously and created some genuine human drama out of it its B-movie premise, but that’s not the sort of game this is. What you actually get (in a series that originally didn’t have any story at all) is dialogue so bad it wraps around to being highly amusing, especially if you fondly recall the glory days of the original Resident Evil games.

With every element of the game, including the storytelling, gameplay, and graphics, you can’t help but imagine what it’d be like if Sandlot had a bigger budget, and more experience making AAA games, but despite it all there’s a cheesy charm to everything, that means a part of you hopes it never changes – which is just as well, because it shows no sign of doing so.

Earth Defense Force 6 doesn’t really do anything new except have more of everything: more weapons, more enemy types, and more missions (and more microtransactions).

Although there are plenty of ordinary machineguns and shotguns, there’s also a huge range of sci-fi weapons to unlock, from laser guns to colossal hammers. There’s 140 in total and though many are just minor variations it’s still an impressive armoury, especially when you add in a wide range of armoured vehicles, including aircraft, that you can pilot.

One disappointment is that there’s still only the same four character classes: ranger (all-rounder), wing diver (flying), air raider (support), and fencer (heavy unit). Their abilities have been expanded, but only in fairly minor ways, such as rangers being able to clamber over obstacles, air raiders gaining the ability to use drones, and the fencer getting extra speed boosts.

A lot of the enemies are also the same as previous games but there’s been so many that the accumulation of bugs, spiders, robots, kaiju, UFOs, and miscellaneous monsters is now quite the menagerie. So even though most missions are never more complicated than ‘kill all the monsters’ you never know quite what you’re going to get into. Although that is a problem when selecting a class type, as the game never gives you a clue as to which might be most useful.

The antidote to this is to play in co-op, with the game supporting a robust range of online options. Which is a good job, as the split-screen mode makes terrible use of the limited amount of screen space and is borderline unplayable given the janky camera. With online co-op though, and four people that know what they’re doing with each class type, it’s an absolute blast… literally.

Earth Defense Force has always featured levels of destruction that would shame any other game and you can basically flatten the whole map by the end of a mission. That alone speaks to the freedom you have in how you approach the game, and while it’s true the combat lacks depth in terms of the gunplay, co-ordinating with other people to take down the invaders, with all the different tools at your disposal, is a huge amount of fun and surprisingly tactical.

It’s less so on your own, but still entertaining enough – even if you’ll probably never have the enthusiasm to play every single mission. You certainly won’t be beguiled by the visuals, which still look like an Xbox 360 game and suffer from the series’ usual array of bugs and glitches, and infamous slowdown.

Some of these faults can be excused by the low budget, but the game itself is not budget-priced and there’s an offensive amount of expensive microtransactions. For now though Earth Defense Force 6 remains interesting because of the volume of content and the online co-op. But if Earth Defense Force 7 is the same again, that’s when the excuses are going to run out.

The next entry is World Brothers 2 later this year (Earth Defense Force 6 was first released two years ago in Japan), which will dodge the issue by being a spin-off, but Earth Defense Force 7 needs to finally add something new or scrape together enough budget to look like a modern game. We’ve little confidence either of those things are going to happen but for now we’re still willing to defend the series.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), PlayStation 4, and PC
Price: £49.99
Publisher: D3Publisher
Developer: Sandlot
Release Date: 24th July 2024
Age Rating: 16

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