Review: Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon
Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon is a cheesy and simplistic B-quality budget title that’s surprisingly fun to play. Sure, you’re just killing giant bugs, lots and lots of giant bugs, but somehow it manages to entertain. Featuring co-op gameplay, four different classes, a host of weapons, and three difficulty levels, it has the potential to keep you busy for a while. As long as you go in with the right mindset, you’ll get solid value out of your $40.
Insect Armageddon is the sequel to Earth Defense Force 2017, which was a cult hit of sorts from Japanese developer Sandlot. For Insect Armageddon, the torch was passed stateside to North Carolina developer Viscious Cycle. I haven’t played the original game, but from my understanding not too much was lost in translation.
These cyborg spiders you encounter later on are pretty nasty.
The story of Earth Defense Force is on par with a cheesy Michael Bay movie. An army of alien ants, spiders, and ticks is invading Earth, and you and your squad are the only people left to stop total insect domination. Somehow, the bug army also has access to advanced robotics and space ships, so you’re in for a long fight. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to squash em’ all.
What’s fun is that Insect Armageddon realizes it’s a cheesy B-movie and embraces it. Some of the lines your squad mates say are hilariously bad, my favorite being “I’m live blogging this s— right now, my hits are going to be through the roof!” Others aren’t quite as entertaining, but definitely still cheesy. I feel a little bad for the voice talent, which features ER’s Parminder Nagra and the man of a million voices that roughly sound the same, Nolan North. But hopefully they realized what they were getting into and had fun with the cheese.
This robot spider is particularly big.
The other important factor is that unlike so many other games, Earth Defense Force doesn’t halt the action with its story. There are essentially no cut scenes; each mission is introduced with some VO during the loading screen and while you’re preparing a weapon load out for the mission. During the missions, you have some basic objectives to complete, and there’s basic instructions given to you. But generally, you can get through the campaign by advancing to the waypoints and killing everything that moves.
On normal difficulty, it’s not terribly difficult to complete the campaign. If your health hits zero, you’re knocked unconscious, but can be revived by an ally. You have two squad mates in the campaign; they will be AI in single player or can be replaced by buddies in co-op (split screen or online). Surprisingly, the AI squad mates are more than adequate at their jobs on normal difficulty. They don’t seem to die that often, and are generally reliable if you need them to revive you. You do want to make sure you roughly stick together, however. As long as you do that you should be able to beat normal without failing a mission.
It’s important to note that the 15-20 minute missions do not have checkpoints. So if your whole squad gets wiped out, you’ll have to restart. This is a fair trade-off, however, given that there’s no limit on how often you can get revived.
In a couple of instances, you jump into a mech and/or tank.
This will come into play on the harder difficulty levels, though. If you don’t strategize well, it’s easy to have your entire team wiped out in rapid succession. Because of this, I’d recommend playing hard and insane only in co-op, where you have a better chance of being able to coordinate. The harder difficulties also require quite a bit more personal responsibility. Getting hit by enemies does a decent amount of damage, so you can’t just stand around and mow them down, as you might be able to on normal difficulty. You’ll need to learn to be always moving and dodging projectiles.
Insect Armageddon also features four different armor types, which essentially are your character classes. There’s a standard trooper, a battle armor that lets you carry heavier weapons, a tactical armor that allows you to place turrets, and my favorite, a jet pack armor. The jet pack may only let you fly for about ten seconds, but it’s great for getting in and out of areas. With the jet pack, you also can move around on the ground faster than the other characters. So you trade off some damage and health for enhanced mobility.
You earn experience as you progress through the game, and that experience only applies to the particular armor type you’re wearing. As your level increases, your base abilities improve and you gain access to higher tier weapons. You also can get loot drops a couple of times per level from the larger enemies you encounter. Because you can only carry two weapons at a time, and each class is limited to certain weapon types, there is a decent amount of customization in what weaponry you and your friends bring into battle.
Insect Armageddon features both online and split-screen co-op.
If you score highly as an “Achiever” in the Bartle Test, you’ll definitely have quite a bit to come back to in Earth Defense Force. If you want to max out a particular armor type, you probably will have to play through the campaign once on all three difficulties. The game also prevents you from farming experience on easier settings by instituting a level cap depending on the difficulty. Playing on normal, for example, you’ll max out at the fifth level. If you’re truly insane, you may also want to max out all four armor types and get the achievement that goes with it.
While the primary focus of the game seems to be on the campaign, there are a couple of other modes. There’s a “remixed” campaign that apparently has the same missions, but the monster spawns are more varied. There’s also a survival mode, which forces you to be a level one Trooper with limited weapon options. You then try to see how many waves of enemies you can survive before you meet your demise. Interestingly, survival mode lets you play with up to five other players online, so this game mode will be pretty popular with some. I had a hard time getting into survival mode, however, because I didn’t get to use all the neat toys I picked up in the campaign.
Given that this is a budget title, it’s no surprise that there are some aspects of the game that are unpolished. The graphics aren’t anything to write home at, which is somewhat understandable given how many enemies there are on screen. Occasionally, when there are massive amounts of enemies and explosions going on, the frame rate will tank for a couple of seconds. But the game generally runs smooth enough, so it’s not too bad. The multiplayer was mostly lag-free, though getting into a quick match might take a couple of tries before succeeding. I did encounter one weird online bug, where I couldn’t see the large mech enemy my ally was shooting at. But this only happened once, so it doesn’t appear to be a recurring issue.
Ultimately, Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon is a game about killing giant bugs. If you consider bugs to be your friends and/or suffer from arachnophobia, this probably isn’t the game for you. If you’re looking for a deep game that elicits an existential crisis, you’re barking up the wrong tree. But if you want quick and uninhibited bug stomping action, you’ll have a reasonably good time.
VERDICT: HAPPY CANARY
Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon is available now on Xbox 360 and PS3. Review was conducted on Xbox 360. Reviews appear every Friday on Game Canary. The Game Canary review system is detailed here.
Coming up next week is a review of Ms. Splosion Man.
Categories: Reviews
Tags: EDF, Happy Canaries, PS3, Xbox 360