This week many insects died. Many, many insects. Also a few dozen arachnids, a bunch of robots, an alien mothership, and a handful of dragons. D3Publisher was in town with Earth Defense Force 2025 and we attended a hands-on multiplayer preview of the game, playing four-player co-op against the insect hordes. And we won, every single time. EDF! EDF! EDF!
But don’t feel bad for the poor insects, because these space bugs are all the size of buses and they’re trying to take over our world. As anyone who’s seen “Starship Troopers” knows the only good bug is a dead bug, and these particular bugs ain’t afraid of nothin’. Teach them fear with the EDF and their brand new soldier classes. As in past EDF games there’s a variety of ways to kill the literal swarms of enemies but now you can play four-player co-op for the first time ever. The first game (Earth Defense Force 2017) only offered two-player splitscreen multiplayer, Insect Armageddon, three-player online. Four seems like a sweet spot and it really allows you to team up and pick weapons and soldier classes that complement each other.
As opposed to the 150 weapons offered up in the original here there’s a staggering 700 weapons to find and try out. Killing enemies sometimes makes them drop green crates after they die, each of which has a random weapon hidden inside it. For this press preview every weapon in the game was unlocked, allowing us to go nuts with some of the more powerful weapons.
But jump into an EDF game and the first thing you’ll notice is that it doesn’t look that great. In fact, it looks pretty awful at times. There’s a lot of clipping and the framerate drops tremendously when there’s a ton of enemies and explosions on screen, which tends to happen a lot in a game that throws dozens of enemies at you at once. But you know what? You won’t care. You won’t care one bit. Fending off the hordes is so thrilling and fun, especially when you’re “accidentally” destroying a city while doing so. Soon you’ll forget everything but one thing- how can I squash these bugs?
The four different soldier classes give you lots of different ways to go about that (and you can now customize their colors for the first time). The first class I tried is the Ranger. He’s an all-around fighter and comes with some really powerful weapons. The assault rifle I picked was a great choice for the urban, skyscraper-crowded level we picked, the fireworks as my secondary weapon, not so much. They’re powerful little explosives but while we faced giant ants the biggest threat came from the sky, where swarms of giant wasps loomed. I immediately regretted not going with my instincts and picking the Wing Diver, because two of my teammates soared to the skies to take them on in their own territory while I stood on the ground, trying to get off a shot here and there.
I corrected my mistake with the next level, which took place on a mountainous region, sparsely populated with a few farm houses but otherwise uninhabited. The Wing Diver can fly but her power meter guarantees that she can't do it forever, although it allowed me to quickly scale the hills and mountains and quickly get to the enemy. Here I learned that it's important to shoot off the powerful homing missiles (Ghost Chaser) in the air, because if you do it too close to the ground you'll blow yourself up, which I promptly did while far away from my team. I slowly rolled down a hill while I waited for my flightless companions to catch up to me and pick me up. You can revive a downed teammate but it takes half of your health, which makes finding health pickups incredibly important, especially if you're playing with someone as careless as I am.
Revived and back on the move, we soon decided to find to find the Proteus mech that was located somewhere on the level. Along the way we destroyed a few ant nests (they don’t stop coming out until you do) and found some massive, lava-spewing ants as well. These things were bigger than the screen and trapped one of our poor compatriots in a sea of fire and lava, who barely escaped with his life. We managed to find the Proteus and it was soon obvious why the fine folks at D3Publisher wanted us to try it out- it was amazing. All four players can clamber into the mech, with one driving and the other three manning guns. I took the right arm and soon took joy in destroying the few remaining ant nests with well-placed (and incredibly powerful) rockets. This thing is a beast, which is why only a few missions feature it.
The next mission took us back to a battle in a city where spaceships and mechs were attacking, and I chose the Fencer for the job. Oh, the Fencer. This absolute tank can carry four weapons at once, the only class to do so. Two different loadouts will be selected first loadout included a Jackhammer that shot out powerful rivets and a one-handed gatling gun. Hit a button and you switch to your second loadout, which in this case included an Ion Mirror Shield (which will protect you from enemy attacks) and a missile launcher that required a teammate playing as the Air Diver to target enemies for you. Once you do though- hoo boy, watch out. The Fencer is slow and lumbering but when he's this powerful you don't need speed. The final battle saw us battling a mothership that filled the entire sky, waiting until it opened a hatch to deploy more spaceships and just unloading eveything we had at it. When it fell down to the city it exploded in a massive ball of fire.
The Air Diver is a support class but don’t think for a second that that means you’re a weak character who exists solely to help your team. While he can deploy various items that help others and he can’t carry powerful weapons like the Ranger gets he does have some brutal weapons, including devastating airstrikes, one of which may or may not have blown up both me and a teammate. I was amused to see that there was a chat option to say “Sorry for blowing you up”, because I managed to do that a couple of times…
(As a sidenote, the chat option is actually pretty ingenious. Use the d-pad and you’ll select from a massive number of possible selections, which will pop up on your character like a cartoon speech bubble. We took great joy in using the various screams and yells when downed, or planning tactics by warning folks when another airstrike was coming.)
The Air Diver also has access to the vehicles. Select one before the mission and in the game you can throw a beacon that will deploy your vehicle of choice, everything from motorcycles with sidecards to helicopters to armored mechs. The Vegalta Mech I chose for one of my matches was a real joy to play with, with rockets and a machinegun for arms and a mortar strike up on the shoulder.
I had so much fun with the Air Diver that I played one more match with him, remarking on how each weapon loadout made it feel like a completely different character. I unfortunately didn’t get a chance to try out my helicopter because I was taken out pretty early. This particular level was one of the more exciting ones, featuring dragons swooping around the city. One smaller one grabbed me in its jaws and took to the sky, and I managed to blow it up (and myself), dropping hundreds of feet to the ground below, broken. My companions had to fend for themselves against a boss dragon that was at least ten times as big as the one that held me in its mouth, spraying the city with flames. One by one we were taken down until there was only one left, and I watched across the city as his health dwindled… but he prevailed, and we got the win.
Perhaps the greatest praise I can give the game is that I couldn’t stop playing. I had only intended to stay and play for an hour before getting back to the office but when I checked the time it was way past that. The game is just too much fun, and with the amount of weapons and customization it feels like a completely different game each time you play, even when we repeated the mountainous level when a new reporter came in. I could have stayed there all day, laughing at the insanity of the odds we faced and trying new weapon loadouts every time.
There’s an absolute ton of variety here and since new weapons and armor packs (basically upgrades to your character) come from downed enemies it further encourages replays. Adding to the variety is the massive number of missions. The game comes with 85 but you can find nine more online, bringing us to a grand total of 94 missions. (You don’t actually have to play with people online for those last nine, but if you connect to the internet they’ll be available.) There are also mission packs on the way, offering new enemies and challenges. The first pack will be available on launch day, with three more coming soon after.
Weapon packs will also be available to give you even more tools of destruction, although two are timed exclusives. Both Gamestop and Amazon have weapon pack exclusives for preordering the game for the Ranger and Air Diver respectively. The Amazon one might be the funniest one, because it comes with the infamous Pure Decoy Launcher, which launches a balloon themed after a character from the Dream Club dating sim. Launch that and enemies will swarm it instead of you, because anime girls?
Regardless of the exclusives they’ll be unlocked for free for everyone after a month.
So there will be plenty for you to do and look forward to in Earth Defense Force 2025. From what I’ve seen it’s pretty clear that this is the best of the series so far, a fantastic return to form for original developer Sandlot. It reminds us of why we play games in the first place- to have fun. Earth Defense Force 2025 hits the Xbox 360 and PS3 on February 18th.
