Review – Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon

Shooter

Take one cult classic and add one no-mark developer.

Earth Defense Force 2017 wasn’t the perfect game but it was exciting, arcadey and it just didn’t give a fuck. At times the screen would be so full of giant bugs, it was like kicking your 360 in the nuts.  Frame-rates would slow to a crawl occasionally but EDF 2017 just kept going and, for the most part, it was a triumph. It was B-movie gaming. Fun distilled to the purest essence. And despite being overly long if you wanted the full 1000GS, it managed to be enjoyable and challenging all the way to the end.

The premise of games in the series is that each level sees you facing off against huge hordes of alien enemies. In EDF 2017, different levels called for different tactics but the series was never about depth. It was about destruction, seeing hordes of ants fly up into the sky when you shoot at them or watching a skyscraper crumble when your rocket misses its intended target and takes out some real estate.  The kind of immediate, accessible chaos that you’d get these days if arcades still had games in them and not just air hockey tables and fruit machines.

So when D3 Publishing announced that 2017 was getting a sequel, everyone got very excited. This only continued when the new new developers (Vicious Cycle taking over from Sandlot) revealed that the game would be getting three-player online co-op, six-player(!!!) online survival (basically a ‘horde’ mode) and various improvements to the core gameplay. Colour me excited.

So how does it stack up?

Well, at first Insect Armageddon seems to get things right. The action is just what you’d expect. You start off in a city with a bunch of giant ants. The first level shows off the new graphics (more on that later), battles against the ants, an anthill and a hector (the stompy robot pricks from 2017) and it also shows that Insect Armageddon has in-level objectives (namely turning on a transponder on a crashed lander and then destroying it). So far so good.

When it comes to improvements initially things look pretty good. A sprint button, a much-needed reload function (with a time-saving ‘active reload’ mechanic) and a choice of classes to play as all make the game seem pretty exciting at first. Add to that the online co-op and at this point most people will be pretty happy with their purchase.

The next levels slowly introduce more enemy types (spiders, wasps, ticks, bigger hectors and a few other ones) and continue with the ‘go there and press something’ objectives. Whilst being not-particularly exciting, the game very slowly gathers pace. Then after fifteen levels that all feel pretty much the same and just recycle the same enemies over and over it just ends. This is roughly four hours in. Fifteen levels of New Detroit with the same battles over and over.  That’s it.  The final level in particular is completely awful with a swarm of ants and spiders followed by five or so giant hectors attacking you (one at a time like a poor kung fu movie) until you are bored to tears. And then it’s over. There’s no battle against the giant mothership (even though it is right there firing at you) or anything special. You just take down the last of the hectors and then leave. It’d be a spoiler but can you spoil an ending when it barely exists?

This is where you realise that Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon is basically a glorified demo. The same level archetype over and over (no beaches, no underground hives, no countryside, no water) with no ending. It’s unacceptable. Vicious Cycle either lack the vision to handle a project like this or just didn’t have the time/ability/money to finish it but this is literally half a game. 2017 may have been fairly limited in scope but at least it required some tactical decisions (in terms of changing your weapons for each stage). Insect Armageddon just gives you the same five minutes of gameplay and extends it to two to four hours. It then extends that to a further 150 hours if you want the full gamerscore. 2017 was a long game that required five playthroughs. This is a four hour game that requires almost forty.

Jase Secondary Review Insect Armageddon is a vast improvement in many ways over its predecessor. You no longer get trapped in a stun loop by attack, the drop in drop out co op is seamless and the class specific skills are fun.However there are several weird decisions that leave it feeling a bit half baked. Arguably the most egregious of these is the games length and variety. The first game had a number of distinct environments. There was the beach where hectors would walk in from the sea, dark underground levels that left you feeling claustrophobic and tense. The size of these zones was also quite massive and while walking over the space to pick stuff up was a pain it was genuinely impressive. EDF :AI unfortunately takes a step back in both respects with smaller levels and only one environment: the city of New Detroit. The game is also super-short and is easily finished in 2-4 hours with this length artificially extended by the ranking system and harder difficulties. It isn’t all bad the co-op makes up for a lot but ultimately you’re left with a short game that expects you to grind the same levels over and over to progress. The real tragedy is that the developers made great progress improving on the gameplay of EDF 2017 but ultimately ended up making a less enjoyable game. Secondary Score: 5/10

Other improvements are also smoke and mirrors. The four new character classes are a joke. Jet class is the only one that feels fresh (it lets you fly, which is quite neat) but the other three would add up to the guy from 2017. Battle class has extra armour (you could pick up extra armour in 2017), Trooper class gets to use all the gun types (as you could in 2017) and Tactical has turrets (as you had in 2017) and a proper radar (as you had in 2017). Basically these three classes are all compromises on the original Storm1 chap. They take away, they do not add.

Vehicles are much improved in some respects. The tank is no longer made out of tissue paper and the mech is particularly useful early on. There are also manned turrets for ground and air defense. These are initially great but when you are playing on Inferno they are just too weak and are best ignored. The only useful thing would have been the 2017 chopper but that’s not in here. Sure, it was a pig to pilot but it was handy.

Online play is a welcome addition. When you are in a game, it works particularly well. Getting into matches can be troublesome – the matchmaking system is pretty awful – but they’ll no doubt improve it. Playing private matches is definitely the way to go for now. On harder difficulties and with two co-op buddies, this is a better game requiring a bit more cooperation and strategy. The survival mode unfortunately is incredibly tedious (even with six players). The achievements ask you to grind 500 stages of that nonsense and given that it doesn’t gain you EXP or cash, it’s just a horrible waste of time. It’s possibly the single most tedious thing I’ve played in a shooter. And that’s saying something.

With more variety in levels and enemies, this could have been a very good game. The engine is more or less there (although the bugs are mostly smaller and in lesser numbers as a concession to the online play) but the content is sorely lacking. It feels like Vicious Cycle gave up halfway through and said ‘that’ll do.’

This is what you expect when a no-mark developer is given the reins to one of your favourite games (see also: Dead Rising 2 and Crackdown 2). They’ve still got a chance at redeeming themselves through DLC (having admitted that it’d be ‘cool’ to let you fight the final mothership – the fucking cretins) but true EDF fans will have grown tired of this game by then and will take some convincing. There’s still some fun to be found here, and at a budget price, but overall this is a spectacularly average and lazy offering by a dev team that really don’t seem to know what they are doing.

Primary Score: 5/10