Earth Defense Force 6 – Frozen in Time Review

The only video game that prides itself on how many bugs it has returns with a very familiar premise but excellent co-op action.

Earth Defense Force turns 20^Thursday anniversary last year, meaning that Japanese developer Sandlot has been churning out sequels and spin-offs for two decades, albeit with no sign of mainstream success or significant innovation. In fact, for most of that time they were just trying to recapture the magic of the early games, which overcame their low budget to become some of the most enjoyable third-person shooters on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360.

However, Sandlot has never been able to capitalize on the improvements in technology or the relative glory of the franchise, and while the last few games have seen improvements, it feels very much like the moment has passed for the series. A little success is better than none, though, and that brings us to sequel number six.

Earth Defense Force 6’s main selling point is that it has more missions and weapons than any previous title, which isn’t very comforting when one of the key issues with the series has been quality, not quantity. But with a typically silly plot, a slightly different environment than usual, and a greater variety of enemies, it justifies its existence. Which is pretty much Earth Defense Force tradition.

The underlying plot involves time travel, with the game opening with Earth nearly destroyed – aliens whose weapons of choice are giant insects and Godzilla-sized robots – and humanity on the brink of extinction. The only answer is to make a Terminator and try to go back to the events of Earth Defense Force 5 to ensure that the invasion never succeeds. Except the time travel technology belongs to the aliens and both sides quickly find themselves in a timey-wimey stalemate.

There was probably a way you could take the story seriously and make it a real human drama, from its B-grade premise, but that’s not the game. What you actually get (in a series that originally had no story at all) is dialogue so bad it’s very entertaining, especially if you like to remember 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 would have been 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 is, part of you hopes it never changes—which is just as well, because it shows no signs of it.

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

While there are plenty of regular machine guns and shotguns, there’s also a huge variety of sci-fi weapons to unlock, from laser guns to colossal hammers. There are 140 in total, and while many are just minor variations, it’s still an impressive arsenal, especially when you add in the wide variety of armored vehicles, including planes you can pilot.

One disappointment is that there are still only the same four character classes: ranger (omnipotent), wing diver (flying), raider (support), and swordsman (heavy unit). Their abilities have been expanded, but only in fairly small ways, such as rangers being able to climb over obstacles, raiders gaining the ability to use drones, and a swordsman getting an extra speed boost.

Many of the enemies are also the same as in the previous games, but there were so many of them that the accumulation of bugs, spiders, robots, kaiju, UFOs and various monsters is now quite a menagerie. So while most missions are never more difficult than “kill all the monsters”, you never quite know what you’re getting yourself into. Although this is a problem when choosing a class type, as the game never tells you which one might be most useful.

The antidote to this is co-op play, with the game supporting a wide range of online options. Which is a good job, since the split-screen mode uses up the limited amount of screen space horribly and is borderline unplayable given how catchy the camera is. With online co-op and four people who 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 put any other game to shame, and you can basically level the entire map at the end of a mission. That in itself speaks to the freedom you have in your approach to the game, and while it’s true that the combat lacks depth when it comes to gunplay, coordinating with other people to take down attackers with all the different tools at your disposal is huge amount of fun and surprisingly tactical.

On its own, it’s less so, but still fun enough – although you’ll probably never be excited to play every single mission. You certainly won’t be fooled 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 affordable and there are an offensive amount of expensive microtransactions. For now though, Earth Defense Force 6 remains interesting due to the volume of content and online co-op. But if Earth Defense Force 7 is the same again, then excuses will 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 avoids this problem by being a spin-off, but Earth Defense Force 7 needs to finally add something new or put together enough of a budget to look like modern game. We have little faith that either of these things will happen, but we’re still willing to defend the streak for now.

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

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