Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon (PS3) Review

I’ve been meaning to write this review for quite some time now. After investing around 40 or 50 hours into it, I can safely say that it’s been a good investment. I’ve completed the game on Normal with all classes, and Hard with the Battle Suit. Most of the game has been completed on Inferno with the Battle Suit as well, and I’ve had some experience playing local co-op with my girlfriend and a few others, and touched on Survival Mode a little bit.

What did I like? It’s Simple, Controls, Number of Enemies, Destruction, Multi-player, Leveling up and Weapons

Some may say that this is a flaw, but I disagree. It’s simply a shoot anything that moves kind of game. You have hundreds of giant insects and robots to kill, so you better get to it. It’s very satisfying to see how many you’ve killed in your recorded stats, and watching them all disintegrate in from of you when you shoot a group with a rocket or mow them down with a machine gun.

The controls in the game are responsive, and easy to manage. The layout is a bit different from the usual shooter control scheme, but it’s easy to get used to.

As I mentioned already, there can be hundreds of enemies on screen at a time, and with the many different weapons and classes of armour you can choose from, you’ve got a lot of different ways to do the same thing: destroy giant insects, spiders and robots.

All the buildings in this game can be destroyed (within the boundaries of the game environment), and you can watch them fall all around. I like to clear all the buildings in the area so that I can see insects coming from any direction. It’s not really anything to amazing, but it’s addictive just blowing everything up. And with unlimited ammo, you’ll be doing that a lot.

This game was made to be played with a friend, and I had a chance to do that on several occasions with different people, but mostly with my girlfriend. We finished the game on normal a few times together, and did a little bit of survival mode. Survival mode and Inferno difficulty pretty much have to be done with an actual person and not with the friendly A.I. that the game provides, as they are not the brightest guys. Anyway, it was quite a lot of fun playing with someone. You have the option of playing with up to 3 in the campaign or up to 6 in the survival mode (which is where you defend a location against waves of enemies).

As you play, you earn credits for every mission you complete, and this allows you to level up and gain access to new weapons as you go. You also use credits to buy weapons. There are a lot of weapons, so you have to play through a lot of the missions multiple times to earn enough credits to buy them all. They are also dropped by larger creatures during the game, so be on the look out.

What did I dislike? What could be done better? Graphics, Sound, Companion A.I., Lack of mission checkpoints

The graphics in the game are not all that spectacular, but that is excusable. With the amount of stuff going on at once, I’m not surprised that the graphics are knocked down a bit, or else the game would be unplayable. There was even a bit of slow down at time while playing by myself, so I can’t imagine seeing a better looking game similar to this one until the next generation of consoles come out.

The sounds wasn’t all that bad, but there was some issues with crackles and pops during gameplay. I’m not sure what to attribute it to, but it must be a bug (not pun intended). None of my other games do this, so I’m certain it’s not my speaker system.

Your team mates in the game are not the brightest pair. Sometimes they will run off and get killed in the middle of a tense battle and they will be pretty far off. Running to revive them is a bit annoying, and once you’re on a harder difficulty it’s dangerous. The missions in the game are long, and when you get near the end of one and die, you must start all over again. It’s a moments like that where I turn the game off and take a break. Most of the time, I blame my team mates for sucking too much. They do save you on occasion, but they should never be relied on.

As mentioned, the missions can be very long sometimes and if you die during them, you have to start over again. With no checkpoints, this is a pain in the ass and gets frustrating on higher difficulty levels. At least it still records your stats for killing insects, but you don’t get any experience or credits for anything.

Overall

If you enjoy games where it’s mindless fun, and there are a lot of enemies to kill, and/or are a fan of Starship Troopers, then this is for you. If you like games that are more complex and you don’t like highly repetitive gameplay, you should stay away from this game. For it’s $39.99 price tag, it’s not the worst gamble I’ve ever seen though. If skeptical, definitely give it a rental.