Earth Defense Force 2017 was a surprise hit for me last year, and quickly became my all-time favorite Xbox 360 title. To many gamers, it had a lot of shortcomings, but its pure arcade action and B-movie style presentation made it endlessly enjoyable. So with a new developer behind the wheel, I wondered how well Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon would fair. From what I played at E3, things seem to be rather promising.

Truth be told, I did not really invest enough time in trying the game, especially considering it’s a followup to a game I love so dearly. I intended to get back to it after my brief but eye-opening initial play-through, but other things kept grabbing my attention.

A bit of my time with the new game centered around getting used to the new controls, which were more geared to what I imagine is a more typical third person shooter setup. Having played the 360 version, A is now the default jump button instead of the left trigger. The left trigger now lets you access whatever abilities are assigned to your character class (a little more on this in a bit). And another new addition is that holding the left bumper lets your character run, which makes getting around the enormous areas a bit easier.

A lot of things are retained from 2017 like virtually endless ammo, hundreds of unique weapons, destroyable environments and, of course, giant nasty bugs. However, there’s now a system in place for leveling up your character, which is the primary means of increasing your life and getting new weapons. In response to comments from fans of 2017, however, developer Vicious Cycle did implement some special weapons as drops from bugs, and I am glad they did. Also, health drops now recharge your life, as well as giving you a life buffer of sorts if you already have full HP.

Another major new addition is the character classes. I only had the opportunity to play as the Tactical class, which has items like turrets and mines as standard equipment. By holding down the left trigger, I could select what weapon I wanted to use the main four buttons. These weapons did not take the place of the standard weapons you can pick before going into battle. This is actually a pretty nice setup, since in the very difficult stages of 2017 it became necessary to have a friend play as a dedicated turret user, and that’s all he was good for. With a player as the Tactical class, they aren’t locked into using only turrets. Other classes include Trooper, the all-around soldier, Jet, who can fly but lacks defense, and Battle, who is slow but essentially a walking tank. I’m really beating myself up for not trying the Jet class.

Vicious Cycle also gave more attention to detail to the bugs themselves. The mission I started with, which admittedly was one of the harder ones, had a greater variety of enemies than any of the stages I can think of from 2017. The developers also gave insects abilities related to their type. For example, the giant ants can now pick up and throw cars at you due to their tremendous strength. The very annoying spiders also returned, although their web slinging seemed more manageable in this game. Other new enemies I recall include man-sized ticks that latched onto me, huge, bulbous spiders that would explode when destroyed, and mechanical praying mantises that fired powerful energy waves (that I sucked at avoiding). Classic enemies also return like the spaceships and the bipedal Hector robots.

One drawback to Insect Armageddon may be its size. I was pretty astonished when the representative told me it would only have fifteen missions set over three campaigns. However, each mission is designed to be a lot longer and more involved than the typical 2017 missions. I was also informed that building up your character would require multiple plays of missions, and the rep reasoned a full play-through of the game would run 8-10 hours, which doesn’t seem bad (although I do detest measuring a game’s content by time). Insect Armageddon also has three difficulty modes: Normal, Hard and, as an homage to 2017, Inferno. And, very thankfully, the game offers online cooperative play, and still retains local coop as well, which so few games on 360 and PS3 do.

Although it may be a somewhat different experience to deep fans of Earth Defense Force 2017 like myself, Vicious Cycle’s Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon still seems to be a solid and arcade-oriented game, and hopefully has enough updates that make it more comfortable to other gamers as well. Insect Armageddon releases July 5th on Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3.

Tags: D3Publisher, E3 2011, Earth Defense Force, Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon, EDF, hands-on impressions, Playstation 3, preview, Vicious Cycle, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 14th, 2011 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.