Earth Defense Force 6 Review: 410,757,864,530 DEAD ALIENS (PS5)

Earth Defense Force is a franchise I’ve had a passing awareness of for the longest time, but I have never played it myself, despite knowing that I would probably love it. Its longevity and consistency are certainly impressive, not many franchises manage to make it to six numbered entries. Many franchises and developers swing for the fences, then fail spectacularly, dying forever in the process. Choosing to stay humble, and deliver solid if unambitious products for a niche, devoted audience is perfectly valid. Keeping ambition and scope in check is great, especially given how many AAA releases have failed spectacularly in the past few years. Does Earth Defense Force 6 continue to delight and amaze with insect-killing action, or is this series more worthy of a can of Raid than it is your time?

Earth Defense Force 6 is available now for $59.99 on PlayStation 4/5 and Steam.

Story: Insect Armageddon

You are EDF. This is your game. You shoot the bugs. You shot the bugs. This is the end. I love you.

I joke (or paraphrase from Smiling Friends), but that is basically it. Earth is invaded by an army of aliens, and as a member of the titular Earth Defense Force, it’s your job to blow the crap out of every single one. Humanity finds itself facing impossible odds against an army of giant bugs, robots, killer frogs, and more. No matter how many thousands of aliens get thrown their way, humanity will never surrender.

Nobody wants to wake up and see a dozen UFOs floating over them.

One easy way to think of Earth Defense Force is it basically being Japanese Helldivers 2. Instead of fascism and Starship Troopers references, Earth Defense Force 6 is full of cheese and old kaiju B-movie references. The story is basically gibberish and is full of time travel, weird science, and monsters that eat buildings. It’s nonsense, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Well, there is one other way I would have it. Quite a few other ways, actually. The way Earth Defense Force 6 tells its story is really bad. There’s a lack of proper cutscenes, the story is almost exclusively portrayed via dialogue in the middle of missions with no dialogue tags to denote who is speaking, and it constantly swaps from dialogue from other EDF soldiers, dialogue from civilian radio broadcasts speaking about the war to any variety of random nonsense. One particular conversation that struck me as strange was the game hyping up this uber-massive threat of humanoid aliens. You see them fly in on this vast ships filled with glass tubes, and when they land, it’s just the same giant frog warriors you’ve been slaughtering by the dozens since the game’s very first mission.

Despite their incredible size, Frogs are highly vulnerable to bullets.

Gameplay: Kill Em’ All 1989

Earth Defense Force is one of those franchises that changes very little with every new installment, not that it needs to. Earth Defense Force is a third-person shooter where you control one of four character classes, all fighting to save Earth from the invaders. The classes are all distinct and each gives you dozens of different weapons and pieces of equipment to choose from. I’d say they’re all quite satisfying. The Ranger uses conventional weapons like assault rifles and rocket launchers, but they’re no less effective when it comes to turning the aliens into chunky salsa, The Wing Diver can fly and bombard enemies with lasers, lightning guns, and other sorts of energy weapons, and the Air Raider commands armies of drones and gunships that give him unrivaled crowd control capabilities. 

The Fencer is the only one I struggled to understand the appeal of. It’s certainly the coolest, I’ll give it that, wearing power armor and lugging around massive artillery cannons like they weigh nothing. As with most things, sadly, practicality takes precedence over coolness. Fencers are slow, their weapons are horribly inaccurate and or have pathetic range, their mobility options are finicky to use, they have a normal jump and a rocket jump when they should just have the rocket jump, and the only thing they get in exchange for sucking at absolutely everything is slightly more health. He is explicitly said to be a character for experts, though, so maybe I just suck.

The Fencer is strong, but mobility is vital to dealing with the alien hordes, which is where the Wing Diver excels.

Big Game

The one thing Earth Defense Force 6 excels at is selling the scope of the invasion. Not only do you have to fight hundreds of enemies at any given time, but even the tiniest ones tower over you. Sure, you can tear through them like tissue paper, but no matter how many you kill, there’s always more where they came from. 

That point also applies when it comes to the game’s content. Try and guess how many missions you think this game has. 30, 40, 50? 100 maybe? Try 147! 147 missions, taking anywhere from 10-15 minutes to play through. And several dozen more available via paid DLC. The amount of content is absolutely dizzying, enough to last for hundreds of hours, especially considering all of the grinding you’ll need to stand a chance at beating missions on the harder difficulty levels. 

At least you won’t get bored of blasting apart the aliens. Earth Defense Force 6’s enemy variety genuinely surprised me. Every time I’ve seen Earth Defense Force played, all the footage I’ve seen is of players fighting giant ants. There are giant ants, don’t get me wrong, multiple pallet-swapped variants even, but there are also pillbugs that roll into a ball and pound you flat, bees and spiders that fire stingers and webs at you, robots with bombs, laser guns, and claw arms, UFOs, frog warriors with guns even larger than you are, and even a giant monster that resembles but is legally distinct from Godzilla, complete with atomic breath.

You’ll need a lot of fish to take on this beast. And also explosives.

Stick Together

Earth Defense Force 6 is one of those games where you technically can play it solo, but it has not been balanced for single-player at all. It is vastly easier to play with a team of buddies, both to deal with the massive horde of monsters and collect all the weapons and upgrades that they drop. If you can’t find any buddies, then you’re either forced to grind even harder or play the game on Easy, as even Normal difficulty can be rather stressful in solo play. 

Multiplayer does work quite well at least. I didn’t notice any instances of hitching or connection problems, and the other players I matched with really seemed to get a kick out of the chat system. I had half a dozen instances of people shouting “EDF!!! EDF!!! EDF!!!” at a deafening pitch for minutes on end. 

No matter how badly humanity is beaten, the sun shall always shine for a glorious new day.

Graphics and Sound: Bug Blood Bath

Earth Defense Force 6 is a difficult game to visually assess at first glance. It looks like a PlayStation 3 game from screenshots, but considering the amount of monsters the game is rendering, the large scale of the maps, and that this is a cross-generational PlayStation 4 game, I’d say the visuals are fine overall. More could be done, but I’d take smooth performance over top-grade visuals any day of the week.

One of these “more things that could be done” is character customization, as there basically is none. Your only option is to alter color palettes, you don’t even get to change your class’ gender. I was expecting, considering the cheesy vibe the game exudes, to be able to slaughter monsters in the silliest costumes imaginable. Look at Dead Rising, how you can slaughter zombies in pajamas with a Servbot helmet on and you tell me that wearing an outfit like that wouldn’t make Earth Defense Force 6 ten times better.

UI Design is also a weakness here. Menus are annoying to navigate, you have to set controls for every class individually, and it just would not let me remap the Swap Weapon button for the Air Raider class, it’s R1 by default, I want it to be Triangle, and the game says no for whatever reason. Loadout slots are also weirdly limited. Each class gets only one layout slot, which is annoying because you have to constantly swap equipment load-outs for multiplayer.

Sound design is solid but generally unspectacular. Some of the music is pretty catchy, but the music is pretty hard to hear over the constant sounds of gunfire and marching monsters. Voice acting is in a very awkward spot. It’s bad, but not funny bad, just regular bad.

Earth Defense Force 6 was reviewed on PS5.