Earth Defense Force 2017

I love this game. As soon as I started the first level I was hooked. This was a budget title release in 2007 for $40, but I downloaded it from Games on Demand for $20. The sequel, Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon, is scheduled to be out in the next week, so I wanted to catch up on this title. There are pure ideas in this game that I don't know if they can be done in a higher-budget sequel by a different developer.

Earth Defense Force 2017 is about an alien invasion of overwhelming insect and robot forces, known as the Ravagers. You are Storm 1 and in proper third-person you will run around and shoot every alien in sight, from the insect horde, to city destroying robots, to troop transport ships and many others. It's not a cover-based shooter, but you can hide behind buildings until something blows it up. This entire game is 53 levels of Gears of War 2 Horde Mode. It is exhausting and exciting, and draws you in as you are surrounded by a 100 giant ants all at once. Usually you are the last one standing from your unit.

Developer Sandlot managed to fit all this in less than a 2Gb download, but it certainly tasks the system. By the way, I hate to say this, but as much fun as it is, the game is deeply flawed. With so much happening at any one time the frame rate can barely keep up. There will be a dozen giant ants coming at you, two dozen ships in the air shooting at you or your team, a giant robot firing plasma bolts and drop ships sending in a dozen more ants and spiders to replace the ones you just killed. It is pandemonium. No wonder the Xbox 360 has trouble. The ideas are so ambitious for a budget title I really wonder if the system could handle it in full HD texture.

I could easily compare the bad designs in this game to Duke Nukem Forever, they both have many of the same issues, graphically I mean. The scenery is bland, but everything is destructible. There's nothing going on that looks to be in HD. There is so much clipping that aliens get caught in buildings and you often times walk through stuff. Dead aliens drop off collectibles, but they are 2D sprites like in Doom. What? Who still does that? There is no perpetual world, which means if you destroy a building, it will be there again in the next level. The missions either put you in a city (with Japanese signage), a hillside, a beach, or an underground nest (the worst idea in the game). I think developer Sandlot made one enormous level containing all of this and dropped you in the parts you need to fight. There are a litany of other issues I'm not getting into.

None of this matters. You will ignore most, if not all of the shortcomings. This game is so much fun on a fundamental level. Even the little details like bullets hitting the enemy, everything reacts a little different, but you know you're doing damage. As I played, it evoked movie moments from Starship Troopers, Independence Day, Aliens, Godzilla and even Battle: LA (even though that came out after this game). I want a game from each of these movie franchises that uses this game's engine. I bet this is exactly how the Battle of Klendathu went down. Google it.

There are five difficulty levels, from Easy to Inferno. The higher levels are impossible to get through, but here's where the game shines. As you kill Ravagers they might drop a health item, an Armor item, or a Weapon item. These last two are the ones you want, because at the end of the level the game tallies up what you collected and ads Armor to you overall stamina. You start with 200, but soon enough after a few levels you'll be at 300, then 400, then you start thinking about grinding for a while on a level to build up enough stamina to move to higher difficulty levels. After playing through both Easy and Normal I accrued over 2000 stamina. This builds up a good desire to replay levels.

But I forgot to talk about the weapons. There are 171 weapons in the game. You can use two at a time: I usually chose a machine gun and a rocket launcher (I'm a big fan of the Goliath D1). To get weapons, collect weapon icons, and at the end of the level the game will randomly decide which weapons you get. Not all weapons are available at the start, you have to be on or past a certain level and predetermined difficulty to receive most of the weapons. On Normal you can get 77 weapons. There is only one to get for beating Easy and all the rest are on the last three difficulties. With a combination of better weapons and grinding for more Stamina this game is suddenly winnable at the highest level. I can't think of another game in recent years that has me playing again and again just to build up enough strength to beat the hardest levels.

Even though a voice is telling you at the beginning of the level what to do, the plot of the game is a worldwide failure to fight the Ravagers. This is a real disconnect from what you are doing as you will hear that the mission is a failure but you win the level because you killed everything. Many times I thought I did something wrong, but it was just the plot in the background. Also in the background is your team. You can ignore them, but they do manage to kill a fair share of aliens, but if they all die it doesn't matter because you can always survive. I did feel bad every time they died because they tended to yell and scream on your radio. Take a hint from Independence Day, if you're trying to destroy something huge, wait for something to open on the underside and shot it with as many rockets as you can. Then get out from underneath it. Not that it will hurt you, but it looks awesome to shoot down a troop transport and watch it fall on buildings, leveling them. Explosions are intense and amazing. The screen will shake and dim, the controller vibrates, dust and smoke cover everything and the framerate craps out (which actually seems more realistic like you took a blow to the head). I even like the plasma bolts that dim the screen and look extra bright, as if they are washing out your field of vision.

The price is right and the gameplay is strong. Everything else is pretty bad, but that doesn't matter in the long run. Achievements don't stack. There are only six, one for each difficulty level and one for getting all the weapons. There are some great "Oh, s**t" moments most games don't have. Even the reveal on the first level when you see the Ravagers for the first time is unsettling. Sandbox did a great job of proving gameplay is the key to gaming. I will likely keep this game on my system and just grind levels for some time to come.