Some studios will spend years of development time and hundreds of millions of dollars chasing emotional, Hollywood-quality stories and realistic graphics, but the Earth Defense Force series proudly prefers to remain the most pure video game nonsense ever conceived. Don’t be fooled by the PS3-era graphics, atrocious voice acting, absurd story, and uneven technical performance of Earth Defense Force 6 – developer Sandlot knows exactly what it’s doing with this over-the-top satire that makes Helldivers 2 look highbrow by comparison. Like its predecessors, EDF6 leans into its rough edges and silly cooperative mayhem, prioritizing mindless fun above all else, and the result is yet another wonderfully amusing entry in the ongoing saga. But even going in with the right expectations, it’s not all sunshine and dismembered thoraxes, as this inadvisably long campaign has tons of repetition, plenty of levels that are more boring than amusing, and at times crosses the line from knowingly campy to just plain bad. Still, this giant insect-filled monster fest is more often than not a hilariously good time, and that’s something we could certainly use more of.
Earth Defense Force 6 is a goofy as heck cooperative third-person shooter that throws you and up to three friends into a version of our world under siege by aliens. Called the Primus, these primarily insectoid invaders are a grab bag of dorky monsters that range from generic flying drones, knockoff Godzilla kaiju, oversized evil Battletoads, massive spiders that jump everywhere, and more. Across the 80+ hours it took me to complete its 147 level main campaign, you’ll blast these low-res goons to bits using a growing arsenal of guns, rocket launchers, grenades, turrets, vehicles, and giant Gundam mechs, some of which feel great while others are experiments gone horribly wrong. Wrap all of this ridiculousness in some contentedly outdated graphics and a framerate that becomes unstable whenever your explosive shenanigans reach a fever pitch, and you’re in for an uproarious good time.
You’ll also bounce between four returning character classes: the Ranger, a standard soldier whose only advantage is that their weapons are the best around; the Wing Diver, a Valkyrie-like class whose jet-pack and wings give her unmatched mobility (offset by the fact that she’s killed by a light breeze); the Air Raider, an often second-fiddle support class who specializes in calling in massive bombing runs, relies on gadgets like drones to squish bugs, and can summon vehicles to deal serious damage; and the Fencer, a dual-wielding tank class who can absorb serious damage with a giant shield and smash things to bits in melee, but who is also quite difficult to play well. It might be a little milquetoast, but I favor the Ranger – it’s just hard to beat rocket launchers that can level cityscapes in a few seconds and assault rifles that plow through hundreds of aliens with ease.
While the stories in Earth Defense Force games have always been charming rubbish, EDF 6 sets a new bar with a tale that actively makes no sense at various points (even if, like me, you’re following along very closely and occasionally taking notes). It makes heavy use of time travel and has humanity losing the war against the Primus, only for you and the aliens to both go back in time to try again – but the good guys perplexingly make very little use of the knowledge gained in the previous timeline, so you’ll have to watch them slowly piece together what’s happening while you and your character are already miles ahead of the buffoons trying saving humanity.
Most of the time, this insanity is as amusing as you might hope, like when one part introduces giant frog enemies and says they’re “just like humans” without addressing the fact that they’re clearly frogs, then later introduces cliche humanoid gray martian enemies and describes them as “not humanoid.” Other times, though, it’s just painful, like one section where they explain the origins and biological breakdown of a flying dragon monster while making you fight it about five times in a row, reminiscent of a filler episode of Dragonball Z.
The extremely poorly written story is eclipsed in its dreadfulness only by the voice acting, which sounds like it was performed by some poor souls who were rejected by their local improv troupes and decided to give video game voices a try. One part nearly made me spit-take when a character says, in the most monotone voice imaginable, “you have no idea how relieved I am” – you’re right, my dude, I definitely do not. But between all of that cringey dialogue and senseless plot development, there’s a ton of joy. There is still plenty of the kind of bad-by-design silliness at which EDF excels, and the times where it manages to walk that line properly are a gift that keeps on giving.
Thankfully, the heart and soul of Earth Defense Force 6, its over-the-top combat against all manner of blurry foes, is actually a lot of fun – and oftentimes pretty darn challenging. Dodging, dashing, and flying out of the way as monsters, aliens, overgrown insects, and robots rock the screen (and threaten the framerate) is exactly the kind of action-packed madness I love about this series, and it’s never been done better than in this iteration. The fundamentals of that action may be almost identical to what we got a few games ago, but EDF6 adds a ton of weapons and new enemy types to the mix and then dreams up interesting scenarios to put you in, like one level where you’re defending a beach from an entire army of giant poisonous reptiles. Playing through on the normal difficulty can be challenging enough, especially if you don’t have a competent crew at your back, but it gets absolutely insane once you dial that up to the harder options. It requires an intense amount of grinding to get the requisite powerful weapons and armor to put up a fight, plus a team who absolutely knows what they’re doing. As with prior entries, combat’s simple setup and silly attitude don’t get in the way of being extremely entertaining and genuinely satisfying to overcome, and that can make it pretty hard to put down.
That said, some of the design decisions definitely go a step beyond janky fun and into being straight up obnoxious, like how if you’re killed and waiting to be revived by a teammate, you just have to sit there staring at your own corpse until they come to get you. There’s no option to watch what other players are doing if they aren’t standing right by you and no respawn timer, which is just plain boring. There are also a handful of maps you’ll find yourself running missions on quite a few times, and while the enemies and objectives are usually at least a little different, the lack of variety definitely grated on me at times. Also, you’re occasionally made to play some slower-paced, story-focused levels that are simply the worst, though they at least only show up at a few specific moments. This isn’t the kind of story that’s at all worth slowing down the pacing to tell, and those segments just absolutely waste your time in a campaign that’s already way longer than it probably should be.
