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PreviousRetrospective: Earth Defence Force 2017 Article
Retro Xbox 360 Article by Alec Meer
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EDF! EDF! EDF! There is one central thing you need to know about Earth Defence Force: it is not what people have come to believe they want from a videogame. Graphically it's last-generation, the animations are like watching stop-motion puppetry, the voicework sounds like extras from Baywatch reading the script of an Ed Wood movie, and the monsters appear to be based upon stock photography of insects.
It is, however, the answer to why we started playing videogames in the first place, all those years and all those consoles ago. It is the grand, raw, silly joy of pressing buttons and watching crazy, fantastical stuff happen on the screen in response. For whatever reason - accident, design or budgetary restrictions - it isn't a whole lot more than that. It doesn't need to be. You press a button and a building explodes. You press a button and a dozen giant ants are hurled into the air. You press a button and you ride a speeder bike over the head of a giant robot with laserguns for arms. That is why we play videogames.
EDF: not, in fact, a gas company, but rather the Earth Defence Force, humankind's last, best protection against an invading alien force. Not that they seem entirely sure it is an invasion - they immediately nickname the shiny spheres that appear in the skies 'The Ravagers', and then wonder if they come in peace. A self-fulfilling prophecy, really. The dialogue is hilariously broken and inappropriate, but it adds beautifully to the general B-movie air. "A bug! A very huge bug!"
And very huge bugs they really are - tank-sized ants, shed-sized spiders... It'd genuinely be a little creepy, if only there weren't so many of them on-screen at once that it plunges into happy absurdity. Armed with a rocket or grenade launcher, you murder them in their dozens, strangely undamaged, unwobbling corpses flying skywards and landing as temporary, chitinous mountains. It's low-tech for sure, but the scale and butchery of it looks incredible. EDF was met with a sour reaction by many gamers, and frankly it's baffling that they didn't find this simple act of comical carnage endlessly satisfying.
Equally crucial to EDF's towering achievement is the Police Academy-esque incompetence and total disregard for anyone else of the player-character. Boom! Oops, there goes that bridge. Kapow! Gosh, hope no-one was still in that tower block. Kerrrash! Oh come on, there was no way I wasn't going to shoot that massive radio tower. If it's a building, it can be destroyed. No-one will ever tell you off for it, no points will be deducted and, frankly, nothing will have been achieved - except the pure glee of meaningless destruction. It'd be an entirely different game if there civilians in them, but save for you, perhaps your co-op buddy, the Ravagers and some comically inept AI EDFers (who can also be casually murdered without consequence), the Earth you're so forcefully defending is a ghost-world.
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The developers have said they're working on EDF2. And you can still get it for pennies on ebay - that's where I got mine.
It's great fun though and an absolute blast in multiplayer. Global Defence Force is the more replayable game however. They should port it with a graphics overhaul to the PS3, it'll sell like crazy. |
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its been tucked away on a local supermarket shelf for 60 AED - thats about 10 pounds queenie money. and over here in the UAE thats not a bad deal for a 360 game (even one thats out of print)
I've picked it up countless times the last months, only to put it down again with a 'nah' and a shake of the head.... Mr Meer has convinced me to pick it up. Of course, its bound not to still be there now.....
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most recently on 07/06/09 @ 11:58
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Baggies1879
07/06/09 @ 10:57
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I love this game. Me and the Mrs have spent countless hours playing through this at stupid o'clock in the morning. Great fun, just switch of your brain and blow shit up.
Edited 2 times,
most recently on 07/06/09 @ 11:58
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sweetcheeks
07/06/09 @ 11:10
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damn you mothership, did we wake you up ??!
oh and i never posted my kudos at the time. i was Really Really impressed with the review, this is why i go eurogamer first. i'm sure most review sites would have given this a average score, i cant stand review sites that do an ign styled breakdown graphics score, sound score etc, and then rate accordingly. it was a bold move to score that a 9, its technically no where near a nine. but we dont play games for tecchnical merit, Games are meant to be fun. that is all. Kieron ftw
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most recently on 07/06/09 @ 12:22
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+1
If you don't like EDF, you have no soul. That's a cold hard fact that you obviously won't understand if you have no soul :P
I got this near release at it's RRP (£25 at the time) and it was great then. Certainly a great contrast to the also brilliant Gears of War. It is a shame about the lack of online co-op, but it's still great as is. |
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barnard666
07/06/09 @ 11:37
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I love this game, its stupid, it's great, and even greater if I am drunk with a friend.
Bouncing plastic spiders. the I agrees and I disagrees were class. |
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Ah right, I remember it being £25 at launch, come to mention it.
I've just been playing it and wasn't able to complete a mission cos a giant ant got stuck inside a building and I didn't pack a rocket launcher as I wanted to try out the shotgun I'd just unlocked. That kinda stuff is gonna annoy. But yeah, it's a good laugh, although I'd still be a bit miffed if I paid more than a tenner for it. @ilmaestro: I made the same point when they did a "retro" feature on Pathologic, which is about three years old. I'm not sure EG quite understand retro! |
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I bought this at launch for around the £20 mark, and it was worth every penny.
Maybe it's a game for the children of the ZX Spectrum era... Those of us who remember first seeing giant ants (or GI-ANTS as a friend of mine refers to them) as a kid in 3D Ant Attack and wishing you could do more than jump on their heads. It is a game that is impossible to play without a big stupid grin across your face, a genuinely 'laugh out loud' experience which sees you leveling cities, destroying wave after wave of absurdly large insects and shooting down Independence Day sized flying saucers with glee. I remember the first time I saw a wave of giant (the word giant just doesn't seem big enough) robots coming out of the sea, firing technicolour megadeath rays, or the huuuuuuge 4 legged walker leveling buildings all whilst being attacked by hundreds of insects & UFOs and just wondering how in the hell my 360s GPU wasn't melting under the strain. It's a game that can be summed up in 2 words. Fun & Excess. As DFawkes so rightly said, if you can't find anything to like in this game then I put it to you that you have no soul.
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most recently on 07/06/09 @ 12:52
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Wastelander
07/06/09 @ 11:55
+1
Such a great game.
In big-budget HDgaming world this shouldn't even exist, so glad it does though. |
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+1
@ilmaestro & lucky-jim
The standard definition of "retrospective" is "looking back over things in the past" - it has nothing to do with "retro" as in a game more than a few years old. Therefore, Eurogamer would be perfectly entitled to do a retrospective on a game released yesterday if they wanted! |
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It's here for £9.95 delivered:
http://www.mymemory.co.uk/Xbox-360-Games... |
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Serious Sam was a game that shared many of the traits of this - swarms of ridiculous-looking monsters filling every map, ranging from the tiny to the absurdly enormous, and you were provided with an equally-wacky variety of boomsticks with which to dispatch them. Classic, old-fashioned gaming re-incarnated. Serious Sam was fun, but it was also good.
EDF reminded me of Serious Sam in a lot of ways. But it was bad. Perhaps it was a case of it being "so bad that it was good" that caused it to capture so many positive reviews (it somehow garners a 69 average on Metacritic), I don't know. But unlike Serious Sam, it certainly wasn't good.
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most recently on 07/06/09 @ 13:18
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kentmonkey
07/06/09 @ 12:21
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I didn't really enjoy it, to be honest. I can see the appeal with a mate, but virtually all of my 'mates' are not really into gaming, and my wife certainly isn't, so with the lack of online that buggered it up for me really. I can see that it would be anarchic fun in two player though, and massively more enjoyable.
I got to about level 20 and the repetitiveness started to get to me. Very uncreative achievement points as well. |
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"But unlike Serious Sam, it certainly wasn't good."
Would be useful, though, if you cared to elaborate on why. I bought Global Defense Force because people said it was even better than EDF, although that failed to catch my immediate interest after half an hour, so I still haven't tried this. By the way, I think you're stretching it a bit when 2007 games get articles in the retro section.
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most recently on 07/06/09 @ 13:47
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Has someone at eurogamer recently read this old review linked below and rightly decided that the guys was a c**k and launched a fightback. This guy slams Crackdown and EDF and actually says they are the worst things on the 360. The mind boggles.
http://www.gamecritics.com/crackdown/rev... |
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Rev. Stuart Campbell
07/06/09 @ 13:19
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Everyone here dissing EDF: I seriously and truly hope you all die of an exploding rectum.
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Rev. Stuart Campbell
07/06/09 @ 13:21
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http://www.gamecritics.com/crackdown/rev...
Brad Galloway is a big bucket of dickwipe. He hates Bangai-O Spirits too, because he's fucking shit at games. |
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I bought this the day it came out for £17.99, and that's some of the best money I've ever spent. What I love most about this is game is the way that sometimes it just can't even handle what's going on and the frame rate drops to slide-show speed. Any other game would be intolerable with this, but somehow this just makes EDF even better, just adding yet another layer of lunacy to the game!
Now if any game (or sequel) was crying out for 4-player L4D co-op shenanigans, it would be EDF! 4 x Vulcan rocket launchers, you'd probably end up blowing up the whole city with the first shot! :) |
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Waffleaber
07/06/09 @ 13:30
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Global Defence Force on ps2 was better. Better co-op, more weapons, 2nd soldier type changed the way you played. Doesn't look as impressive obviously but given the choice I'd take GDF over EDF every time.
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coach_mcguirk
07/06/09 @ 14:13
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When this is over, I'm going to take you out for a steak!
PS Azael - if you like Serious Sam, you NEED this game.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 07/06/09 @ 15:13
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Inquisitor
[mod]
07/06/09 @ 14:48
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I enjoyed it for a while but it gets fairly boring after a few hours. The graphics aren't great but the scale of things is still impressive, levelling the TV tower or fighting the huge spider were epic moments. However there was nothing there to pull me through the game aside from seeing how ludicrous they could make the next boss encounter.
For a game based entirely around firing a gun I found the weapons lacking and without any punch, the core mechanic just wasn't satisfying enough to over come the slog of basically grinding through the game, it's a long game too. Huge levels and plenty of them don't do it any favours, if it had been sliced down, the filler and grind removed I'd have probably come away a lot happier.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 07/06/09 @ 15:48
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Wastelander
07/06/09 @ 17:18
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Inquisitor sucks ;)
The weapons get mental powerful after just a few levels, how much did you play? |
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Vermillion3000
07/06/09 @ 17:32
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Oh yes. This is a game for actual game fans.
No, there isn't a proper story or epic, tastefully lit cutscenes - there's just gameplay. Pure, distilled gameplay. The sort that makes games lecturers lie awake at night, shaking in terror because it's so impossible to plug into an academic framework. You might find the lack of sense or context troubling but don't panic, you can switch back to your telly and watch some adverts every half hour to get your fix of deep and meaningful characterisation. Grab a sniper rifle, head down to the beach level and stare in awe at the giant robots stalking out of the sea. Enjoy fun again. Enjoy being ten years old and running round the woods with a machine stick making dakk-dakka-dakka noises. See how many monsters you can kill with one volley of rockets, see how quickly you can get the framerate back up by picking off the expensive meshes. (Aye... Stoatboy) This is the least pretentious game since Space Invaders, and possibly the most fun. It makes Crackdown look sensible. The original EG review also uses the term "Weaponised Bukkake." And if that doesn't convince you to play then, frankly, you don't deserve to have any fun. Ever again. |
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