Earth Defense Force 6 review for PC, PlayStation

Given that every Earth Defense Force game is basically the same – World Brothers’ weird, Lego-ish detour notwithstanding – it’s hard to know what there is to say about Earth Defense Force 6 that hasn’t been said about all the previous games. I mean, if you were to watch videos of 2006’s Earth Defense Force 2017 alongside the newest game in the franchise, Earth Defense Force 6, you could probably tell them apart because EDF6 features more destruction…but it’d be no sure thing.

In other words, everything that has made EDF as a series great, terrible, or both great and terrible is in full effect here. The world is under attack by giant bugs and robots, and you and a brave troop of EDF soldiers are tasked with blowing up everything that moves. You get rocket launchers, grenades, sniper rifles and shotguns right off the bat, and they only get more powerful the further in you get, and pretty much every level allows you to level city blocks with no repercussions whatsoever.

That, obviously, is the “great” part of the equation. Blowing up enormous bugs and War of the Worlds-style robots is a blast, and it feels gorier and more visceral than ever in EDF6. One of the first enemies you see are building-sized frogs with laser guns, and when you shoot them they don’t just explode in a sea of purple guts, they also try to keep fighting even as their limbs go flying off and their blood is spraying everywhere. Not only that, when you run past those blasted-off limbs, you see muscles and bone sticking out. It’s disgustingly amazing.

The same goes for all the bug carcasses. It’s certainly fun to launch rockets into crowds of ants and spiders and see them go flying into the air, but the game seems to revel in seeing bits of pincers and legs and wings bouncing around as their owners are blown to smithereens.

Unfortunately, the not-so-great parts of previous games are present too. Obviously, this includes the middling graphics and the amateurish writing and voice-acting – but those things are givens at this point, and they’ve reached a point where they’re part of EDF’s charm. The game looks rough when you have too much action going on on-screen, and the prattle during levels is nonsensical and stupid, but those things have been part of the series’ fabric for more than a decade.

On a more serious note, it’s probably worth mentioning that playing EDF6 online on PC currently requires logging into an Epic Games account, even if you’re playing on Steam. As someone who sticks to offline solo play, this wasn’t something that bothered me in the least, but judging from the huge number of negative reviews on Steam as of this writing, it clearly matters to many people.

The main problem with EDF6, though, is that there’s simply too much of it. The base game includes 147 levels, each with five difficulty levels if you really want to be a completist. While it’s undeniably fun to blast away at aliens, bugs, and robots, at a certain point it all feels a little repetitive. The game starts to feel like a slog of explosions, no matter what the setting is.

Still, that’s always been the ethos at the core of the Earth Defence Force series: blowing stuff up in the service of a story that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s a mindset that, for better or for worse – largely for better – is alive and well in Earth Defense Force 6.

D3Publisher provided us with a Earth Defense Force 6 PC code for review purposes.