Earth Defence Force 6 Review

As my first honest foray into the series, playing Earth Defence Force 6 felt like discovering something new and naughty. It’s a remarkably ugly but exceptionally joyous videogame about shooting all manner of giant bugs and aliens as a tiny dude with a powerful arsenal and coming to us in the year of our lord Helldivers 2, though it’s a tricky proposition at a much pricier $90. While this sixth mainline entry in the burgeoning series still wears its PlayStation 2 roots proudly, does it eradicate enough of its edges to make this a worthy current-gen entry?

The EDF6 pitch is simple. Select one of four classes of militant earth defenders that successively compound in complexity and technical difficulty. Then fix up your class-specific loadout with an eye-watering array of wild and situational weapons. Finally, embark on an incoherent story of overcoming bugs that use reality-disrupting alien technology across some 146 missions. Gear drops as loot from slain foes,  scaling the best loot for the hardest of its five difficulties. The loot and progression are unified across single and multiplayer, making all play rewarding. When dropped into your destructible cityscape sandbox, go and kill the red dots on your mini-map, hoover up the green dots, and keep watch over the blue dots. Blue are your mates. The city-levelling carnage that occurs when those red dots on your mini-map are revealed as creatures many times your size fills every inch of your screen. This is also the closest game to Splatoon in its likelihood of staining your jorts as it excessively drenches the world in paint-textured viscera every colour of the rainbow. 

Dialogue almost exclusively carries the narrative of this game, being character-driven while having exactly zero named characters. It is effectively a radio drama that plays out with muddled lines, mispronunciation, and screeching melodrama. Everyone sounds like a 90s English anime dub actor. As far as background noise gets in a co-op game about slaughtering oversized insects, it is somehow the most entertaining I’ve come across this year. It’s so much more varied and indulgent than Helldivers 2’s amusing though limited mix of “GET SOME” lines. The non-player army that bands along with you on missions will fill the silences with their observations, musings, and nasal prayers every step. What at first sounds like idle chatter to buff out the repetitive sounds of gunfire and explosions becomes something far more humorous and sincere. The writing and acting are still perfunctory and basic, yet there’s a magic to its effective timing and refusal to disrupt the on-screen action that demonstrates a commitment to complementing the main shoot-em-up experience. 

Somehow I bought into this squeakily-delivered nonsense

Though this sixth major entry boasts some markedly improved textures, it remains as grotty and low-budget in its presentation as ever. I’ve tested the couch co-op with friends to great success, but they all noted that the game looked like how they remember PlayStation 2 games looking. Muddy, flat, and jagged. It’s hard to say how much of this is developer Sandlot proudly upholding its legacy or a limitation of the team’s artistic capabilities and budget. Regardless, it almost never gets in the way of the destructive fun on display. 

Almost. Even when playing with the performance mode, expecting a stable framerate, it was occasionally anything but. The start of missions often chugs a little. Fights that fill the screen will occasionally hold tight but at other times will bottom out well south of 30 frames. Mostly this wasn’t an issue, and the rates did not seem related to the action on screen. When the action is cooking at its hottest, expect the frames to safely hover between 30 and 60 with rare drops below that. 

Getting into EDF as a relative newbie, I was reminded immediately that ammo reserves aren’t a thing in this game. Instead, players are encouraged to bring wild arsenals into the fray and just hold that firing trigger. The recommended starting class, Ranger, is perfect for this philosophy. For your efforts, you coat dilapidated high rises in alien blood blue, pink, and yellow and enjoy the fireworks of hellfire as towering monsters are torn limb from limb. It’s hard not to get superlative talking about this experience, but it succeeds in vibes where conventional gameplay attractions or features may be lacking. I initially played through the entire 146-mission campaign solo as a Ranger, this title’s only traditional action game infantry class. I only managed to hit the 10% overall progress mark a dozen missions into my subsequent Hard playthrough with strangers online. Suffice it to say, if you like this flavour of game, EDF6 will reliably keep you entertained and surprised whether alone or accompanied for the foreseeable year. 

I have a PS5 album of screenshots like this that I would print and frame, if not for the state of the economy

However, deja vu begins to set in early as a result of the game’s laughably throwaway advanced alien technology plot device. Due to mysterious alien meddling, players will end up replaying some missions as many as five times throughout the campaign. Yes, there are some fun twists and knowing winks, but most of the time the mission is virtually identical to what you’ve already played again and again. Perhaps a few lines of dialogue change to acknowledge “We’re here again? Our mission is futile!” and the enemies are now a different colour. Fortunately, there’s a reliably exciting mission sprinkled in among every three or four, but the repetition is sometimes challening to overlook. It is not just in the repeated missions with similar enemies and dialogue, but also in the game’s lazy approach of giving you the same weapon multiple times, adding a couple of letters to the name, and pretending it is new. Or simply just using the same asset across various completely different weapons. Playing the deja vu for a joke is often amusing, but it never hides the arguably egregious recycled content. 

One thing EDF6 does that I’ve not seen similar sandbox shooters consistently achieve is the use of theatrical setpieces devoid of modern extravagance and a tendency for player interruption. Cutscenes? Who needs ‘em? There’s a great example early on when looming upon a deep valley full of ants. You unload into a few from your perched position at the valley’s edge. Suddenly, they move out of sight as they begin their steep ascent out of the valley towards you. After successfully blasting the ants as they breach the mouth of the valley, a calm settles and you celebrate after a hard-fought mission. As you begin your cleanup process of vacuuming up the weapons and armour dropped from the bugs in the valley, the tables suddenly turn. Now you’re in the valley, and there are hundreds of ants descending towards you. It’s a thrill, and the magic is that there is something like this in every other mission, warning you to not rest on your laurels until the job is done. 

Failing a mission is a treat, too. When the team is wiped, you are given the choice to try again and carry over the majority of your loot yield, or you can simply retreat with most of your haul now. After a bit of fine-tuning to your loadout, with some weapons upgraded from that mission failure, you’re always in a better position for the next attempt. It’s the equivalent of the game picking you back up, dusting you off, offering you a choice of complimentary beverages and a slap on the arse as you gallop back into the fray.

This is where the budget went

Running out of health during a mission isn’t so hot, though. Online play functions well but is still very rudimentary, with an especially frustrating lack of consideration for knocked-out players who are stuck looking at their ragdoll until help arrives. Similarly overlooked is the lobby system, which doesn’t allow for joining matches in progress and just barely functions better than wrangling your average Nintendo multiplayer session. Also, while the glitches during single-player were almost entirely amusing, missions would often need restarting in multiplayer due to events not triggering or enemies not spawning and preventing mission completion.

Final Thoughts

I think I get it now. Earth Defence Force is like the conventionally unattractive partner you experimented with in your youth. They were so grateful for your attention, and in turn, really knew how to show their appreciation. A genuine guilty pleasure of the kind that you might be a bit sheepish to introduce to friends because they buck the trend of traditional beauty (and they just sound a bit weird). But goddamn it, you grew from having indulged the relationship with the ugly duckling. It’s great coming back to that partner as I settle into adulthood. They don’t give a shit about how they look, are mostly stable, have a pleasant demeanour, and still aim to please by exploding all over my jorts.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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