Khuutra said:
How is Earth Defense Force 2017? I've been meaning to look into it. It looks right up my alley.
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I'll put it this way; after I finished playing it, I actually bought a European PS2 so I could play it's predcessaors as well. (Which weren't released in the US.)
I doubt many other people will respond like that, but it's probably my favorite 360 game now along with Braid. (For completely different reasons.) Lot of people say it's fun for a broken game, or a fun bad game, I say it's just a good simple game. If there's anything wrong with it it's simply on the wrong system. But It's great arcade shooting fun. It's a 3rd person shooter we're you just blow up EVERYTHING. No intrusive story, all the story telling is done in radio chatter and occasional short cutscenes that open certain missions. No lame forced puzzles. You pick your weapons, and go head first in waves of giant ants, robots, spiders untill you're dead or every enemy is dead.
It's graphics are really dated, sound could be a lot better, vehicles handle like crap, enemy variety is kind of limited, and the game reuses the same seven or so maps for over fifty missions, but I couldn't stop playing it. One thing that's really impressive is the scope of things in this game. You hear about how there's huge wave of fighters coming, and then you see a hundred alien ships fly in from the horizon and start attacking and you gotta start shooting. In another game that would be some cutscene and you'd change locations or they'd just be background effects. Not in EDF, that huge swarm of giant alien ants are coming for you. You'll see some giant bugs swarming across a tower across the level and you can blow them and the building up with a single rocket.
The game also has great weapon variety. Although the types of enemies and the levels are very limited, you'd get a ton of great shit to shoot them with, which can help keep things from getting dull. Rifles, Remote Bombs, Snipers, Missles, Gernades, Turrents, Flamethrowers. Even weapons in the same class can behavior very differently. There's Rocket launchers with zoom and fast rockets that work a lot snipers, another one that shoots 10 rockets in a row like a machine gun, another that shoots 6 at the same time like a shotgun.
Short version: EDF 2017 is very simple and it suffers from low production values for an HD game, and seems ill-fitted to the 360 actually. But if you can look past that, and in a mood to simply blow shit up, it's awesome. Single-handling blowing a pair of giant UFO's of the shy while blasting your way through the hundred giant ants they dropped off while you're hearing reports on the next freaky monster that the aliens have dropped off was a big rush for me. Honestly I find it more "epic" then most touted HD games at times. The fact that almost everything you fight is giant is already pretty intimdating, but the fact that there's dozens of giants all swarming at you from every direction is insane. Espeically in the last stages when they start ramming every conceviable monster at you at the same time and the game's frame rate drops to a crawl and you're fighting in slow-mo while you're commander tells you you're the only hope for the earth. And it's got local two player co-op, so a friend can hop in.
EDF 2017 is actually the 3rd game in the series, but the first to make it to the US. From what I understand EDF 2, which was on the PS2, ironically actually has more missions, more enemies, more weapons, better map variety, and a second player-type with different abilities.