Token Female Gamer

My Impressions

I first heard about this game from friends, who raved about how great its cooperative play was. But the first person shooter aspect made me hesitate to try it out. Even though I am not the biggest fan of console shooters, I let myself be convinced.

The game itself won me over by starting me out with a handicap. That’s right, my very first weapon was a rocket launcher. A brilliant newbie starting weapon choice, since it requires minimal aiming and tends to be rather slow to reload. The only drawback is that it’s easier to blow yourself up.

The rocket launcher and the huge ant monsters took care of my poor aiming, allowing me to relax and enjoy the game instead of wrestling with the controller trying to get it to aim.

“Inexplicably fun” seems to be the theme running though most of the other reviews I read about the game. I am pretty sure that the “inexplicable” stems from reviewers being shocked that a game with less then epic graphics could be fun.

It’s probable they underestimated the fun involved with shooting giant bugs and destroying entire cities in the process. The game is completely honest about its intent and doesn’t try to muddy the waters with unnecessary extras.

Review

Release date: March 20, 2007
Website: Earth Defense Force 2017 Wiki

Developer: Sandlot
Platform I played on: xBox 360

Game play

I like to call this game a back-seat shooter. The camera view is over the shoulder of your character, just like if you were in the back seat of a car.

Other then that it’s a very standard 3D shooter on the console. One controller nipple guides your aim and the other guides your characters movement.

Five different difficulty levels let you customize your experience to your level of skill. Of course I played mostly on easy, but if you want the more powerful weapons you have to play the harder modes.

Collect weapons and items and health as you run around the levels, but do it before the mission objective is complete, because when that happens it means its time to move on.

World and Story

The world is being overrun by the Ravegers. You and your squad must defeat this evil to save the planet!

Fight giant ants and spiders, robots and dinosaurs. Shoot down spaceships and drop ships while you run around with your team.

But make sure to blow up a few buildings along the way.

Graphics

Here is the games weakest aspect. The graphics are really fine, they don’t excite, but the game play does and I would pick fun game play over exciting graphics any day.

While the graphics are standard 3D all the buildings in the levels are completely destructible.

All the item graphics are 2D, which are completely pixilated, but their ugliness helps then stand out.

Replay ability

There are fifty-three available missions and five difficulty levels, so really there is a lot of game here to play. There are also xBox live achievements.

Multiplayer

Two Player Cooperative Mode!! Fight the alien giant ant invasion with a friend. Its split screen and even though the camera view is over the shoulder, not that much of the screen real-estate is taken up with UI and character graphics, leaving plenty of room to see the actual game.

Game finished

Well I really enjoy the game and will most likely play more single player but really the draw is that it’s cooperative. Sadly my trusty partner in games isn’t too hot on first person shooters.

Things that bothered me

-Where oh where do I go?
I find it hard to figure out where to go to complete my objectives sometimes. I usually use the radar to find where all the enemies are and go there.

Still it would be nice to have a little more indication of what I’m supposed to do.

-Eliminate team members for items.
So there are other NPC that run around and help you out. Once your level objective is completed the game automatically ends the level regardless of anything else. That means the only way to get a chance to collect all the items is to take out all of the NPC team members so they can’t complete the objective before you are ready for it to be completed.

-It’s hard.
Even with all my handicaps and playing in easy mode I have had to replay missions. This is in part due to not getting clear mission objectives but its also because the game is just hard. It would be nice if easy mode were a bit easier.

Time played

Three hours so far and I have only really completed twelve missions out of the fifty-three that are available.

Rating

Mood Progression

Last Thoughts

This might not be the most glamorous of games, but little does that matter because its clear they focused on what made the game fun.

Tags: cooperative, fps, scifi, xbox360

This entry was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Console Games, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.