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Sunday 11 June, 2006
Just got this game today. Unfortunately, since I stumbled across it in a fairly ill-informed import shop, I ended up paying full price for what is normally a budget game. Fortunately, the game's worth it.
It starts out on a very strong note. In the first level, you (assuming you have chosen the default settings) find yourself standing next to a tank on a bridge over a river. On the far bank, a seething mass of *something* is crawling over everything - buildings, people, and so on. So you jump into the tank, like any other shooter player, and squeeze off a couple of shots with the main gun...
...And realize, a moment later, that you have just blown up a bunch of giant ants and demolished Big Ben.
At its core, "Earth Defence Force 2" is a standard run-n-gun third-person shooter, made on a budget... but for what it is, it's excellent. The game is simple, and usually amounts to "destroy all enemies to win the stage". Even within this constraint, the stages somehow don't really get stale. Perhaps it's because they usually end pretty fast, and new weapons are doled out on a fairly regular basis.
The story is pretty standard. Aliens are trying to invade the Earth (again), and they're starting by dropping tons of giant mutant insects in to soften things up. Against these hordes stands the Earth Defence Force... in other words, the player (or players - the game supports co-op mode), armed with a couple of guns, the odd vehicle or jetpack, and... well, that's about it. As stated, each level amounts to "blow all the bad guys up before they do the same to you", but it hasn't gone stale on me yet after 4-5 hours of play.
The levels are worth a mention. They're huge cityscapes - we're talking Katamari Damacy huge - and virtually everything is destructible. Furthermore, unlike in the GTA series, when you blow up a building, it stays blown up even if you go off to the other end of the level and come back. New enemies appear every couple of levels, so things never get TOO boring. Thus far I've encountered giant ants (who have a nasty kick, and can spit acid), giant flying ants, giant spiders (who jump around and shoot webbing that slows you down and damages you), small UFOs which spam laser bolts, larger UFOs which spawn the aforementioned creepy-crawlies, alien tripods suspiciously reminiscent of the ones from "War of the Worlds" and just about every FPS since Half-Life 2, and... well... a boss who is instantly recognizable, but I won't spoil it for you. Apparently I've only cleared 13 or 14 of the 70-odd levels...
...And the equipment at your disposal is similarly inspired. The game has two characters: a standard ground trooper (male) in a uniform which could have come straight from a B-grade alien invasion movie, and a female Special Forces trooper who wears a jetpack (and a skirt, natch). Whilst this does reinforce the usual gender stereotypes, I find the female soldier to be more interesting in a fight - there's definitely something to be said for aerial mobility in this game, and her weapons are also pretty different from the guy's. To balance the fact that she can fly, the guy can drive vehicles. Unfortunately for him, the vehicles aren't much to write home about - there is a stock hoverbike, a stock chopper and a stock tank, of which only the tank is actually worth very much in a fight. (The bike is admittedly useful for zipping around the huge levels, especially in missions where you have to chase down a specific target.)
Each of the characters has a different arsenal of weapons; the box claims there are about 140 (!) different weapons. Whilst some of these are straightforward upgrades of others, there's a lot of variety here - the three different versions of the standard assault rifle I've unlocked, for instance, handle quite differently from each other. Some weapons are pretty unique - the female trooper has a very short-ranged weapon which spams a bunch of low-damage laser beams in all directions, kind of like a really deadly sparkler, and is great for strafing runs - while others are just over the top. Take the guy's Sky Turtle Beta homing missile (yes, that's its name), for instance: it's so incredibly slow that you could probably outrun it by driving the tank, but when it blows up, it can take several medium-sized houses with it.
I suppose you could call this the console version of Serious Sam, but that wouldn't really be doing it justice; the scope of this thing is just amazing, and it goes beyond many full-price titles in terms of what it delivers. I'm very, very impressed.
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