Earth Defense Force 6 review — We are soldiers, brave and strong!

Sometimes, you just want to turn your brain off, hang out with some friends, and have a few laughs. Unfortunately, there aren’t a ton of games out there you can do all three of those things with. With Dynasty Warriors you can mostly turn your brain off, but co-op can be a hard sell with the performance. Something like Helldivers 2 makes it easy to group up with friends and laugh, but you still have to pay attention to what you’re doing. Thankfully, we have Earth Defense Force to tick all of those boxes. Earth Defense Force 6 may not be the most polished or highest budget game out there, but that’s part of what makes it so charming.

If you’re not familiar, Earth Defense Force is a series of games in which you battle against hordes of bug-like aliens as one of four unique classes. There’s no side quests, open world, or even much of a story to speak of – you’re here to kill some bugs and that’s it. In EDF6, you can play as the Ranger, a typical soldier dude, Wing Diver, an all-female unit with jetpacks, the Air Raider, a tech specialist with all the guns, and the Fencer, a defensive unit who can parry enemy fire. As you play, you’ll unlock new weapons and gear by collecting Weapon and Armor crates from downed enemies. These unlock weapon and health upgrades from all four classes so even if you stick to your favorite class, there’s no issue swapping to another and being ready for the onslaught. It’s an extremely streamlined design that I wish more games implemented. That being said, EDF6 is not balanced in the slightest, with some absolutely busted combinations of weapons that work in just about all of the game’s 147 missions across the main campaign.

The Ranger’s Volatile Napalm Grenade Launcher has effectively unlimited range with high damage, the deadly flames it leaves in its wake, a good explosion radius, and a decent reload speed. Editor Katelyn primarily used that along with the T5 Mouse Grenade to absolutely decimate most enemies, entire maps more or less trivialized by those two alone. Meanwhile, Flynn as the Wing Diver took a while to unlock some good gear, but eventually started playing flying Dynasty Warriors with a devastating melee attack in the Handy Saber with an equally deadly shotgun with decent range, and finally a super long range electric sniper rifle with shots that ricochet off of walls allowing you to shoot around corners. The other two classes can assuredly be made just as broken, and finding that niche is a lot of fun. There were more than a handful of times we would be cast in a large circular arena, enemies visible from all sides, but it didn’t matter because Katelyn could pick them all off from an incredible distance using the Volatile Napalm while Flynn would immediately fly over to them and kill stragglers using the saber and shotgun.

Still, some classes are more involved than others. The Wing Diver needs to balance their jetpack and weapons, as both draw from the same pool of fuel with a fairly lengthy emergency recharge time. The Ranger is less mobile, but that’s about its only drawback, and with Volatile Napalm you really only need to worry about line of sight. That’s part of the game’s turn your brain off appeal, but having some class interaction to cover those weaknesses could make things slightly more involved and interesting. Maybe the Wing Diver could pick up other classes to move them around the battlefield, while being unable to attack when carrying. Or the Air Raider could resupply other units making reload and recharge times shorter. Just something to make those easier missions more engaging.

Even with so many missions, we were surprised at how often and for how long EDF continued to introduce new enemies and maps. After playing for about 15 hours of online co-op and reaching mission 55, about a third of the way through the game, we had just been introduced to a variant of the robot enemies who could now swing through cities like Spider-Man. Some enemies are just very simple recolors of previous enemies, like wasps who literally just had the red value of their color scheme turned way up, but others have entirely new models and textures. We must have fought no less than five or six variants of the Android enemies who started as weak enemies and could only attack at a close range with a claw shot. By the time we wrote up this review, we had variants with bombs for hands who could be extremely lethal if not dealt with quickly. The discrepancy is very odd, but given the game’s clear lack of a substantial budget I think the developers have done what they could. They really do make the most of that budget. While maps and enemies are reused constantly, it feels like every mission has a new twist or perspective that makes it fresh. One mission may have you entering a village from the outskirts, destroying frog-like aliens who were seemingly left to die by their commander while a later variant of the map has you destroy giant spider webs as you make your way through.

EDF is very light on story. There are less than a handful of characters, most of who don’t have names, and any cutscenes are relegated to very brief in-engine dialogue sequences where the characters randomly spout small bits of narrative just to provide context to all the carnage. It’s merely set dressing. There were definitely a few missions that felt like filler, and there’s even a few times they make you replay the exact same mission with the only change being what you’re shooting at. But it’s kind of shocking how often the game was throwing new twists into the formula to make it feel extremely fresh. You might be killing the same frog enemies 20 missions later but now they have full body armor so they can take some serious punishment.

If the game has you fighting multiple enemy types at once, it can get pretty hectic, but that’s where the game shines. Playing this in co-op with each other, cracking jokes, spamming voiced emotes, and the absurdity of some of the story sequences, made for an extremely jank but fun time. We have another 90+ missions left to complete and honestly, I’m excited. From the constant enemy variations, the NPC soldiers singing along when you use the song emote, and the overwhelming carnage, this is an extremely fun game but it has some drawbacks.

Katelyn and Flynn played on the PC version of the game, and there are some incredibly odd issues with this version. Minimal PC options, the game booted up with max settings enabled. It doesn’t let you tweak any of the settings without going through a couple menus as the main menu is just the different modes of play from Offline, Online, and Split Screen. Fast loading via SSD and Direct Storage seems to be MIA on the desktop version but it loads extremely fast on Steam Deck, for some reason. You can not swap between keyboard or controller without backing out to the title screen and hitting Start on your preferred input. As far as we could tell, there’s no option to play with local and online friends simultaneously, a feature that was in one of the earlier EDF games. It’s clear EDF as a series is just here to give you a very simple but good time, it almost feels like a B-Movie in terms of budget but the simplicity and variety make it a pretty fun experience with friends.

Meanwhile Henry squashed bugs on the PS5 version, where performance was generally pretty flawless, with stable frame rates at a solid 60 fps. Load times are generally pretty fast, taking less than 5 seconds to load into missions. Controls can be rebound on the DualSense controller for each playable class, which is a nice feature, but virtually none of the controller’s flagship features are utilized. Meaning there are no adaptive triggers or haptic feedback here.

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