Earth Defense Force 6 Review

Earth Defense Force 6 is one of the most exhilarating shooters I’ve played in years, offering mega-scale slapstick shootouts like nothing else while teetering on the edge of genius and idiocy in its design. It’s also a half-baked, unpolished piece of software with a mediocre PC port and blatant asset recycling.

This cult phenomenon started out as a budget experiment on PS2, a straightforward third-person shooter with a retro B-movie feel about a small soldier battling giant alien ants and wobbly UFOs with weapons that can destroy a skyscraper in a single hit or send your ragdoll body rolling for half a mile if you get caught in your own explosion.

That core remains unchanged, enthusiastically amateur voice acting and all, though the EDF now has four soldier classes, full online co-op, and a much wider variety of enemies. The exhilaration of being the little guy against impossibly powerful hordes of gun-toting heroes so huge and numerous they blot out the sky remains, and is only amplified when the game hands you a lumbering Pacific Rim-style mech and asks you to blow up a bunch of kaiju the size of a skyscraper.

Deja vu

EDF is to guns what Dynasty Warriors is to swords; pure meathead gaming. You shoot giant aliens, collect the red and green boxes they drop (slowly increasing your base health and ensuring that your weapons drop randomly), and repeat, either alone or with 1-3 friends. Easy to learn, but with real tactical nuance. Maybe not quite the level of systemic depth of Helldivers, but each enemy type, spawn pattern, and battlefield requires a different approach and experimentation with the hundreds of weapons you collect.

Whether you’re shooting UFOs with the world’s largest sniper rifle or thinning out a hundred giant wasps with artillery, there’s enough tactical depth and physics-based unpredictability to keep the action consistently engaging, especially in co-op mode, where the class-based nature of squads shines brightest. One player shoots giant bugs on the front lines, while another leaps from rooftop to rooftop shooting UFOs. A third calls in airstrikes to slender out the worst of the horde, and a fourth races across the map to intercept squads of gun-toting, building-sized frogs before they become a nuisance.

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EDF 6 is essentially the same game as 2017’s EDF 5, engine and all. That means it’s not a pretty game on PS4. The good news is that it runs decently on systems as modest as Steam Deck, but it won’t win any awards for the most detailed textures. What EDF lacks in detail, it makes up for with the biggest gunfights in gaming and some of the best explosions, the lightweight of which illuminates the area for miles. While PC is the best place to enjoy the game, the menus still feel awkward and poorly worded, and I recommend just not touching the weird “camera lerp” slider.

EDF 6 also offers most of the same resources and moment-to-moment action as the previous game. And yet, despite being the longest in the series (counting a whopping 147 missions—around 35 hours to travel through “normal” difficulty), it feels less repetitive this time around thanks to the strength of narrative context. That’s a really odd thing to say about an EDF game, but bear with me.

Let’s go back in time again

EDF 6 picks up after the finale of EDF 5, a spectacular but Pyrrhic victory over the aliens and their giant, shiny god-emperor. The first few missions see you and a motley crew of wasteland survivors hunting down alien remnants before the invaders play their trump card: time travel. One moment the aliens are leaping through a portal to the past, the next you’re in an even more doomed timeline, where humans are being hunted by rickety giant robots—a whole modern threat. So we’re off to the past (and back to EDF 5) to outrun the aliens and destroy their modern toys.

And that’s the trick. Budget-saving reuse in some way He’s working because it’s all framed as an escalating game of temporal domination. The aliens send a modern threat back in time, and you return to kick its ass in a condensed version of the EDF 5 campaign remixed with modern dialogue, enemies, and plot twists. Every time it seems like the game has squeezed everything it can out of its current set of scenarios and enemies, it resets, the aliens return to mess with the timeline even more, and you return to save humanity from being crushed. Each time, the NPCs’ conversations about the battle become more and more amazed at this alien-killing miracle that seems to know Exactly how to win.

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It works in perfect harmony with the EDF progression loop, as you slowly become more resilient, collecting modern weapons and vehicles, and deploying them against ever-increasing threats. Each modern set of enemies mixes up the flow of the game. The robots swarm like ants, but they have harder hitboxes (thanks to their wire-thin limbs) and like to throw rocket-like punches from odd angles and heights.

Then there’s Kruul, a 30-foot-tall octopus soldier (like the Martians from Metal Slug, but huge) who can wield dual pistols and dual energy shields at once, and his physics-driven, noodle-like limbs and weird, hyper-reactive, bullet-blocking AI make him feel genuinely alien. Then there’s the giant, incredibly hard-wearing fish-men who hide in the Silent Hill-style fog, pop out of it, and force you back with poison gas, each requiring modern tactics and a constantly changing loadout.

Everything elderly is modern again

EDF6 never gets bogged down in its predecessor’s grind of replaying too many of the same missions. Each time loop feels like a modern escalation, resetting the pace and scale of the battles for a while, introducing modern threats, building to a spectacular climax, and then doing it all over again. It ends up feeling less like a regular EDF sequel and more like four or five smaller ones played back-to-back.

The time-travel angle means that players who start with EDF 6 may not fully appreciate some of the plot twists and events (and some are brilliantly cathartic if you played EDF 5), but the polished campaign structure makes it the best entry in the series. Normal mode was a nice warm-up, but I still barely touched on the higher difficulties (three of them), which bring faster combat, a modern arsenal of weapons to play with, and occasionally remixed missions with more arduous enemy spawn points. 35 hours was enough to knock the rust off. EDF is setting itself up.