https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM4E-qKlSuM

Earth Defense Force 4.1 Review (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM4E-qKlSuM)

Editor’s Note: This is a review coupled with a video review. You can watch the video review above, or read a transcript of the video below.

The PC platform finally gets to experience the wonders of Earth Defense Force 4.1; the fourth war between the giant bugs, bigger aliens and tiny humans has made the jump from console, and I get to talk about it. Does the port live up to expectations or do we have to blow its arms and legs off like a disobeying ant?

EDF is easy to describe, gameplay wise – it’s a third person shooter in which you shoot the hundreds of bugs with your massive stockpile of weapons. The series has lived (and died, in the case of Insect Armageddon) on this premise; the swarms are overwhelming, but you have overwhelming resources to match. The game’s world is a giant city of destructible buildings, massive open fields, and underground caves. You control one of four classes of trooper to go head-to-head with the massive threat.

Each of the four character classes has a focus – the Ranger, the jack of all trades with your typical guns and rockets, the Wing Diver, goddess of the skies, with plenty of plasma and electric death, the Air Raider, vehicular expert and artillery commander, and the Fencer, a walking tank with chainguns and hammerswords for arms.

Each class gets tons of weaponry to themselves, and they all play completely differently; the Fencer can get into the thick of it thanks to his health pool but he huffs like a titan, and the Wing Diver needs to stay out of trouble, which is easy when you can fly, but you have to watch your resources.

There’s tons of bugs as well, of the good kind – everything from garden variety ants and spiders to giant walking robots of death and swarming bees, anthills for them to spawn, dragons and even Godzilla-like dinosaurs show up throughout the game’s huge set of 89 levels.

Shooting them all down gives health, armor to raise your health cap and random weapons that get stronger the longer you go through, so you’ve always got a new toy to play with as you go. The variety of gameplay with the classes and enemies is fantastic, and when they add the DLC levels to the PC version, it’ll get even better.

Making the game more diverse is the large range of difficulties. Easy is a cakewalk for when blasting is more important than anything. Normal and Hard actually provide challenge. Hardest and Inferno are for the returning players – everything moves faster and hits harder.

The higher your difficulty gets, the more weapons you can unlock, and since you’re always gaining a bigger health pool when you play, you’ll be ready for the harder difficulties at the end of the easier ones. It’s a really nice balance that means you really never need to stop playing until you feel like it – one more level syndrome definitely applies here.

There’s something that’s hard to describe with words when it comes to EDF though, and that’s the fact that everything in the game is covered in a massive layer of metaphorical cheese. The voice acting is right out of a 12-year old’s imagination. The bugs fly everywhere in tiny pieces and people ragdoll like wacky inflatable arm flailing tube men.

Almost every gun has infinite ammo, no knockback / recoil and some of them get ridiculous, like a shotgun that has bullets that bounce, or a tiny lady carrying a chainsaw that fires lasers. Most of the animations are ridiculously canned, and every friendly troop nearby will do a gesture when you do as well, which makes them even funnier. It just gets more and more ridiculous as time goes on, and it never stops being hilarious.

This gives the series an amount of charm that almost breaks the awesome barrier. All of the elements form together into an almost cohesive whole of pure, stupid, gigantic amount of unobstructed fun. As much as it might seem shooting yet another swarm of giant ants only to see their legs fly off in all directions might get old, it really doesn’t.

The swarms are always dangerous and always cool – watching them crawl over hills, smash through buildings, and seeing everything around them explode in multiple shades of red and purple time and again constantly retains its appeal. Some players may not appreciate the fact that the game has a distinct lack of polish on purpose, but when it comes to EDF, that’s just part of the fun.

The PC version is overall quite polished, although it still has some issues. While the performance in a mission never skips a beat on my i5 4590 and GTX 970, something the PS4 version tended to do when it had too much on screen, it can tend to glitch out, oddly enough, in the menus. Graphical settings are somewhat minimal but functional.

Keyboard/mouse and controller are both supported, although you have to return to the title screen to swap between the two. I’ve heard things about AMD users not being able to launch the game as well; hopefully a bug fix will come for that quite soon. Overall though, it seems Sandlot have done a good job with their first outing on PC.

Online co-op is where the game really shines, and it works a treat even at high ping, although you may run into trouble with voice chat not having a push to talk key, something I hope is fixed up. It’s mostly stable, minus a couple of Alt-F4 failures I had in the ten or so hours I played online. The lobby system works fine otherwise.

You can invite people to private lobbies via typical Steam functionality and it works fine provided you have the Steam Overlay enabled. You can even do local 2 player co-op on one PC, something very rare these days – although it’s probably just a carry over from the PS4 version, it’s still really nice to have.

Earth Defense Force 4.1 is a fantastic example of what games are capable of – being big, dumb, and an absolute ton of fun all at the same time. Lots of content, presentation so silly that it’s heartwarming, and giant swarms of bugs and robots to blow to smithereens alone or with friends make me come back time and time again. It’s a high recommendation to basically anyone – you’re never so high and mighty as not to deal with some giant insects.

Earth Defense Force 4.1: The Shadow of New Despair was reviewed on PC using a digital copy purchased by Niche Gamer. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here.