Review: Earth Defense Force 6

Earth Defense Force 6 is among the strangest games I’ve ever played. I don’t mean strange in an Earth Defense Force kind of way; I’m no stranger to EDF. To explain how fascinating this game is, I’m going to get deep into spoiler territory. There’s no way around it.

For those of you who would rather not have the game spoiled, here’s a spoiler-free summary of my thoughts: It’s Earth Defense Force 5 if one of its developers woke up from a fever dream with deranged inspiration for how to extend it by nearly 150 missions. Even if you finished EDF 5 a few months ago, you might go into EDF 6 and not see much has changed aside from more dirt, a new narrative, and a couple of other small additions. It is not much of an upgrade, but you couldn’t ask for a better continuation.

But calling EDF 6 a continuation is greatly underselling it. It does, for better and worse, build directly on top of the previous game, but it does so in such a novel and bizarre way that you can’t help but forgive it.

Earth Defense Force 6 (PS4, PS5, PC [Reviewed])
Developer: Sandlot Games
Publisher: D3Publisher
Released: July 25, 2024
MSRP: $59.99

In terms of non-spoilers that I can tell you, I might as well cover some of the things in the trailers. Earth Defense Force 6 starts off a few years after the last game. Humanity drove the invading Primers off. However, the war took a massive toll and left the world in ruins. With only 10% of the population remaining, humanity is struggling and failing to get society working again. There has been no rebirth of civilization.

You start off trying to protect these ruins from monsters who were left behind after the invasion. It’s established that you’re playing as the same protagonist from the last game. Even though you “saved” the Earth, only one scientist dude remembers you, and he dresses like one of the executives from American Psycho for some reason.

It’s bleak. Your commanding officer keeps commending you and your teammates for avoiding civilian casualties, even though the city you protect is just burnt-out ruins without a person in sight. Like in most EDF games, they make a big deal when the newest, hottest tech is being rolled out on the battlefield, but when it actually does, it’s just recycled mech torsos mounted on the back of trucks. It’s an amusing bit of self-awareness that manages to hammer home how much humanity’s victory really sucks.

At this point, the game is just EDF in grey-brown ruins. It still features gameplay centered around defeating hordes of monsters and picking up the weapons and armor that fall out of their pockets. There are four classes – Ranger, Wing Diver, Air Raider, and Fencer – the same as there was in the last two games. The new terrain isn’t pleasant to look at, but it does feel unique compared to the cities of previous games.

That’s it. EDF in wrecked cities is all you get for a little over a dozen missions in the beginning.

Okay, so now we’re going into spoiler territory, and this is where things get really weird. 

The Primers show up for a second invasion since humanity is already on its last legs. The storytelling gets a bit sketchy at this point, but the important detail is that humanity is fucked. There aren’t enough people left to mount a defense against the Primers’ renewed attack.

As a last ditch, you and your fellow soldiers attempt to bring down a big, ring-like ship. However, when you destroy its flashing weak spot, you’re suddenly transported back in time. Back in time to Earth Defense Force 5.

That isn’t hyperbole. You quite literally, with no stretching of the truth, get taken back to the EDF 5 mission, “Turning Point”. Some of the dialogue is tweaked slightly in a very sly way that actually ties into the new narrative, but note-for-note, the mission is exact. I could show you side-by-side screenshots of the EDF 5 and EDF 6 versions, and only the slightly different HUD would tip you off as to which was which. Even the placement of the cars in parking lots is the same. It is the same map, it is the same mission.

At this point, it’s hard to tell if this is extremely stupid or remarkably genius, which is generally how I’d define the Earth Defense Force series as a whole.

If you find recycling of assets from previous games vexing (I don’t know why it would), then Earth Defense Force 6 will break you.

I want to be clear: Sandlot isn’t going to make you play through EDF 5 again. Things quickly diverge. You may think that the first thing you do after arriving from the future is warn people and impart your knowledge of the enemy’s glowing weak spots, but there’s fat chance of that. You’re a silent protagonist, after all. What are you going to do? Communicate through emotes?

Instead, it’s the aliens who are trying to change the future. They send back their latest human-killing tech to make sure they win this time, and they do, so you eventually wind up right back at the start of the EDF 6 but in an even bleaker situation where humanity just lost. 

As it turns out, the guy dressed like the executive vice president of the company joined you on your quest backward through time. So, he convinces you to attack the ring-ship at the same moment you did last time, which sends you back in time again to the same moment. You once again get remixes of EDF 5.

This time, everyone thinks you’re so damned amazing because you know the weakness to all the monsters. You’re basically Doomguy at this point; killing aliens and giant ants has been all you’ve done for years, so you’re just amazing at it. The scientist dressed like an accountant also uses his future knowledge to introduce new weapons into the EDF’s arsenal in an attempt to change fate.

And that’s what Earth Defense Force 6 is. It’s Groundhog’s Day with giant ants and bigger firepower. But what is stranger is that it works.

My biggest problem with the Earth Defense Force games has always been the repetition of the titles. They’re invariably a million missions long, and the formula begins to wear thin. The addition of new classes, dynamic enemies that will run away or try to flank you, and lots of big glowing weak points have done a lot to stretch the formula, but by the time you hit the fiftieth mission, most of the grass has been worn down to a brown, dusty path. EDF 6 is approximately 2 million missions long (147, to be exact), and this is still a problem.

Where the constant moving back in time helps things is that you’re repeatedly pushing through EDF microcosms. Each loop is still long, but it leaves you waiting in anticipation to see how things will be different. Humanity keeps getting its ass kicked, but will this finally be the loop where things change? How are they going to get out of this pickle? It’s easier to be patient when it’s only, like, 30 or 40 missions to find out.

The fact that the narrative also has you break from the series’ usual super-competent but otherwise common soldier approach also helps you feel powerful. Each time you get sent back to EDF 5, your commanding officers and fellow soldiers become more and more bewildered and impressed that you know how to shoot at obvious weak points. It’s easy for a protagonist to get lost in the story of a world getting burnt to cinders beneath the heel of an unstoppable threat, but Earth Defense Force 6 slowly builds you up until you are clearly a worthy adversary against a world-ending invasion.

That’s not to say that the storytelling is any better in EDF 6. Pretty much every development is told through conversations on the radio that you’re not any part of. Much of the dialogue is entirely daft to the point where you can’t tell when it’s being deliberately ridiculous and when it’s trying to be somewhat serious. On other occasions, it’s difficult to know if a character is trying to communicate important information or if they’re making an in-character, off-base observation that isn’t based in the reality of the plot.

You can, at least, catch enough of the gist to understand what is going on. Tannoy is just a very distracting way of telling a story.

It’s extremely disjointed. Things never really flow from one mission to the next, and NPCs rarely mention previous events. It also does that thing that happens in every EDF where you can’t kill something until it’s the designated time to do so. It’s impressive that Earth Defense Force 6 (and all games in the core series) tell grand stories without the use of cutscenes, setpieces, or relatable characters, but it doesn’t mean it does it particularly well.

Going into Earth Defense Force 6, I didn’t expect I’d spend this much time talking about the narrative. If I listed what I love about the series, its story would be extremely low on that list. However, it’s amazing how much a different narrative framework improved the formula. The gameplay is still extremely repetitive, and the constant feed of new monster types only does so much to keep it fresh. But the constant unpredictable twists and turns give reason enough to dig through its almost 150 levels. Just when you think you’ve seen everything, it pulls out something completely bizarre.

That said, I still wish Sandlot would shake things up. A metagame framework, like something from an XCOM game, would do a lot to lift up the destruction and violence. Failing that, we’re long overdue for a new Robot Alchemic Drive.

Earth Defense Force 6 is easily the best game the series has seen so far, and it attains that title in an unexpected way. While its gameplay could be charitably described as a continuation of EDF 5 (or a complete rehash, if you want to be mean for some reason), the way it uses its narrative to repeatedly spin things in surprising ways drastically changes the feel and flow of the mission-to-mission gameplay. It’s still the same loveable mix of possibly deliberate tokusatsu campiness and jank, but something’s different this time. If you’ve never been able to decide if the EDF series is completely stupid or remarkably brilliant, this will keep you wondering, but also fascinated.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}