Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon

Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon is a spin-off in the third-person shooter franchise, which features heroic soldiers fighting against enormous insect-like aliens in a huge war for Earth. As is EDF tradition, your goal is to rid the planet of this extraterrestrial pest by using a huge arsenal of powerful firearms. As you lead your team, code-named “Strike Force Lightning”, you'll do battle against ants, spiders, and other creepy crawlies that are dozens of stories tall. As you progress through each mission, you'll earn new and better weapons to keep the pain coming as you push the alien aggressors back to their homeworld. Although some elements of Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon are underwhelming, the core experience is both wacky and entertaining.

Main Game Features

• Solo and multiplayer game modes
• 15 levels and over 300 weapons
• Massive battles with giant insect enemies

Story

Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon is a spin-off of the main EDF franchise, so fans looking for narrative connections between the games will be slightly disappointed. Instead of following the ongoing story of the main game, Insect Armageddon flips locale, telling the story of a fierce squad of EDF soldiers from the United States. You play as Lightning Alpha, the leader of the Strike Force Lightning EDF squad during a massive alien invasion. Starting in the fictional city of New Detroit, you must push back the alien invaders while rescuing downed EDF soldiers and securing points of interest. In truth, the story of Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon is mostly plain and campy, similar to a low-budget action movie. While this is generally disappointing, the big focus in Insect Armageddon is the shooting gameplay, which helps make up for the lackluster story.

Gameplay

Like past games in the Earth Defense Force series, Insect Armageddon tasks players with surviving in a small sandbox map as massive insect-like aliens destroy the city around them. The game has three story chapters, each with five levels of mayhem to enjoy. You can play the main story in both single-player or co-op, supporting both local split-screen and online play. There are four distinct soldier classes to choose from, each with a unique armor that provides special abilities. This includes the standard Trooper armor, the airborne Jet armor, heavy Battle armor, and the supportive Tactical armor. While the classes offer similar play styles, each type has a specific strength, such as the ability to fly with the Jet armor or deployable turrets with the Tactical armor.

Missions are straightforward and mostly involve moving across the map as you wipe out any alien in your way. Sometimes you'll have to rescue or retrieve an important item from a specific part of the map, but most often, you'll simply be defending a position or fighting against waves of enemies. You can fend off the giant insects with a huge variety of weapons, including assault rifles, rocket launchers, snipers, shotguns, and more. There are over 300 unique weapons in the game, many of which can be unlocked by spending credits, which are earned through normal gameplay. With three difficulty options to choose from and a bonus wave-based Survival mode, there's some decent replayability as well.

Conclusion

While Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon doesn't win any awards in the storytelling department, it's still a wild and crazy third-person shooter that's a lot of fun. It's enjoyable to play solo but even better with friends, resulting in some unique multiplayer mayhem that you won't get anywhere else.

Pros:

• Hectic shooter action
• Monster designs are cool
• Fun to play with friends

Cons:

• Mission objectives are repetitive
• Shooting can feel stiff
• Campy plot