I’m a fan of the EDF games, with their Massive Ants and Massive Wasps and Massive Robots and Massive Space Ships. I was intrigued by this, Minecraft-y looking entry into the series, but the problem with EDF games is they cost money and don’t often drop to Super Cheap, so I never got round to buying it. And I still haven’t, because it appeared on PS+!
I thought the only real difference between this and the others in the series was the graphics, but actually, there’s a bigger change. You see, you don’t control just one person, you control a squad of four, swapping between them with the d-pad. Instead of collecting billions of weapons, of which you used to be able to wield two, each of your team has just one weapon. But! Because you have four of them, you essentially have four weapons, albeit they’re a bit trickier to swap between and some of them may get “killed”.
As you play through the game, you find and rescue more “brothers” and “sisters”, each of whom is a terrible stereotype of the country they supposedly represent. You can then use these in your squad, and each type has different attributes (like speed and armour) and a special skill (like being able to fly for a bit, having a dash-dodge move, or grenades) so choosing a good combination of both characters and weapons for your team is essential. Well, actually it doesn’t make a lot of difference most of the time and I tended to stick with a couple with long range and a couple with short range weapons.
The rest of the game is, broadly, same as it ever was only in Super Bright Colour Vision and with stupid hyperactive chat instead of the usual morose “we’re all gonna die”/weirdly upbeat “we are the valiant infantry” of the grey-brown entries in the series. You still have ants and spiders, you still have Hectors and Erginus, you still have tanks and a huge cargo robot you can ride, it’s just a bit more jolly and blocky. Also, it was really smooth with no slowdown, which is unusual for EDF but probably because this was the “simpler” game, and on a PS5.
As before, I played through the game with my daughter in co-op, which actually meant we had two squads of four! It’s a lot of fun, but we found it a bit short compared to the “proper” games, and I also missed the “collect all the green weapons crates and red armour crates” which don’t exist here. Well, the red ones just heal your team now. Still, can’t complain when we enjoyed it so much anyway, and it didn’t cost us anything to play.
