Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon

Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon feels more like an experiment than a fully fledged series installment. It's a mongrel title stuffed with clashing styles and mechanics; city set Space Invaders with an active reload time waster borrowed from Gears of War. The game is a muddle. EDF's usual bulletin stages replaced with lightly sprawling missions, full of press-and-hold objectives. The candy coloured world of Earth Defence Force 2017 has been washed with bricks; staffed with grit teeth army dudes, rather than slight scrap chaps. The tokusatsu enemies have been made over to resemble the kind of sub-Transformers automatons last seen jobbing in Terminator: Salvation. The gee-whizz zeal of 2017 is more or less absent. Weapons err puny, the Campaign peters out without resolution, and the majority of achievements require a satirical amount of repetition. There's none of 2017's incremental meta-progression either. Power-up drops are rare, and armour beefing revolves around a Call of Duty style levelling system that demands utter dedication for little immediate reward. Despite some fine-tuning that eases 2017's hard-nosed approach to failure, Insect Armageddon is a mess. A half-hearted sequel hamstrung by needless feature creep, and routine re-calibration. Above all, the title feels rushed. A half-finished mutant dumped to market in a hurry to keep brand ticking over.