Monday, September 03, 2007


Earth Defense Force 2017 - Completed

Sometimes you want to just shoot stuff. This game lets you shoot hordes of enemies relentlessly with well over 75 variations of weapons. The sad part is you only get to shoot the same monsters over and over. When purchasing the game I was under the assumption that you would play as one of those futile little guys who shoots a bb gun at Godzilla. The idea intrigued me and my imagination went bounds thinking of all the great monsters I will have to best with practically my bare hands. The first level started out very promising, there are giant ants attacking Tokyo, we must save the city and destroy the menace. But when I got to the 50th level where I was fighting ants, spiders, and a few scat giant robots which all represent the same faction it started to feel quite repetitive. The terrain would slightly change and occasionally you would fight in the mountains. But there is not real strategy involved with the process of killing. You run backwards and fire away till you die or they do.

Now they did include the use of vehicles, four different types. You can run a motorcycle, mech, tank, and helicopter depending on which is included on your current level. The motorcycle is fast but lacks greatly in damage. The mech takes quite literally 5 minutes to turn around, how does anyone think this is plausible? You give them mech jump jets so it can fly but the blasted thing cannot turn around, this made no sense to me. The tank has a single fire mode and did well against a single target, yet it was hard to drive and maneuver. Finally the helicopter, I crashed more times then I was capable of killing the enemy. If your going to include vehicles in a game make sure there useable. This seemed to me as the biggest programming flaws in the game. Which leads me to another silly aspect of the game, one of the unlocked weapons is a turret gun. Stands alone and tracks enemies with cameras while firing away. Now your little fellow with not so much as a back pack has unlimited ammo. Yet the turret guns run out of ammo and disappear after a few hundred shots. Its not as if you can sit back and let them fire on forever to beat a level, the tracking systems require the enemy to be very close in order to be fired upon. Yet they choose to give this stand alone gun with an ammo canister larger then my characters torso 200 shots or so, seems a little silly to me.

When I was tired of the monotony I scoured all the weapons and found a missile launch with 30 some on missiles that homed in. I found that if I backed off a ways and fire the homing missiles would fly completely across the level to the nearest target and destroy it. For about the last 5 levels I would be reading or what not and just pushing the button to fire as it auto reloaded. Not sure if this be considered a flaw, but if I choose to get anymore achievements from the game you can be sure this is how it will be done.

The game was 5 out of 10. Playability was sub par, graphics where nothing special, story was stale, and the monotony was killer.


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