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Azazel
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Earth Defence Force 2017 - Sandlot - 360
After seeing it mentioned elsewhere on f13 with someone recommending it as a lightweight but fun co-op shooter, I decided to give Earth Defence Force 2017 a go. The fact that it was pretty cheap over at Play-Asia also contributed to my purchase.
So basically, you're a soldier, and you start off with some health, and a couple of basic guns. As you go through the game, the enemies drop Health (which heals you), Armour (which adds to your health next time you start a mission) and more weapons (which make stuff dead).
Most of the game you're simply ploughing through endless streams of enemies - and there's only a few types of enemies - black ants, red ants, brown spiders, robot walker things, flying robot things in silver (and red ones for one level), and boss creatures, like the 4-legged walker, the Mecha-Godzilla knockoffs, and the flying monster generators.
You slowly increase in power by collecting the aforementioned Armour and Weapons. Ever time you get through a level, you're given health equivalent to the number of armour pickups you, erm, picked up. Each weapon pickup you got will generate a new, random weapon from whatever the game makes available to you at that difficulty level and stage. So you'll more often than not end up with the same weapons you already have, new upgrades being a rarity. There are a few vehicles players can use, but the helicopter and mecha-suit are useless, the Abrams tank is ok, and the speederbike has no weapons, but is a fast way to get around.
The levels are uninspired and samey - being either a generic city, a generic chunk of countryside which usually has a river gulley through it, some shitty cave systems and occasionally, a beach. The monsters/enemies, as discussed, are uninspired and samey, the character models are uninspired, and the game just feels a little cheap, particularly on the 360. Oh, and there's a bit of slowdown from time to time, more often in the single-player mode than in split screen co-op.
However... and despite all this, it is bloody good fun!
The two-player co-op, particularly on a larger screen TV is just great, mindless shooting fun. Giant Ants and Giant Spiders on the screen are guaranteed to freak out wives and children, (and probably you as well) at least at first. It's basically a very simple game at its core, I read one review that described this game as the kind of thing that, say Tecmo or Altus would have churned out for the SNES back in the day, and I can definitely see that. As it happens, "Earth Defence Force" was indeed churned out for the SNES.
As a 2-player split screen (no fancy online modes here) it's enormous, simple, shooty fun. If you like that kind of thing, even a bit, you owe it to yourself to give this game a try.
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Buy it.
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