My brother and I obsessively played the Earth Defense Force games when I visited him in Japan a few years ago, but I had a hard time saying why. The games were dumb, ugly, and sounded terrible, but something about fighting huge hordes of insects and robots (with a b-movie vibe and a rocket launcher as a default weapon) just made them fun. Still, the last release, EDF: Insect Armageddon, was significantly worse than the older EDF: 2017, with the newer game feeling like a chore to play. That game had been put into the hands of other developers who didn’t have the particular magic that developer Sandlot brought to the series in 2017, failing to capture the madness, speed, and frantic combat of that game. Luckily, Sandlot is back, and have completely nailed the madcap formula that makes this series so fun and has made Earth Defense Force 2025 such an amazing multiplayer title.
2025 has some neat and varied classes in it for the discerning exterminator. You have a basic soldier called the Ranger (The only class you could play as in 2017), and he’s about as plain as you can get. You can equip him with two weapons, he’s got pretty solid defense, and he walks and jumps around like just about any character from a third person action game should. If you don’t want to mess around too much with learning new controls or anything fancy and just want to shoot the things, this is your go-to guy. Still, he moves kind of slow, his armor is only decent, and you’ll be missing out on some of the weirder things you can do if you stick with this guy.
One of the great things that 2025 did was taking the one good ideas that the inferior Insect Armageddon did right, though, which was adding new classes to alter how combat works. Find the soldier slow? Well, there’s the Wing Diver class, one that sacrifices armor for speed, letting you fly across the map. Getting torn up in combat? You can play the Fencer class which gives you a boost to your armor even if it makes you move ungodly slow. Don’t feel like anything is working and just want to help everybody while dropping tanks from the sky? There’s the Air Raider class for that. Not only do these classes give options for several different play styles, but they also let you change things up when the game feels like it’s getting old. These classes also tend to work well with each other if you’re playing the game co-op (2 player local, 4 player online), as it helps to mix up the speed of a Wing Diver with the slow, but powerful, Fencer or Soldier. Besides, you’re going to want a friend playing with you when you see some of the awesome, stupid stuff that happens while you play the game.
The only drag of the class system is in how you increase your character’s power. As you play through the game, the enemies will drop huge crates of armor and weapons, and picking those up will help better equip whatever class you’re using. Those boosts only apply to the class you’re playing as, so changing classes late in the game likely means having to replay some old levels to build its strength up. Not only that, but the weapons you pick up will only be for the class you’re playing, so while this means you don’t have to worry about picking up weapons you’re never going to use, it also makes it harder to switch later on. Playing around with each of the classes at the start is definitely the best idea, as you’ll want to pick a class and stick with it due to these design decisions. Sandlot was right to tie weapon drops to your active class, but it does make it hard to change the game later.
Then again, that might not be a problem if you’re playing multiplayer. As far as I could tell, armor drops were shared between all of the classes that were playing while weapon drops were dictated by which player class picked them up. It might mean that you don’t always pick up a new weapon, but as far as strength goes, you’ll at least be on par with where you’d be if you’d play the class for most of the game. It can get a little annoying when you’re playing with Wing Divers, though, as their increased speed often means they’ll be swooping in and grabbing all the weapon drops while you’re still chugging toward the fight. I’ll admit that a couple of my ‘accidental’ rocket hits to the Wing Divers were less than accidents because of this.
Speaking of that, be careful during heated combat in this game, as your shots will do damage to other players. I didn’t see any way of shutting this off, and trust me, I would have if I could, if only to protect myself. A lot of the weapons in this game explode, and if you’re too close to the blast radius then you’re going for a ride. You might think to prepare for this by playing alone, but the screaming NPCs and slight inclines in the environment are more than enough to cause you trouble from your own weapons as well. There have been many times when I was pulling the trigger as an NPC ran right in front of me, making me just about kill myself. Then again, I soon learned to fix this problem by shooting at NPCs as I ran towards fights. Sorry guys, but the insect hordes are the least of your problems when I’m around.
Let’s get to the sweet, sweet combat of the game, though. The earth is being attacked by aliens who like using huge bugs to fight you (mainly giant ants). These things are the size of small houses, and come in large groups. There will be stages when you’ll see them just pouring over hills at you, a sea of them that stretches out in every direction. This also happens with the various other bugs that come at you, so you’re never fighting less than thirty to fifty creatures at one time. With groups this big, you can fire your weapon in almost any direction and hit something, making combat a frantic, chaotic thing. All you’ll be doing is whirling around and shooting whatever’s closest, hoping you can turn in time to hit whatever bug’s about to bite you.
After you’ve been fighting insect groups for a while, the game will start throwing groups of robots, ships, and mechs into the mix — each with their own types of weapons and defenses. These things also tend to come in larger groups, although nowhere near as many as the easy-to-kill insects. Fighting these guys required a lot less crowd control and a lot more run-and-gun, as you’re desperately trying to keep moving to stay ahead of the laser fire. If you’re fighting small ships, you could have dozens of them all shooting at any one position at once while you fight to stay ahead of them, or you could be weaving around the blast radius of a laser gun the size of a skyscraper. Again, combat stays frantic, but it’s a different kind of frantic compared to fighting the insects.
There are a lot of levels in the game and, at a glance, it appears you’ll only fight the same couple of enemies in each one. After a while, it would seem like it should get boring to just fight bugs and robots, but it rarely does. It fixes this problem by throwing in a lot of mixed groups that work well together, for sure, but the main reason it clicks is because the game is very good at creating set-piece battles, or moments in the fight that you’ll remember. There will be many times when you’ll find yourself fighting through a brutal horde of ants and find the group thinning out, only to look up at the sky and see it filled with enemy ships. You could just be finished with those ships, but then look out into the distance and see giant robots lumbering toward your location. Maybe once you finish those robots off you’ll see your radar light up as ants just come pouring in by what looks like the hundreds, dropped by huge motherships floating overhead.
This aspect was neat in that it didn’t always cause the game’s difficulty to spike. These moments did push me a little harder, to be sure, but I never really felt like the game got much harder (while played on Normal difficulty) when these things happened. Some fights did get pretty hairy, but overall these attacks carried more of a visual presence than any sort of increased challenge. I guess these new onslaughts always made me feel that the game was going to get a lot harder even if they didn’t change the challenge all that much, and it was that feeling of being overwhelmed that stuck with me after every stage. I’d gasp in relief as MISSION CLEARED appeared on the screen even though it wasn’t much harder, as being hit with enemy groups that big always made me think I had escaped big trouble. It was a neat trick to keep gameplay balanced while shooting enemy group sizes into the stratosphere, and I’m impressed Sandlot could pull it off.
Your weapon drops also go a long way toward keeping the game balanced and new. There are hundreds of unlockable weapons to get in the game, and they’re all random drops based on class and the difficulty level you’re playing on. Not only that, but the game only provides you with those weapons from green crates you pick up from killing enemies, but it doesn’t tell you what you got until you beat the level. Even then, it’s a random chance and you can pick up repeats of old guns, so it creates this odd lottery where you go over your item drops at the end of each stage, crossing your fingers for something marked ‘new’. It also adds a little more excitement to combat if you’re playing the split-screen co-op or online multiplayer when you see that random green box drop from an enemy body, as you know that that everyone fighting with you is about to break off from what they’re doing to try to get it.
The weapons also range from the powerful to the completely outlandish, so you really never know what you’re going to get. I’ve gotten a ten-barrelled shotgun that hurled lightning, a rocket launcher whose ammo moved so slow that I could outrun it with the slowest class, and a gun that fired its rockets out in a V, requiring that I aim by looking away from whatever I wanted to hit. The game does provide weapon descriptions when you’re equipping them (which you can only do before you enter a level), but they’re a bit on the vague side. The only viable way to figure out what something does is usually to use it for one level, which always adds another interesting layer to combat. You could end up with a couple of really bad or weird weapons during one level, and having to play through that stage with a completely different combat style adds another layer to keep things fresh.
Fighting hordes of giant ants and shooting lightning shotguns makes for a lot of mayhem, but there are a few more things that really make the game pop. One of the big ones is that all of the environments are destructible to a certain degree. Many stages take place in urban settings, and with the game’s emphasis on explosive weapons this could have gotten really annoying, so almost every structure you see can be knocked down. If the fighting’s behind a huge tower, start pitching explosives at it until it crumbles so you can get a clear shot. What happens when the debris from that building falls on you, though? Nothing at all, I’m happy to say. You take no damage from falling structures, which looks silly when you’re clipping through a falling apartment complex, but it means there’s nothing standing between you and causing more chaos. Bugs crawling on an overpass above you? Look straight up and fire rockets at it until it crashes down on your head. It’s dumb, looks ridiculous, and is absolutely awesome.
The magic that tops it all off is the sound. I’m not talking music, though, as once the stage starts you won’t hear much of it. What I’m talking about is the chorus of screams, explosions, and enemy roars that just overwhelm every other sound. I played the game with the sound off just to see how much it added to the gameplay, and there’s something about all the chaotic noise that captures the feel of the game’s madness and makes it all work together. Hearing officers shouting orders, NPCs screaming, and your rockets slamming into enemies and sending them howling into the sky just makes everything feel so, so good. It gets even better when, during a moment of silence, you catch one of the cheesy lines that the other characters say, hearing one guy talking about how he was supposed to go to a barbeque a few moments before the ants attack. The absurd dialogue of the game really ties the audio up in a nice little package, and gave me a laugh before some insane battles.
Visually, the game isn’t that bad for the series. It’s not going to blow anyone’s mind, but the enemies are pretty detailed and gross looking. The environments have tons of repeating elements, but there is a decent variety of levels. If you were just looking at the visuals you might not be impressed, but you’ll be too busy dealing with the enemy hordes to think about it. The only time visuals do become an issue is when the game’s framerate starts to chug, which actually does happen with some frequency whenever there’s a lot going on. For a game that’s this focused on fighting groups, it’s kind of a nuisance that this sort of thing wasn’t dealt with, but it’s not something that bugged me a lot once I really got caught up in the combat.
You probably won’t care, either. Yes, the game is cheesy, chugs when it’s too busy, doesn’t look that good, and features kind of repetitive enemies, but it’s just too dang fun for me to care. Insect Armageddon somehow screwed up that aspect, making combat boring and slow while sticking me in endless stages of misery. Earth Defense Force 2025 is a return to the right studio and the right form, taking the good character classes of the last game and sticking them into a tighter, better-looking game. This game is wild and crazy, and is the perfect thing for a couple of friends to pick up and just blast away at. This is my go-to multiplayer game when friends come over now, and it needs to be yours, too.
