Earth Defense Force 6 review

Earth Defense Force 6 is one of the most joyful shooters I’ve played in years, delivering mega-scale slapstick gunfights like nothing else while walking a tightrope-fine line between genius and idiocy in its design. It’s also a janky, rough-hewn piece of software with a mediocre PC port and egregious recycling of assets.

What is it? A big, silly class-based B-movie co-op shooter on an enormous scale
Expect to pay £49.99 / $59.99
Developer Sandlot
Publisher D3 Publisher
Reviewed on Windows 11, Nvidia 3070 (Laptop), AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, 16gb DDR5 RAM
Steam Deck Playable
Multiplayer? Online 4-player co-op, 2 players split-screen
Link: Official site

This cult phenomenon of a series began as a budget-priced PS2 experiment. A simple third-person shooter with a retro B-movie theme about a little soldier guy fighting vastly oversized alien ants and wobbly UFOs using guns that can demolish a skyscraper in one hit, or send your own ragdoll body tumbling for half a mile if you get caught in your own blast.

That core remains unchanged, enthusiastically amateur voice acting and all, although EDF now has four classes of soldiers, full online co-op and much more enemy variety. The joy of being a little guy with an impossibly powerful gun fighting hordes so massive and numerous that they blot out the sky remains unchanged, and is only amplified when the game gives you a lumbering Pacific Rim-esque mech and asks you to punch out some skyscraper-sized kaiju.

EDF is to guns as Dynasty Warriors is to swords; pure meathead gaming. You shoot giant aliens, pick up the red and green boxes they drop (slowly increasing your base health and providing random weapon drops), and you repeat, alone or with 1-3 friends. Easy to pick up, but with real tactical nuance. Perhaps not quite Helldivers levels of systemic depth, but each enemy type, pattern of spawns and battlefield demands a different approach and experimenting with hundreds of stockpiled guns.

Whether you’re skeet-shooting UFOs with the world’s