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Earth Defense Force 5


Sly Reflex
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First things first. If you've not enjoyed these games before, abandon thread now. There's no point in you wasting your time here. It's more of the same with tweaks, mostly good tweaks, but nothing that's going to convince you you want to spend time with the series.

 

For the people that do like the games, you're in for a treat.

 

First of all, despite looking like a budget game, it looks glorious in motion.Debris and chitin breaks off everything while you're shooting it, blood flies across the tarmac and up[ the skyscrapers in the most ridiculous fashion turning the levels into a B movie version of Splatoon. Buildings drop after taking set amounts of damage rather than falling to the ground after being hit with explosives once. There's a significant improvement visually. The best thing? Zero frame drops in this chaos. However you will see a slight stutter as it loads in the next wave occasionally, it doesn't happen every time but there's a bit of a performance blip. It never truly stunts the action though, which is the most important thing.

 

Enemies.The Hectors are gone (Or have not showed up yet) and have been replaced by giant bipedal frogs. The AI behaviour of these frogs, as well as the danger they present offers a nice tactical hinge where they differ from killing swarms. I found it best to use cover  and then when you get close enough to them use shotguns to kill them in one magazines worth of buckshot. However, you can pelt them from a distance and amputate limbs which will cause them to react differently dependant on what gets blown apart. Don't leave it too long because limbs can grow back.

 

Levels. I don't want to spoil this too much, but those settings from previous games where it's basically sunny all the time and in the day or underground? Not anymore.

 

Weapons. You can level up weapons now. A lot of the weapons have returned, but there's also new ones to get. For instance I was using a rocket last night that worked like the one from Half Life 2 where you have a laser that can guide the rocket precisely where you want. The other weapons seem to have had a rebalance as well, the shotguns seem to have a place now. I've not seen anything super crazy yet, but most of what I have seen has been good.

 

Classes. I've only played as Ranger so far, but the sprint feature they've added has helped no end. It's basically Gear's roadie run, although it ends with a weird slide I don't like. Useful for getting out of bad situations or collecting items. Speaking of which, while you are running you have a circle around you that automatically picks up items. I think this collection circle is around vehicles as well, although I've not witnessed that with my own eyes yet. The Ranger can also call in small vehicles for himself, but I've only had a bike and to be perfectly honest it's not as good as the built in perks you get from being on foot.

 

Other alterations. After every mission amour collected and weapons are distributed between the 4 classes, with the class you are playing getting the lions share. There's a bad aspect to this screen though, since if you've collected a lot of weapons it goes through the whole process of levelling them up and explaining what they are. I don't think it's a bad thing completely, but for a game you could spend hundreds of hours in, having a skip button to cut through that crap would have been nice. Regardless, it's going to make it so that if you want to try out another class you're not starting with a blank slate, which is a good thing since EDF is one of those games where altering your teams composition is something that is encouraged. Also I think the drops are more generous than before.

 

Other changes. Inferno is locked so no going to the end of the game to get super powered weapons. In fact the armour and weapon limit persists right into Inferno and the only way to shut it off is to hit 70% of missions complete to remove limits. They might have taken away with one hand, but they've given with the other. difficulties now stack, so no need to play on difficulties you're blazing through.

 

I'll probably be back with another huge wall of text later when I've played some more.

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I do really enjoy this series,it’s a right laugh,especially with mates. 

 

I can’t afford it yet,but I will definitely want to pick it up at some point in the future. Though I’ve looked on both Game and Amazon,and neither have this listed. Is it digital only here then? I’ve only seen the Japanese version on disc,currently at £75.

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Download only for English translation.

 

One thing I have had to do is alter the button layout. The 4.1 one is gash in this if you play Ranger. The roadie run is on L3 click but you have to hold it in to continue running. I put it on X but that made it so that I couldn't control where the running was, so I had to completely rejig the controls and put it on R1. I have to put the "Look here" notification on L3 because it makes no sense to have the ping elsewhere, especially on touchpad click as the game would have you do because that's just cumbersome. Because the Ranger can call in a vehicle if he has one equipped I've put that on touchpad click. I dunno, it might be a while before I find a set up that's completely comfortable. On the upside, everything is completely rebind-able. If a game of this stature can do it, then there's no excuse for anyone else.

 

Had a good laugh at the self awareness of the game in one of the missions. "Don't destroy anything, we need the facility intact". Thirty seconds into the fight and it was already smouldering rubble. :lol: 

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2 hours ago, Sly Reflex said:

Had a good laugh at the self awareness of the game in one of the missions. "Don't destroy anything, we need the facility intact". Thirty seconds into the fight and it was already smouldering rubble. 

 

That description you gave me - it's a city destroying simulator with some giant bugs as collateral - is honestly one of my favourite things about 4.1.

 

It's just how dumb it all is. Is the Ranger the one I played? Can you not do sprint as a toggle rather than a button hold? 'click' sprint, 'click' slide?

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The destruction is a bit better in this one.It has to be really, the frogs have basically made them an integral part of how they behave.

 

Ranger is the one you played. I don't think you can toggle the sprint, although I will have a look to see if it's possible.

 

Had a bit of a play about with the Fencer tonight. The dash thing is very different, it might take a while to get used to that. On the upside, you can reload his shields now, it's a small quality of life improvement but it makes them much more usable.They take ages to reload so being able to do it when you want means you can fill your defences up when you get a space to do so.

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Sold some games in town to get some PSN credit,seeing this is digital only. So long,Red Dead 2. Hello,shit loads of aliens.

 

Got it in my download queue now,might have it finished downloading before I go to work tonight. 

Looking forward to getting back on the battlefield. EDF,yo!

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Air Raider has been fixed and is actually usable now outside of killing massive stuff. I've not done any underground stuff with him yet, but fuck me if they've not made him fun as fuck to use above ground. I don't know how well it scales, but I could quite happily spend the rest of the game bombing the ever loving fuck out of everything.

 

Some really nice audio touches too with the airdrops he has before he's inducted into the EDF. That's some cool attention to detail.

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Those new enemies about halfway through the game are going to be scary as fuck on Inferno. They take a right pounding on the difficulties I've fought them on and require the whole team to focus them down and not stop until they're dead. You think the frogs are a bugger to deal with you've not seen anything yet.

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This has taken a right spike in difficulty online. If you didn't know playing online scales up all the mobs as if 4 players are in the lobby. I've got about 40 odd levels in and if I don't have another person in the lobby things go to shit, especially when a certain enemy is present. You really need a few people to lay into them and kill those particular enemies where they stand because if you let them push you about you're going to die. I'm at armour cap and if I give them so much as a tiny bit of breathing space or let them gang up on me I'm fucked. I've had to drop to easy just to carry on. It's rough.

 

Like I said in the above post, on Inferno you're really going to have to talk to each other and make sure that when you're faced with those they get riddled and blow apart before they get to do the same to you.

 

 

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Yeah,I see what you mean about the ammount of enemies on screen. It reaches Starship Troopers levels of “Jesus tapdancing Christ,how many?”.

 

Reached Mission 12,the dialogue continues to be utter cheddar. At one point,everyone is panicking at seeing aliens that look like humans. “They have arms, and legs, and talk”. Yeah. But they’re giants. And also,they’re more like frogs than humans. Ludicrous ?

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I'm up to level 60+ now and it's got to the point where if you don't have good weapons or  you aren't near armour cap then you're in for a hard time. It's rough but the time where kicking randoms for not having the requirements to do the levels they've come into is going to have to start to happen. One of the main rules of this game is don't die, and if you have to die make sure what you were doing when you got iced was worth it. The further I get into it the more of these pointless deaths I'm seeing, some even being me for misunderstanding how much risk I'm at.

 

It's a learning process. Eventually we'll get there, but it is a case of people being weeded out now. I can't see myself carrying through the latter half of the game when I'm struggling with it myself.

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