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Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain


AndyKurosaki
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Well, this is a weird one. I’ve always enjoyed the EDF series. With its army of enemies, terrible dialogue, and absolute carnage, it’s consistently been a fun series. Many people don’t touch it due to its janky looks, but it’s certainly a good time. This one was developed by a different team, Yukes. And it definitely tells.

 

It looks slightly graphically better than say, EDF5. It’s still not ‘triple An quality, but you can definitely tell the difference. However, that does go against one of the series’s main high points. Quite often in an EDF game, you get bombarded with enemies. To the point where you can barely see what’s going on. Chaotic, sure. But fun to blast your way through.

 

That unfortunately never happens here. Sure, there’s the occasional swarm attacking you. But never on the scale that EDF5 provides.

 

The series trademark awful dialogue is also absent. There’s no furious chants of EDF, or ridiculous conversations between allies. Everything said in this one is instantly forgettable.

 

Combat wise, you have 4 classes to choose from, ranging from your standard Soldier, to being able to jet pack around, to wiring around the level Spider-man style. All with the typical range of over-the-top weapons.

 

I was mostly having fun with this. Until I reached the final boss of level 52. There, it stopped being fun, and became a frustrating chore. Throughout the fight, the boss has its energy recharged by support ships. If you haven’t brought in a good long-range weapon, this renders the fight impossible.

Enemies constantly respawn, and choose to ignore your squad and go straight for you. So while you’re trying to aim a rocket at the bastard health recharging ship, an enemy will often run into your face, and into your rocket, damaging you.

 

Then, as if that’s not bad enough (and it is), multiple more recharge ships show up. Just to make your life a misery. I was hammering away at the fucker for a good 20 minutes, at least.

 

Eventually, a further form of the boss appeared. By this point, the health recharge ships were constant, and the respawning enemies constantly got in the way of my line of sight of the boss. Then without any warning, it activated a massive area of attack energy blast, that killed me instantly.

 

Do all that again? Fuck no. I’d seen online various people say “the last boss is fucking awful”. So I thought I’d prepared for it as best as I could. But that motherfucker, can fuck right off. I’m done.

 

 

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  • 4 months later...

I was sort of hoping there was no thread for this, as I was going to come in, start one, say "It's shite" and then ask for the thread locking.

 

I won this game after entering a raffle on Reddit. Honestly, I wasted too much time on this game by leaving a comment then. It's beyond awful on so many layers.

 

The controls are dog shit. The controls in the mainline games might not be complex, but they're instant and snappy. Here they're spongy. Also in the mainline games, the button layout is different for each class. Before playing this game I would have said they needed to be uniform, but having experience uniform controls across class, I say fuck that. Let Sandlot do what they do, they know best in this case.

 

Upgrades have also changed. Why? I have no idea. In mainline you pick up weapons boxes and then you can use the weapon. If it's a shit weapon, nothing lost. If it's good, then off you go. Here? You have to pick up currency in crystals. Then you use the crystals to buy the weapons. Everything is expensive as fuck and you cannot test it out. Shite. Also you no longer pick up armour boxes to level up, you have crystals to farm which level up the health in big blocks.utter rubbish. Also there's several different types of crystal because of course this needs to be more complicated. All this? It should have gone directly in the bin. The weapons and armour boxes stuff isn't broken, no need to throw it out and replace it with something that's worse.

 

The levels are total garbage. There's a real finesse to mainline games how they open up as you play, especially as they're designed to be played over and over on higher and higher difficulties. None of that here. Also missions that have defend objectives. Not optional ones that make the game easier, like protecting a mech that can help clear mobs, Just defend missions. Insipid, uninspiring stained toilets are what these are.They're below par at best and unforgivable at worse. Also they're missions where you fight humans. Did Lost Planet learn them nothing? We're not here to fight humans, we've scores of hundreds of games to do this in, we're here to fight the big monsters.

 

Speaking of which, the big monsters. They sure as hell look a lot nicer than mainline, but none of them are fun to fight against. There's not enough of them and a lot of them are just downright cheap. In mainline you're going to take a lot of chip damage because there's so much on screen at one, here you just take damage because the game wants you to take damage, there's no avoiding it. The resulting enjoyment from fighting these mobs is nil. There is no power fantasy of cutting through trash mobs like spiders and ants since they're all so fucking tanky. The point of EDF with these mobs is that they're meant to overwhelm you with numbers and you're meant to eradicate them in a manner that ensures your safety. Here though? Less mobs but it takes just as many bullets to kill them. An ant should be dead in a second or less depending in the variant. The time to kill is just completely off.

 

The difficulty spikes and peaks all over without rhyme or reason. In mainline the story peaks and dips and the difficulty matches that, the difficulty and complexity of a level getting deeper until you hit a crescendo of a boss or whatever before going back to some level of normalcy. Here it just wildly fluctuates. Did anyone play test this shit?

 

The general atmosphere and tone of the game is just awful. Mainline is hilariously bad to the point where it fits in with the B movie shtick. Here we have theses mediocre lines and shouts that just feel minimal effort. There's no fun, esoteric or plain weird stuff being said. You'll never get asked about being a ketchup or soy sauce person, you'll never get washed away in jingoistic EDF chants. Yet another part of the games soul that's tedious, watered down and mundane.

 

The classes. Just use the flying one, there's no downsides. The rest are pointless. Since you can use all weapons on all classes, just go with the one that can move quickly. The Prowl Rider is a nice idea, but it's fucked when the buildings come toppling down. Instead of building a network of classes that have strengths and weaknesses and can cover each other in certain situations, they just did what they've done and fucked it up. Enjoy the cramp in your hands by using the Wing Diver knock off because of the totally wack controls.

 

There's a super mechanic akin to the ones you'd find Destiny and Division. It's pointless.

 

Have I missed anything? Controls are shit, the levels are small and shit, the mobs are shit, the difficulty is shit, the music and voice acting is shit and the classes have being raped of their identity.

 

There's very tiny glimpses of good in this game. Some weapons have interesting traits. There's mobs like scorpions that fit the theme of the game and provide a different challenge no other mob adds. Vehicles are slightly better. Your soldier has customisation on granular level, after each few mission you get bits and bobs to make them your own, which is very nice. Prowl Rider has potential to be really fun, but needs a lot of work and will probably take a few games to get right like they did with the Fencer. Despite the levels being small I like that they go all over the world instead of being in Japan or in some non descript place. Actually seeing different biomes was a nice aspect of the game. It's not enough to rescue the game though. It's beyond redemption, Yukes really should be ashamed of themselves.

 

The EDF series are shit games that are enjoyable because of how they are. Iron Rain is a shit game that's not enjoyable, even in the slightest. I am glad I never spent money on this, but I'm annoyed I lost time to this fucking travesty of a game. I never even managed to finish it. Yukes are recidivists when it comes to making terrible games.

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I wanted to finish it. But the last

boss is one of the worst, cheapest, unfair fights of anything I’ve ever played in my life. 
 

I went into it knowing it was bad, and despite being prepared, still got destroyed. 
 

Definitely the lowest point in the franchise.

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