Weapons and multiplayer

One of the big reasons for the game’s addictive nature is the sheer number of weapon variants you can get. When you kill an alien, it will likely drop off one or more power ups; either small or large health packs (to be used instantly) armor (increases your health bar but only after you complete a mission) and weapons. You don’t know what weapons you might unlock when you pick one up in the game but when you complete a mission and get ready to go on the next one you can select which weapons you can take along. It’s there that you can discover what new items you have available. The game has several varieties available for each type; machine gun, rocket launcher, missile launcher (more powerful than rockets and have homing features) grenades and grenade launchers, sniper rifles and special weapons that can include more advanced grenades, flamethrowers, bombs and even automated sentry guns. There’s one big catch to this truly massive arsenal. You can only take two weapons with your missions at any one time. That means if you bring in the wrong weapon or one that is underpowered you might have to retry with a new weapon set up. However you don’t have to worry about ammo; no matter what weapon you have you will never run out of ordinance (although you will have to reload which depending on the weapon you pick might take only a little time or a lot). The game also provides you with some drivable vehicles in each level as well (a Star Wars style speeder bike with machine gun, a tank with a big barrel gun, a helicopter with missles and machine guns and a mini-mech with a rocket, machine gun and flamethrower) but you can ignore those for the most part as they are almost uncontrollable and get blown up pretty quickly as a result by the enemy.

The end result is a game has a design and look that seems to say, “Yeah we know it’s completely goofy but you are going to have fun anyway.” And indeed I did. Yes the AI is terrible for both your teammates and the monsters. Yes it can get repetitious to see the same levels and fight the same aliens over and over again at times. Yes the graphics are below par from what you expect to see in an Xbox 360 game (there are some impressive visual effects like fire and explosions, though). Yes, it’s completely nuts that one rocket can blow up a 40 story building in the game or that a few shots from a machine gun can bring down what looks like a 500 foot long space ship. Yes, the game should allow falling debris to damage aliens or even yourself but it doesn’t. Yes the American voice acting in the game is atrocious. As we said in the beginning both the Toho monster movies and Earth Defense Force 2017 have a number of problems. But both are fun to experience.

There is multiplayer in the game but it’s not up to what we would call standard for an Xbox 360 title. There is an offline co-op feature where two players can play through the single player missions and that’s cool but where is the online co-op? There’s also a two player offline deathmatch mode where you can use any of the weapons you have unlocked in the game but again, no online support.