Earth Defense Force 2025 Review

When will the aliens learn? It doesn't matter how much more advanced their technology is than ours, or whether they attack us from the stars or from deep under the surface of our own planet. They can never hope to defeat us, because we have one weapon whose sheer might they can never overcome: the indomitable human spirit. As it turns out, though, all those assault rifles, rocket launchers, and other weapons we have lying around come in pretty handy, too. Like its predecessors, Earth Defense Force 2025 is a gleefully destructive romp in which you use powerful weaponry to kill aliens and to lay waste to city blocks, all in the name of saving humanity.
 
Those city blocks don't look the way we expect environments in games to look in this era of sophistication and refinement; like the laughable special effects in many of the alien invasion movies that clearly served as EDF's inspiration, everything seems cheap. Appendages of giant insects poke through level geometry, and trees, once knocked over, blink out of existence. But then, there's absolutely nothing sophisticated or refined about Earth Defense Force 2025. You can't say that its chintzy graphics are an asset, but they're not quite the detriment that they'd be in many games, because every aspect of EDF 2025 wholeheartedly embraces the series' B-movie inspirations. The giant insects and massive enemy spacecraft recall the low-budget monster movies and sci-fi flicks of the 1950s, so when you hear the voice actors hamming it up with every cheesy line, their goofy delivery works to support everything else about the game.