Earth Defense Force 2025 review: ants, spiders, dragons and mechas

Earth Defense Force 2025 (EDF 2025), by Japanese developer Sandlot, is a truly Japanese game. I say so because for anyone raised on a diet of Western shooters, EDF 2025 is going to make your jaw drop.

Seven years after the first Ravager invasion from outer space, Earth is again besieged by giant insects. Your job as a member of the Earth Defense Force is to protect the earth, repel the invaders, and make the world a safe place to live once again.

Just like how New York City is considered to be the entirety of Earth in Hollywood movies, Japan is the focus of EDF 2025. The maps and environments in the game are wholly Japanese, and if you’ve visited Japan and enjoyed it, you’re actually going to find yourself feeling nostalgic.

In fact, if you’re anything like me and possess a fierce liking for the land of the rising sun, your heart is going to hurt when you start seeing humungous ants, spiders, bees, and even dragons overrun those generic Japanese streets and destroy buildings and civilians with wanton abandon.

Yes, folks. EDF 2025 is your quintessential crazy Japanese game. And it’s great.

Insects, dragons, and mechas?

The first line of attack always comes in the form of infantry, and in EDF 2025, the infantry are ants. Giant, silver ants that terrorize the town and spit formic acid at you. The insect footsoldiers tier up as you progress through the game. Later on, you get Retiarus spiders (net-casting spiders), jumping spiders, bees, and even dragons.

I can’t speak for the dragons since they don’t actually exist, but the insects in EDF 2025 are terrifyingly realistic, even in the way they burst when you blast them to bits. I don’t have an existing fear of insects, but the terror I felt when getting swarmed by a horde of jumping spiders was real. It doesn’t help that each insect and arachnid looks like it was modeled by an entomology fetishist, though the game is so well-designed that each blast from my plasma cannon felt like a $100 hour of arachnophobia therapy.

Since the insects are only the footsoldiers, it makes sense that the more powerful dragons and mechas come in the later part of the game. There is a thin storyline narrated by your AI-controlled allies that explains how the alien Ravagers are gathering around Earth once again. The cool thing is that while you face off against mechas, you also get to ride in and control your own, too.

Wars are long and painful, and this one is no exception

Right, so we’re fighting a war in EDF 2025. And war is long, draggy, and painful. EDF 2025 is no exception. Blasting bugs and mechas to bits is fun especially on an engine as well-made as Sandlot’s, but not when you repeat the same actions too many times. While the story of EDF 2025 is reasonably paced, its individual missions are not. There are many occasions where you’ll find yourself squashing bugs—and the same kinds of bugs—repeatedly before the level ends.

This gets worse as the game progresses. Each mission in EDF 2025 has no individual objectives. The main aim of each level seems to be simply to squash every single possible enemy in sight. There are screaming civilians that run from the creatures, but their lives are irrelevant. You can kill them yourself and still pass the level as long as you eliminate the bugs. But the game needs to get tougher, right? So instead of giving the player more complicated objectives, it just provides you with more enemies to kill—entire waves of them.