I'm a huge fan of the series games. My first introduction was with EDF 2025, which was a PS Plus game. I truly hated the game at first. Junk graphics, bugs, confusing gameplay, difficult as hell. Later I started to get the idea and found out that the gameplay is truly fantastic but still thought it was difficult as hell. After a few hundred hours I found out what many other gamers had found before, that the games are truly fantastic and unique, and the gameplay is awesome.
It's a unusual mix of skill, tactics, strategy and brains. You don't have to be stellar on all or any, but you have to be reasonable on all of them to succeed, master and have real fun with the game.
Another plus is the B-movie looks and zaniness. From the dumb narrated plot, to the comments, jingles, dances, poses, the humour is a real plus to the overall quality of the game. A fantastic homage to the genre and these guys should have amazing fun creating all this craziness.
You get 4 completely different classes with radically different paths to solve a mission. Even if you won't master the 4 classes you can definitely finish them all with 2. Finishing all with just one class isn't easy, no class is good at that.
Finally the game has a stellar co-operative online mode for up to 4 players (and couch coop with 2, or you can play both classes solo). The level of craziness and fun that can be achieved in coop play is pretty unusual. It's also awesome that there's only one objective, finish the mission, and rewards are equal to all, so no greedy teammates or competitiveness to see who's best. Everyone should and must work for the final objective, winning the mission.
There have been other game in the series not developed by Sandlot. EDF Insect Armageddon (Vicious Cycle, 2011) and EDF Iron Rain (Yuke's,2019) are sadly junk and laughable games. Although each has its interesting ideas, the overall gameplay is that of the common brainless and boring western FPS shooter. Enemy AI is dreadful, NPCs are usually brain dead (even worse than the EDF 2025 NPCs if that was acceptable) and the games are completely devoid of possible strategies. These 2 games have no soul. There's a huge ditch of quality between both and the vast majority of fans of the Sandlot games will despise these 2.
If you question why Sandlot uses and develops their own game engine for their games, the answer is simple, just look at either 2 of these games and you have the answer. Absolutely no other engine, and certainly not the major ones (Unreal, CryENGINE, Quake, Unity, etc) would be able to handle the obnoxious amount of enemies, bullets and crumbling landscape that Sandlot's one can.
It must be said that EDF 2025 wasn't very good on the PS3. Game engine in its infancy, pushing the hardware beyond what it was able to, and the PS3 was notoriously difficult to take advantage of. Although the game is playable, and I finished both the western and japanese versions, it's not a good experience, specially in couch coop, as the game slows to a crawl too much times. Most of the good and fun weapons for the Air Raider were unusable due to the game slowness. I would advise this one for the hardcore fans only.
EDF 4.1 is a brilliant development from 2025. It's a evolved version of 2025 and different enough to be considered a new game. EDF 5 was again a brilliant development from 4.1. Hopefully 6 will keep this trend.
The games have a reasonable learning curve. Don't expect to understand them with just a few hours of playing. If it's your first Sandlot EDF game, at around 100 hours of playing you'll begin to get the feeling and how to really play it. Most of the first half of the missions are ultimately too simple and boring but the last half has some stellar ones, and on higher difficulties these are what the game is all about. The game is very different on lower difficulties from hardest and specially in inferno, where more quantities of enemies or harder versions will be present and when you're required to use your brains and strategies to solve the missions. If you can just wander mostly around killing things in easy or normal and still progress well, this simply won't work when you get to the juicy difficulties. Inferno is what's the game is all about, the rest is just preparing you for that. Do make a effort, it's really worth it.
One of the reasons the game has many times bad reviews or opinions is simply down to the fact that very few people will play the time it takes to really enjoy the game. Although the same happens with many other games it's more difficult in all Sandlot games as they all share the same "play a ton of time until you get how to play this" syndrome. Still no game will appeal to everyone.
All we can hope is that Sandlot doesn't deviate a lot from their plan, and maintain gameplay along with small step improvements.
Although I'll cover other games I'll share mostly information on the series. I'm a solo man, so the information I write is for almost exclusively for solo play. Hope you enjoy and more importantly that it's useful, that's my goal.
"To save our mother Earth from any alien attack. EDF! EDF! EDF!" 😋
Have fun.
PS All pages will be dynamic and I'll keep adding information that I feel it's relevant to them.
Also if you're a TLDR person this is clearly not your place.
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