The first attempt to make a EDF game that would be more appealing for western audiences was Insect Armageddon. Of course the notion of what is more appealing to western gamers is discussible, as everything in life. D3, the EDF publisher owned Vicious Cycle and either them pitched the idea or D3 asked them to take a different approach to the series.
Insect Armageddon was born, or probably more correctly spawned, and although it was relatively successful the game is almost a total disaster.
The first issue is that the bugs are mostly bugged. They home on you like idiots and their movement is absolutely dreadful. They disappear in the ground and reappear again in mobs, which I don't think was a idea, but a solution to handle game engine breakdowns. The flying enemies are as laughable as the ground ones. The animations of the small enemies are really, really bad, either ground or flying were so laughable, and not in a sense that was expected as the game has a serious tone. There are a few interesting big enemies though. The mantis was a great idea and well executed. The bomber spider wasn't bad either, and the concept of breeding batches of smaller enemies was nice. The hectors were acceptable, more serious than their main series counterparts.
The second issue was the total lack of strategy the game required. It's just absolutely deplorable brainless and pointless shooting, unfortunately typical of many western shooters, nice for "skilled" players. There was no need to plan or think how to solve the mission, just shoot you'll do it. The enemies home on you all in a line as straight as they can. Again development cuts hopefully, the enemy behavior of Sandlot games has been developed and improved for years, it's not something that can be amateurishly copied.
The third issue was the dreadful weapons. Every crappy weapon was basically the same junk and felt the same way using. All you had was slightly better versions of the same junk. With a bonus of a even more dreadful RNG grind than in the Sandlot games to get them. Frankly the only fun weapons were the Pesticide ones, as at least these would actually kill things.
Fourth issue, enemies were bullet sponges (or the weapons were just crap as per previous point). I was so tired of endlessly shooting the stupid ant queen, I just quit the mission, got the Pesticide gun and did it that way, as every other gun was pointless to deal with her (kind of killing a Erginus in inferno with a level 30 or 40 rifle in the main series). It was boring and stupid.
Fifth issue. The game was plain easy. Dumb enemies? Check. No strategy needed, just brainless shooting? Check. Can get weapon that can make all missions even more brainless? Check. Just a few dumb missions? Check.
Sixth issue. Gigantic boring grinds. How can someone complain about Sandlot games grinds, and then play and finish all this junk? Weapon grinds. Armor grinds. Survival game grinds. They probably wanted to add more.
Seventh. Beyond incompetent NPCs. Well, it must be said that until EDF 4.1 Sandlot wasn't much better either on the same department.
Eight. The classes were made to mirror the ones in Sandlot games, but only Storm was decent, which is no surprise, it's a western FPS so a ranger like class it's all that matters. Jet and tactical were just deplorably bad, although Jet had the best Pestocide gun 😁
There were some other saving grace ideas. That the NPCs were able to recover the player, but usually inept to do it. Hum... I think that's it 😂
The game could have been just "Insect Armageddon". Then it was just a stupid, pointless and dumb game. The worst idea overall was labelling this a game in the series, which is a insult. It's just light years away from the Sandlot games, something that even the game series producer acknowledges.
And apparently they were happy with the experiment and decided to have another go. I'll talk about that later. Well, third time is the charm, so I guess we'll see that too.
And it's a wrap.
PS If you really enjoyed IA, it's likely you won't enjoy the Sandlot games. Sorry...
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