I’m a big EDF fan; Fighting hordes of bugs and monsters in corny scenarios with increasingly ridiculous weaponry and machinery is something that is fun with friends and I’ve played my fair shake of all the entries in that franchise, usually in local co-op. I was cautiously optimistic when World Brothers was announced, because it looked like it would shake up the EDF formula, at least a little and go in a different direction. On the other hand, EDF spin-offs (Iron Rain comes to mind) are often weird on both their tone and mechanics. After having completely played through EDF:WB, I feel like it was a good attempt, bogged down by stereotypes (if not borderline racism) and some weird design decisions about the progression systems.
Dropping into large maps filled with voxel bugs and robots, EDF:WB has you play as a team of four characters, each equipped with one weapon, one special cooldown-based skill and one ultimate power that must be charged up thorough the fight. You can swap between characters at almost any time and if your team members go down, you can revive them up yourself. Instead of having multiple weapons, you now have multiple characters. It’s a nice idea, but it fails short in some places. Since armor upgrades are tied to your character and enemy damage ramps up pretty quickly, it’s tough to change if at some point you don’t enjoy your character’s special abilities. The ultimate moves are also almost moot for some of them, because they won’t really charge up at all during a map of normal length. While in other EDF games you could have turrets or special satellite beams on certain soldier classes, now they are tied to specific characters which allows you to build a neat balanced squad but reduces the amount of options you have for each character.
Weapons range from assault rifles to missile launchers to more exotic ordinances like homing beetles and snowballs, and you unlock new weapons by saving characters during fights. Not all characters can initially use all weapon types unless they are leveled up, and this compounds the issues mentioned in the previous paragraph because even if you have a really nice special ability, maybe their weapon skills just don’t cut it. You also unlock accessories for your characters but they are such small numerical increases to specific stats, in the magnitude of 1.01 multipliers that they almost don’t matter.
The campaign and characters make some direct references to previous EDF titles, break the fourth wall in some funny spots and move from EDF greatest hit to EDF greatest hit up until the end. Where it falls apart for me is how weirdly some nationalities are represented, in a sometimes quasi-racist way, if not overly stereotypical way. You get characters from previous EDF games, but you also get characters from certain countries of the real world and they have about one stereotypical personality trait, such as the Canadian “Bear Brother” always saying “eh”. I’m just not sure that a Japanese character always talking about honor, a Chinese character bent on making money and a Mexican ‘lazy’ character are good ideas. Why do that when the British character just talks about The Queen all the time? You could’ve at least found a -better- stereotype.
Ultimately that’s a sour note on an otherwise okay and fun game. The EDF spectacle is all there, with the giant robots, dinosaurs and swarms of bugs, the weapons are okay and the multiple characters have some neat abilities here and there. I’m just really not sure about that whole “World Brothers” thing. I’d rather play another mainline EDF title.
EDF! EDF!
