Earth Defense Force 2017 Portable is a Vita port of the Xbox 360 version of EDF 2017 including a few small additions such as online coop and a new character. For those unfamiliar with the series they are 3rd Person Shooters in where you fight against tons of giant bugs in a large, near open world map. You play as a soldier dubbed as “Storm 1” who is no different than any other soldier nor does he possess any special talents. What separates him from the rest of his comrades is that he survives long enough to get much better weapons and armor. All soldiers including yourself possess infinite ammo and will fight until they are killed. It is no doubt a very useful thing to have and it is balanced by the fact that you are fighting a large swarm of insects that will quickly overwhelm you. You can’t reload at will, annoyingly enough, so you end up shooting into the sky just so your character will reload his weapon and be ready to fight. It is more of a game where you want to be stopping them dead in their tracks in a fast matter, not loading clip after clip into a single enemy as your team is being torn apart. Getting bigger, better and crazier weapons is what this game is heavily centered around.
After killing enemies they have a chance of dropping either health kits, green weapon crates or armor. Armor is a very useful thing to collect as it is effectively your life bar and little by little you get more overall health as you collect them, allowing you to take far more damage than when you start the game. Weapon crates are the only way you receive new weapons and the higher the difficulty, the better the reward. There is no guarantee you will get a new weapon however, it may be one you already own, in which case you get nothing. If you lose the mission you get absolutely nothing from the items you’ve collected. That is the game’s biggest flaw in my opinion. I get not rewarding failure but since there is no way to try out the huge amount of weapons beforehand it is very discouraging to enter a mission with an experimental load-out of new weapons knowing that it most likely will result in a fruitless waste of your time. Allowing them to keep just your armor pickups to slowly become tougher would have been far more preferable. As it is, it’s not unlikely some people will just stick with what works and grind the easier levels just to step up to a more challenging difficulty.
What further aggravates this issue is that you can only carry two weapons. This title is greatly in need of a shooting range type of mode. The guns are really cool to use and most differ greatly from one another. There are flamethrowers, AI drones, a gun that scares off enemies and just so much cool stuff to play around with. I have no idea if any new guns were added into this. I’ve played the original home console version of this for 20+ hours and this portable version for 15 and I am still unlocking cool new stuff. The loot is a big draw to this game which is why it baffles me that you are punished for experimenting. Moving on from that, your character can jump, roll, switch weapons and shoot. There is nothing fancy here, just a basic control scheme tragically missing a reload button. One of the first thing you will notice if you played the console version is that the graphics have been slightly toned down. Luckily there are just as many enemies on screen at once and we still have the huge maps to fight in. It is effectively the same game and not dumbed down in any way.
Like the console version the frame-rate takes a huge dive at times. At times it will be running in the single digits and look like a slideshow. Funnily enough from what I’ve seen is that this portable version has far more stable frame-rate overall. Environments are all large scaled and have fights that would be the ending of any other game. The city map is by far my favorite as all the buildings are destructible and more often than not you will be the one to cause far more damage than any giant insect could ever hope to. It is a lot of fun just abandoning your comrades and go around blowing stuff up with your explosive weapons. You could also take the stairs all the way up some buildings to get to a better vantage point to shoot some alien scum, that is until they start climbing up the building to chew your face off and making you run back down or you can simply jump off the building as there is no fall damage no matter how high you are. Blowing up buildings can also be useful to give you a clear view of the enemies and pick them off from afar. It will never get old seeing enormous monsters knocking down entire buildings in its attempts to stomp me like a Dance Dance Revolution dance pad.
One environment seriously sucks unfortunately. And those would be the underground tunnel sections. They take all the fun things of the game like wide open areas, color and freedom, only to replace it with confined maze like tunnels of nothing but brown copy and pasted textures. Be very careful with your explosives here. It is extremely effective in such a small area but it’s all the easy to blow yourself up. A giant ant or even an ally may get in your way due to the small area and the following explosion will kill you in a single shot. The AI in this game is very poor. It’s not uncommon for an ally to look into the barrel of your gun like if he found a portal to a new dimension and is keeping an eye on it in case Cthulhu crawls out. Other times they will just stand there and be shooting at a wall at distant enemies’ general direction. Far worse than any of these and the second biggest issue with the game is that enemies will often get stuck or just roam around. What that means is that it is a common occurrence for you to have to walk all the way across the enormous map just to kill a single enemy. That seems to happen nearly every mission and is a huge pain. They have fixed absolutely nothing that was wrong with the console version and the last thing you want to do while on the go is to slowly walk or roll your way back across the map like if our character took brain damage and thinks he is Sonic the Hedgehog.
That may be the only situation where you may want to use a vehicle. There are mechs, tanks, helicopters and the speeder bike from Star Wars. Sounds awesome right? Well yeah, it would be if it wasn’t for the sole fact that the vehicle controls are so terrible that I consider them broken. It is insanely clunky and awkward to use. If you were to overcome that you will quickly realize that they are useless. They deal a pathetic amount of damage and are very fragile. When there are giant monsters and destructible buildings in your game and you pass on using a mech suit you know something is seriously wrong. Luckily you never have to use them. They are just there to be there and can be on foot at all times if you want. It would be cool if your allies could drive them but oh well. As much as I mocked our fellow EDF soldiers they are very useful to have around. It gives your enemies another target other than you and they can hold their own. Like I said earlier in the review the only difference between them and you is your weapon so when they have a great gun it is possible that they are even better than you. It can get pretty lonely without them as well since they are constantly yelling corny things and evening the odds against the enemy. If they lose their commander you can get near them and they will follow you around which is a cool feature. There is no penalty if you let them all die or even kill them yourself if you so desire.
Enemy variety is pretty solid. You will start with just fighting ants but will soon be up against giant robots, spiders, gunships and even Godzilla himself. It is truly an impressive sight, seeing giant robots walking through the ocean and onto the shoreline as you and your soldiers try to keep them at bay with rocket launchers. Every enemy has a projectile attack that can hit you at a distance. Ants for instance shoot a few balls of yellow acid like projectiles out of their rear end. Increasing the difficulty makes enemies tougher, a bit faster and in the ants case it increases the number of projectiles from their attack. It is pretty much impossible to tackle on the higher difficulties from the get go and I’d suggest sticking with Normal or Hard until you have sufficient strength to move on to the other two. It is a bit harder on the Vita due to the small analog sticks on the console making it harder for precise precision from a distance. All enemies are much larger than you so it is an easy shot at a short distance but for the long range combat a sniper or a homing missile would do the trick if you can’t pull off shots with your regular weapons. One annoying thing that I must mention is how the game takes away control of the camera to make you look at something like a UFO arriving. That is annoying enough alone but doing that while you are in the middle of a fight and can still take damage is an extremely bad idea. The game doesn’t do this enough for it to be a critical flaw though you can’t help to think how they thought this was a good idea the few times it does happen.
Story is bare-bones and none interesting. You will be doing the same thing from start to finish and it is just there to be there. Voice acting is sub-par but it does add to the cheesy B movie feel it was going for. Graphics while slightly inferior to the console version still are impressive with how big the maps are and the amount of enemies it can cram in. Music is alright as well. It keeps the adrenaline flowing though it is nothing memorable. The physics are pretty weird and are so absurd that it is funny. Blasting a giant ant with a shotgun will cause it to fly off into the sky Team Rocket style and downing a UFO causes it to clip through the floor and right into the abyss. It has this feel of being cheaply made on a tiny budget that oddly enough works in its favor for the tongue in cheek route it goes for. There are 60 missions total and while there is no good story it is interesting to see and hear how the world is falling apart as the time goes by and see the aliens get desperate as well, unleashing more fierce creatures. Most levels can be completed in about 10 minutes making it feel right at home as a portable game. With the promise of better rewards for playing on higher difficulties it is hard to resist the urge to come back and replay any of the missions you desire. This is a large game with a lot of content even if at times it feels like an unfinished prototype with its odd problems.
Everything up until now also went for the consoles versions but the biggest and best addition for this version is the new character called Pale Wing. She is an awesome woman that can fly around in a jetpack and fight the giant insects while airborne. It is lots of fun zooming around the place and landing building from building to recharge your energy meter that powers your jetpack. She also has her own unique weapons since she can’t use any of Storm 1’s weaponry. Her weapons are much more high tech featuring stuff like lasers, snipers that shoot lightning, energy crossbows and others goodies only available to her. The cool thing about her weapons is that they reload by consuming the same energy her jetpack uses so it becomes much more tactical as you have to learn how to manage both your offense and maneuverability. If her energy runs out she will be a sitting duck as she runs nowhere near as fast as Storm 1 nor can she roll out of the way of attacks. It adds a whole new way to play the game and I find her much more fun to play as. Unfortunately she is unlocked only after completing all 60 missions which will take quite some time. While it adds a ton of replayablity that also means those that played the console version have to play through the whole game again to get to the new content. Online multiplayer is dead and I know no one with the game so I could not test it sadly. All in all this game has a ton of problems. So many in fact that it felt like I spent this whole review hating it. The truth is that this game is a ton of fun even with all its issues. Having played the console version as well I effectively played this game twice from start to finish and I have no intention of stopping my giant bug massacre any time soon . If you have a 7th gen console I would suggest Earth Defense Force 2025 as it is a sequel that improved on the formula a lot and if you have a current gen console I would suggest EDF 4.1 which is a remaster of 2025. For us handheld gamers this is a great game that I would highly suggest to anyone looking for balls to the wall action and legendarily cheesy one liners.
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