Earth Defense Force: Space Brothers is a third-person shooter set in a world entirely made of voxels and mixes various elements of the series into a single package. We will see returning characters, enemies, and the classic bug-killing gameplay reimagined in exciting ways for this spin-off title. Right from the get-go, we see every alien mothership attacking Earth at the same time. Considering a single mothership was our main antagonist for every mainline EDF game, their combined might quickly destroys our cubed planet. It’s all good, though. If we manage to defeat them, the various floating pieces of what we called Earth will be put back together.
Heh, don’t question it. Earth Defense Force has never taken itself very seriously, yet World Brothers goes several steps further into the humorous side of it. It casts aside all of the grim aspects and fully goes in on a more children-friendly approach to better suit this cute-looking voxel style. Well, Earth isn’t going to fix itself, so the EDF gives us the position of Commander. We play as a nameless identity that’s job is to assemble a team of four to tackle our missions, of which there are 60 overall. To get to grips with the gameplay, we start off controlling a standard Ranger. There are giant ants in clear sight of where we start that mission, and with weapon in hand, we must save the city. I use the term save loosely there. As is EDF tradition, we’ll likely be doing far more damage to the landscape than the aliens ever did just sitting there until we arrived.
A big new change is that Ability meter. Our Ranger’s ability is simply to dodge roll out of the way, yet this will vary wildly depending on your character. It can range from calling in airstrikes, pulling out a ski to quickly glide through the area, or building defenses. All of them recharge at different rates. Your simple dodge roll only takes a single second until you can use it again, while an airstrike takes 20, as an example. The other significant addition is our SP Move. It is a sort of ultimate attack or defense that fills up as we defeat enemies. This includes stuff such as throwing out toy soldiers that will automatically attack foes or using a massive laser that can hit enemies from across the map. The Abilities and SP Moves do a ton to differentiate each of the 100+ characters we can play as, and that is before taking into account their stats like Speed and Jump.
That is a lot to take in, but no big sweat when you actually play through it. Our method of gaining new characters is by finding them scattered throughout a mission’s area. Going out of our way to pick up our wounded comrades will add them to your list of playable characters. It is largely random as to who will appear on a mission, and in lower difficulty levels, there are three in total to save in a stage. You can ignore them if you want. It is not a necessary part of your missions and may actually be inaccessible in a few missions if you don’t have someone on your team that can fly. With new people being added, they also bring their unique weapons to the mix. Even if you’ve found a great team, you will be gaining more guns to equip, so the incentive to help is always there.
Gone are the weapon and armor pick-ups from defeating enemies. In World Brothers, the only thing slaying a foe gets you are health items or the yellow crate that fills up your SP Move meter percentage. The white boxes only heal the character that picks it up, while the red bin heals the entire team. It is useful, though we gain no actual reward via combat. Everything comes from helping the random wounded characters, meaning we are not incentivized to partake in combat. Instead, upon starting a mission, we are tempted to ignore it entirely and scour the entire map searching for them before getting to the fun bit. This directly contradicts the mission structure and is a habit that is hard to get out of even on repeated playthroughs. The weapon level we receive is tied to our current difficulty, so unless we plan to tackle missions with our lvl 1 peashooters, it is incredibly difficult to ever escape this game flow ruining system.
Another thing to note is that each character gains levels as well. Every time they level up allows them to gain access to using a new weapon category. With enough time and RNG luck of rescuing that same person, they’ll be able to use every weapon in the game. That is the only way to level them up. You can go through the entire campaign with the same four characters, and they will remain at whatever level they had. This system is designed to encourage you to swap out characters to hopefully find the ones you like and always keep on experimenting. It is not necessarily a bad thing.
Unfortunately, yet another system contradicts our willingness to swap people out of the team. Each time you complete a mission with someone, they will gain points into their overall health. This means that a frail character can eventually have more health than a tank. At first, we only have Easy, Normal, and Hard difficulties to choose from. Worlds Brothers is a significantly easier title than other EDF games while on those modes and is where we are most encouraged to experiment. Once you defeat the campaign, that will unlock the Hardest Mode, and beating it again on that will unlock the Inferno difficulty. None of the characters that weren’t part of the mission will gain any residue additional health and will go down like a brick if you prefer to continue playing on those more challenging difficulties. To add insult to injury, there are three versions of every character whose only difference is their color palette, yet they all level up separately.
The whole leveling system in this game is heavily flawed, in my opinion. Thankfully, the actual team mechanic is not. We can instantly swap out to play as any character on our team, which opens up a world of possibilities with all the combinations at our disposal. If you are low on health or need to reload, we can always swap out to take control of another teammate. It adds a lot of strategy to the gameplay, and there is a lot of fun to be had trying things out. You could, for example, take a team made up entirely of flying characters and swap out when needed to infinitely fly around in a mission. Or you could make a team consisting of a bunch of Australians in koala suits taking on the alien horde with katanas. The only limiting factor is your imagination. Well, that and a character’s level as to use different weapon classes than the one they start knowing.
As you can see from these pics, many of the locales are much more colorful and varied than what we are accustomed to in this series. You have rainbow-filled waterfalls, a Chinese-themed map, Egyptian pyramids with a sandstorm raging on, and returning franchise areas now in voxel form such as London. The missions are just as fun. Sure the world just got blown to pieces, and we are the only ones that can fix it, but that won’t stop us from spending several missions gathering ingredients to make miso soup. It would be wise to leave a sleeping Godzilla-like monster alone until HQ can set up an airstrike, though that isn’t stopping a streamer character shooting a rocket at it for views. This is a massively entertaining adventure full of zany people who are the main characters of this tale. You have a time-traveling ninja that never stops going on about honor, a psychopathic catgirl maid, and what’s his face from EDF Insect Armageddon. It has a ton of nods and jokes that only series veterans would get while introducing enough of their own identity that newcomers won’t feel left out.
Most of the 60 missions that make up our journey are your tired and true kill everything before they kill you type of objective. A few task you with defending a building and are not as bad as one would assume, though I wouldn’t mind them not being included again in future entries. All of the missions are on the shorter side. I don’t consider this to be a negative or a positive. It just is. When comparing it to recent mainline EDF entries, 60 missions is a tad on the short side. With how on the forefront the story is laid out this time, it is just a bit more wearisome replaying it multiple times. By the second playthrough, I simply turned off the subtitles and that became a nonissue. The missions are well put together and varied. It keeps feeling fresh throughout despite the repetition of nothing but ‘kill all’ objectives could bring. To review this, I played through the campaign twice and am pretty tempted to do that a third time on Inferno.
On that note, the change to lock higher difficulties behind needing to beat the campaign multiple times was probably done to curve players from going straight to Inferno to farm the best weapons of the game. That is fair enough, though Hard will likely prove too easy for returning EDF fans. It is where a fair bit of my leveling-up criticism came from, as I would not like to grind each of the 300+ character variations to viably experiment on difficulties above that. I’m aware that only EDF 5 has shared progression, yet even then, there is a world’s difference in leveling only four distinct classes than doing 300 fundamentally similar ones. Moving on from that topic, there are two forms of characters. The first are those returning from other EDF titles like Fencers, Rangers, and Prowl Riders. All of them are from previous games and spin-offs. Then we have the other type. These characters are over-the-top stereotypes representing each nation. You have the sombrero-wearing Mexican Amigo Brother, the Australian Koala Brother, and the Indian Yoga Brother. It is quite on the nose and hilariously silly.
With a squad of four, you are never alone, though it sure feels like it. The AI is not much help and are near blind, taking ages to take a shot at a nearby enemy. When they finally do pull the trigger, you’ll find that the damage they deal out is massively reduced to if you were to take control and shoot with that same weapon. That felt plain unnecessary, considering there are no longer a ton of EDF allies on your side. At most, you’ll have one or two people “helping” out your team. You will hardly notice them as they manage to aggro a single enemy at a time if you’re lucky. It feels a lot like the first two EDF games in where there was no ally AI, just you and a slew of foes. Thankfully, this was likely something that the devs were aware of as your teammates take very little damage from attacks when not controlling them. You are also unable to damage them, which is a godsend if you like to use explosives. A few simple commands would have gone a long way to making them feel like more than extra lives, chiefly being able to tell them to spread out as they are always way too close and drawing all the heat towards you.
That is where the online coop feature comes in. It allows you to bring in up to three other people, each containing a squad of four. This is just as chaotic as it sounds and a blast to play. Make no mistake, while it looks cute and unassuming with its voxel style, World Brothers shows no mercy on higher difficulties. It is perfectly doable on solo, yet due to the fact that you are essentially alone against a horde, bringing some friends along for the ride is a great help. Something that I’ve yet to touch up on are vehicles. They will be put into some maps, but you’ll have to make due without them for the majority. You’ll feel indestructible within them in lower difficulties. That is not so when you bump the challenge up, where they become more like glass cannons that deal a ton of damage yet can’t withstand much. Bikes, helicopters, depth crawlers, and more haven’t made the cut. All we have here are a few tank and mech variants. At least we still have giant rock ’em sock ’em robots, though.
For as many changes and distinct features World Brothers implements, it still feels like an EDF game. This is the closest that a spin-off title has come to capturing the addictive nature of the mainline series. Maps are smaller, and the enemy count is lower, yet the controlled chaos that is the mainline series has been replicated here with enough tweaks to give you a reason to play this entry. I can see many newcomers falling in love with World Brothers, and I feel it’s one of those rare titles that can also satisfy existing fans while maintaining its own identity. With over 100 characters to unlock, some are less viable than others, but this isn’t exactly the type of min-maxing experience. It’s one where you choose which one seems more fun at the moment or finding some strange combo that you somehow make work. This is limited on higher difficulties by the fact that gaining overall health isn’t shared among characters, and it certainly didn’t help that they made three individually leveled palette swaps of each character to artificially boost it as “features 300+ characters”.
Something very much worth mentioning is that each character has a personality. Each of them has something to say if they are set as your squad leader or end up getting the most kills. Even during gameplay, they have their own unique dialogue. There is quite a lot of voice acting put into this that brings them to life. Small details like the EDF 4 Ranger frighteningly yelling “dodge?!” while rolling and being in disbelief that you put him as squad leader. Meanwhile, EDF 2 Ranger is saying sorry if he messes up as he is not used to working with people, a small nod that there are no friendly AI in that game. There is so much attention to detail that fans will find a lot to geek out over. I sure did. And newcomers can simply laugh at the absurdity of it all, such as EDF 5 Air Raider being an insane history buff and is prone to manically shout about things. I love it.
While being kind of on the short side with only 60 missions, you can find many different reasons to play World Brothers for hundreds of hours. On higher difficulties, there can be four to five characters to rescue. Doing so levels them up much more than saving them on an easier mode. It also gains more overall health for completing a mission, though that is based on RNG and can net the same if you’re unlucky. Every character and every weapon can be unlocked at any difficulty. This gives us a choice of playing how we like. You won’t unlock level 3 or 4 versions of weapons, though they are hardly needed on easier modes. One of the most common ways this title feels cheap is that they teleport you from an advantageous position to a random part of the map in cutscenes. I suspect that it doesn’t have an off-character camera to use in these scenes, so they choose to teleport you and show you what’s happening that way. It is an inelegant way to handle this, but it then proceeds to drop you in the middle of a river surrounded by enemies afterward, which will be the death of many an under-leveled character on higher difficulties.
Every time you use an SP Move will play a small cutscene too. They are cool for the first couple of times when using that character, yet will get old after some time and break the game’s flow. It is much appreciated that we can actually turn these off, so they don’t play out. Another thing of note is that there aren’t invisible walls marking the end of a map. In World Brothers, the end of the map is actually the end of the world. If you get close to the edge and look down, you’ll see nothing but the abyss. If a Hector blasts you right off the map as you are distracted looking at that, you will fall then randomly respawn somewhere nearby, all while losing a chunk of health. It adds another layer of strategy on the moment to moment basis as you don’t want to get knocked off accidentally. This can be put to your advantage as well as knocking off enemies kills them outright. I can honestly talk about this game all day, but I’m sure I’ve more than put my point across. EDF World Brothers is a flawed game with a ton of charm and just as much content waiting underneath for those willing to give it a chance. I consider it the best spin-off of this franchise and one I’ll gladly keep playing alongside its mainline contemporaries.
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