Review

EDF is a series I feel immense frustration with. It has such a fun and good core. EDF gives me the exact same feeling I'd get when playing difficult games with friends at a very young age at a sleepover. Just bashing our heads against a wall trying to get past some difficult hump well into early morning hours. Strategizing each time "Well, what if we do this and this and wait as long as we can to use that power up?" It has (most of) a good soul.

But EDF is so filled with garbage trash that I frequently miss the forest for the trees. It does NOT feel good replaying these levels over and over to get the stupid upgrades. Their entire upgrade system is fucked. That you realistically need to look up a big chart to see which level ranges certain upgrades drop from, and just farm those missions over and over...it's foul. And it feels more foul because the actual moment-to-moment gameplay is quite fun. That and redoing the missions so you can get more and more armor. Trash, trash, trash.

The pulpy enormous "monsters" (not insects) and kaijus roaming around. The decimating these cities with guns larger than yourself. It's all great. I just want to take a big hammer straight to the shitty upgrade system that they insist needs to be there. It's rare, I think, for one of the core parts of a game's progression systems to be so clearly and fatally cancerous. It affects every aspect of the game. I think it's all the more wretched, because it's not something that makes itself known until you're a decent portion into the "story". But there's this creeping dread where you feel the floor falling out from under you unless you put a stop to the progress you're making and backtrack. And that's no good, because let's be honest. This game has like a max of 10 levels. And we just redo those levels over and over with slightly different skins. So going back to play a level rather similar to the one you're stuck on, in order to maybe possibly upgrade the guns you're hoping for. It just reeks. I want a stern older matronly woman to come in and grab these people by the ears and force them to be correct.