So the game came out in Europe (two weeks after the US release). Vicious Cycle again shows how they don't get stuff. First they made the supposed retro hero Matt Hazard a bald space marine guy instead of a design that would actually fly in an 8 bit game, now this.
The first and biggest problem is this: It's too damn easy. The guys in your three man squad can revive each other to full health within less than a second. It usually takes much longer for an enemy group to wear any of them down from full health. I've only had three wipes so far IIRC. Makes health packs completely unnecessary, after all you're back to 100% health if you die and get revived. Don't even need to bother avoiding enemy attacks. I've dialed the difficulty up to hard despite not having more than the starting equipment. Didn't help. All that does is make it take forever to kill anything (the health increase for enemies is way more than the 2x per difficulty level in Sandlot games, probably to make up for the lower number of difficulties), wipes are still pretty damn rare so missions take forever to play through.
Speaking of missions, they're long. Sandlot EDF missions usually have 1-3 major waves of enemies, this game has 5 or more in every single level. I guess that's meant for coop sessions to last longer but it's really not fun. In Sandlot EDF games you'd go into the shorter, easier missions on higher difficulties to get cool high level gear but there's no such thing as a short mission here. On hard a single battle can last 15 minutes and you'll have tons of those before the mission finally ends. It gets fucking tedious. Sure, you aren't meant to go into hard with early gear but in a Sandlot EDF that would be told to you in the form of a quick death, not battles that last so long that you'll lower the difficulty out of sheer boredom. Instead of a crazy fast frenzy it turns into a boring slugfest.
High level loot drops are also a thing of the past, while you can still get them you cannot use them until you've gotten enough experience to get your character up to their level. So if you happen to find a super-awesome gun in a tough battle you don't get to use it until you've gotten to the point where it's no longer awesome compared to other weapons.
I do like the varied armors with their abilities but I'd rather have looted weapons be independent of your armor level and homing weapons are much better than in Sandlot games. I don't like how Hectors have a weak spot, you used to be able to gun enemies like that down by hitting them anywhere (well, maybe you can but playing on hard it takes so fucking long to kill a Hector I have no idea if it does damage to hit their shiny parts), I didn't like it when 2017 added the hatches to spawner enemies either.
Topic: Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon (Read 4414 times)
