A brand new Earth Defense Force game is out, and I honestly believe it couldn’t have been dropped at a better time. Be it due to a barrage of depressing news in the gaming sphere, as well as the current implosion seen by some AAA titles being released at broken states or merely underdelivering, there’s nothing better than just playing a game that knows it’s silly, stupid, a bit janky, but above all else, simple and fun. Earth Defense Force 6 is just that, cathartic dumb fun… at least at times. When it tries to be a bit more than people want it to be, it fails miserably. It shines when it’s not trying to reinvent itself.

Cute space froggy. Dead space froggy.

At its core, Earth Defense Force 6 is more of the same. Pick a class, get thrown into a hideously PS2-looking environment, shoot the hell out of every alien and giant ant in front of you, collect a ton of loot, repeat. In this regard, I’m glad that the developers didn’t try to reinvent the wheel that much. In some instances, however, I feel like that sticking to the franchise’s “kusoge” (as in, literally, “crappy game”) vibe wasn’t the best idea ever. I understand it looking dated and ugly; that’s fine, that’s part of its odd charm. But Earth Defense Force 6 is now available on PC… whilst still running like crap on it.

On an RTX 3060, with a beefy processor and 16GB of RAM, Earth Defense Force 6 was not able to clock a mere 60fps framerate. It would fluctuate between 30 and 50 frames a second on a good day. I just can’t accept this, at all. Much beefier games like the Resident Evil 4 remake and even Suicide Squad, as crappy as it was, ran better, with higher framerates, whilst boasting actually good visuals. To make matters worse, in true Japanese PC gaming fashion, there’s little you can do to tinker with the visual settings. You can decide on the amount of anti-aliasing, and that’s it. It did help out improve the framerate in about 10% or so, but there was no way to properly tinker with settings in order to come up with a much better performance.

This introductory session went on for an excessive amount of minutes. I hated it.

At the very least, controlling your soldier with a mouse and a keyboard felt like an actual improvement over playing older EDF games on a controller. It’s as simple and straightorward as a PC shooter control scheme can be. Sure, the framerate hampers the experience quite a bit, and the menu interface is very good (pressing the right mouse button in order to go back is certainly a choice), but it’s still the best control scheme I’ve ever experienced in an Earth Defense Force game. Between this and the gameplay loop remaining intact, this means that Earth Defense Force 6 is very fun. It was great to simply pick it up and play. Especially after having to endure some of its really bad cutscenes.

Now THAT’s more like it… bad framerate aside.

Let me just say that a game like Earth Defense Force 6 shouldn’t have unskippable cutscenes. Those are slow, pointless, and sadly, not cheesy enough. There are moments in which this game tries to shove in some borderline philosophical questions about who is the real monster, if we can’t just live alongside the alien invaders, and so on. I wouldn’t mind if this game was completely devoid of a story and cutscenes, because this is not what we are here for. It’s not silly enough, or way too serious to feel like a parody of post-apocalyptic games and movies. Helldivers II did a much better job with its tongue-in-cheek attitude.

Using a mouse and keyboard to play this game is a massive improvement over a controller.

If you put aside the awful introductory cutscenes and unforgivably bad framerate for a PC game, Earth Defense Force 6 is basically more Earth Defense Force, and that’s never a bad thing. A completely stupid but endearing shooter with simple controls and a really fun gameplay loop; that’s all it needs to be, at the end of the day. Would I recommend picking it up on PC over its more traditional console versions? Well, if you can put up with the crappy performance (something which can be remedied with a patch), I’d say yes. Mouse and keyboard controls on an arcade shooter will always be a welcome addition to a successful formula.

Earth Defense Force 6 is available now on PS4, PS5 and PC.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB.

A copy of Earth Defense Force 6 was provided by the publisher.