Recently, the game crossed an important sales milestone, with D3 Publisher announcing via the series’ official Twitter page that Earth Defense Force 5 has now sold over a million units worldwide. The game first launched in Japan back in 2017, before launching in the West in 2018. A year later, it also became available for PC worldwide.

In our review of the game back in December 2018, we awarded it a score of 7/10, saying, “Earth Defense Force 5 is a great game for folks who don’t need any good reason for just wanting to blow up a lot of bugs with a lot of guns.” You can read the full review through here.

Meanwhile, Earth Defense Force 6 is due out for PS5 and PS4 on August 25 in Japan. A western launch date hasn’t yet been confirmed for the game.

https://twitter.com/EDF_OFFICIAL/status/1559739836847628288

VANQUISH

Let’s get the most obvious pick out of the way first. Coming out at a time when the market was flooded with third person shooters, Vanquish provided something different, injecting flair and style into the combat. Vanquish feels excellent to play, and it’s a shame that it wasn’t played by way, way more people.

After announcing it earlier this week, D3 Publisher’s Earth Defense Force 5 is now available for PC via Steam. The arcade shooter franchise has gained a cult following of sorts and this latest iteration satisfies the urge to shoot hordes upon hordes of alien foes. This time around, players will be fighting the Primers, the first human-like aliens in the series.

Don’t worry – giant insects and other kaiju-like beings are available to fight in spades. Earth Defense Force 5 features the most missions and weapons of any game in the franchise. You’ll choose from four different classes, including the Ranger and Wing Diver, each with their own weapons and abilities. Classes can be switched before missions.

For more information on the title, you can check out our review of the PS4 version here. The game’s copious amounts of downloadable content are also available on Steam at a 20 percent discount. Better hurry though – the discount is only available until July 18th.

D3 Publisher has announced that Earth Defense Force 5 will be coming to PC via Steam on July 11th. Taking place during an alien invasion with tons of horrendous enemies, players control an EDF soldier in the fight. Check out the announcement trailer below courtesy of Gematsu.

How Earth Defense Force 5 differ from its predecessors, which have used every giant monster film trope possible? Simple – the aliens, called the Primers, are the first ever humanoid aliens. That means they’re theoretically smaller though Earth Defense Force has always been more about shooting first and asking questions later (plus lots and lots of explosions).

Along with tons of missions and weapons, Earth Defense Force 5 includes four player online co-op and local two player split-screen. There are four different classes to choose from with new ones to unlock over different missions. Earth Defense Force 5 is also currently available for PS4 – check out our review here.

And there are plenty of these aliens to shoot up. From giant ants to giant spiders to the aforementioned giant frogs, there’s tons of giant enemies to splatter with all sorts of weaponry. These enemies always come in bulk and you’ll almost constantly be overrun during your entire playthrough.

Let’s get this out of the way upfront: the game is not a good-looking game. Everything is decidedly low-textured and the animation for most of the creatures is lacking, with memories of the PS2 popping up from time to time. However, this acts as a trade-off for quantity over quality. Since the game doesn’t use very graphically-intensive creatures, it can fit an insane amount of them onscreen at one time. So while Earth Defense Force 5 isn’t an especially nice title to look at, its main focus is on function. In this case, I think that’s a more than acceptable compromise. After all, the entire game is focused on an invading race of monsters. It would be pretty silly to have only a handful of monsters attack at a time just to make them look pretty.

"From giant ants to giant spiders to the aforementioned giant frogs, there’s tons of giant enemies to splatter with all sorts of weaponry."

There is a story in this game, for what it’s worth. You start the game as a regular civilian going about your business in some underground military base when monsters invade. You get thrown into the thick of it and over the course of the game, you start to piece it all together. What are these hostile creatures? Where did they come from? All of that gunk. But here’s the thing: all that doesn’t matter. The story is very secondary to the gameplay and the game knows this. The story exists for not much more than a few funny one-liners and a vague reason to go from mission to mission. There’s very little effort put forward into making the story compelling. The compelling part is all of the bugs and UFOs around that need a few holes put into them. The good news is that putting those holes into them is really fun and more than makes up for the absence of storytelling.

There’s a few classes that you can go through this game as. Up first is the Ranger. This is your standard soldier and what I think a lot of players will gravitate towards for a good chunk of your playthrough. This is the only class that can sprint, although you probably won’t be using it too much since it’s cumbersome to use in the middle of combat. Soldier-man can carry two of a wide variety of weaponry, from assault rifles to sniper rifles to missile launchers. He also has a equipment slot that you can use as a buff or to call in vehicles. This is the basic way to experience Earth Defense Force 5 but that doesn’t make it bad at all. On the contrary, getting to try out all of the weapon combinations is a great time and it helps you find your own style of bug-squashing.

The Wing Diver is up next. These girls provide a very unique experience compared to their boots-on-the-ground brothers. This class can fly and zip all around and their gameplay style relies on meter management. The Wing Diver’s jetpack as well as weapons are tied to a central cool-down that you need to keep an eye on. If you let this bar bottom out, you’ll find yourself not only being unable to fly, but also unable to even use your weapons, usually with ants the sizes of whales charging straight at you. With this big risk comes a great freedom though because Wing Divers are incredibly fun. The Wing Diver’s weapons encourage either rushing your opponents down or leading a target and lobbing shots at them. Being able to fly around for spurts and rain down damage on your enemies is an intoxicating feeling.

"Like I mentioned briefly before, there’s multiplayer and it is highly recommended for anyone looking for a good time."

The Air Raider is the support class of Earth Defense Force 5. He comes equipped with plenty of gadgets based around keeping teammates alive, whether it be health stations or shields. He can also place down turrets and call in a wide range of vehicles. He can also call in air strikes to decimate wide swathes of enemies. An Air Raider has so many options available and has a responsibility to use them wisely. On higher difficulties, the difference between victory and becoming spider soup is smart play with equipment like the health stations and turrets. When playing with others, Air Raiders are essential parts of the team and usually end up setting the pace for the rest of the team to follow.

And for players who really want to shake things up, there’s the Fencer class. These big bruisers come at enemies in powered exoskeletons and use oversized weapons, melee strikes, and a shield. This class takes a little bit of adjusting to use since they are so cumbersome to move around and can easily get overrun by enemies if they’re out of position and have to reload. But once you get into a good rhythm, this class can decimate enemy forces. Ripping into ants with your minigun before switching over to your melee staff is exhilarating and feels like some kind of destructive dance once you pull it off. This class is for players who want to feel safe running head-first into enemy forces without any promise of back-up.

Like I mentioned briefly before, there’s multiplayer and it is highly recommended for anyone looking for a good time. Online multiplayer gives you lobbies where you can select the exact type of experience you want and join in with up to three other players. This is where the synergies of the classes really come together. Holding off a frenzied horde next to an Air Raider, his health stations destroyed and his turrets close to it, while you both wait for an air strike to come down and save you is a rush. Then once your Wing Diver teammate comes in from the flank to take the enemy group by surprise, the relief is palpable. There’s also split-screen play, where you and a friend can both select your individual class and loadouts. In an age where so many titles forgo split-screen functionality, it’s great to see a title like Earth Defense Force 5 keep the tradition strong and it ends up being a stronger package for it.

The game has a few issues though. Although you can go through most of the missions with no issues, there are some big battles where the frames get dropped hard. This choppy feeling is unfortunate but it happens infrequently enough where its negligible. During battle, you can oftentimes get overwhelmed by a large group and your entire view can be taken up by enemies. This usually ends up leading to your death and it feels frustrating when the enemies absolutely swarm you, as fitting as it is feels for the type of game this is. Dead bodies of enemies also ragdoll everywhere and, while it is funny, it ends up cluttering the screen and making it hard to discern what’s dead and what still needs shooting.

"Dead bodies of enemies also ragdoll everywhere and, while it is funny, it ends up cluttering the screen and making it hard to discern what’s dead and what still needs shooting."

Earth Defense Force 5 is a fun title that doesn’t aim for anything more than that. It sets out to give you many monsters to shoot and many weapons with which to shoot them. In that estimation, it succeeds. If the idea of doing this over and over again with the only real progression coming from new weapons gained at the end of each mission, then this is the game for you. If you want more of a reason to shoot said monsters, this game won’t provide that for you. But if you can get into the campy B-movie tone of it all and just turn off your brain for some alien-squashing action, you’ll find yourself having a great time.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

While we know now that Earth Defense Force 5 will be releasing in the West soon, we still don’t know when exactly the game is set to release. The recent trailer for the game still didn’t reveal a release date, but the game is expected to release in Fall 2018 for the PS4. If that information is enough for you and you’re sure you’re going to get the game, there’s good news- you will now be able to pre-order the game, and there will be both a Standard Edition and a Deluxe Edition available.

Just pre-ordering the game will get you some cool stuff, like a PS4 theme, a Powered Exoskeleton Nix Gold Coat in the game, and a Special Weapons Set DLC. If you want just the base game and these extras, then you can opt to pre-order the Standard Edition, which costs $59.99.

On the other hand, the Deluxe Edition costs $89.99, and comes with a lot more bonus content. This includes two mission packs, 12 variations of additional weapons and support arms, two additional missions, the EDF5 theme, a decoy launcher, and something called the “Star Burst”. Players will be able to get all of the DLC content by March 2019.

You can check out the full list of Deluxe Edition bonus content below, along with some newly released screenshots of the game.

That Earth Defense Force 5 will be coming over to the west, is something that D3 Publisher actually announced all the way back in April. It was a bit of a empty announcement, though, since it didn’t share any information or details at all back then.

D3 Publisher finally broke their silence with a brand new trailer for the localized version of the game- but this trailer, while giving us some footage of the game to chew on, still doesn’t share a release date, or even a release window, for that matter, for the game- all we get is a vague “coming soon”. Since the channel has been shared on the official PlayStation channel, we can also now conclude the game will actually be coming to the west on PS4- but that obviously doesn’t mean that it’s not coming to anything else. It still could- it’s just that Sony have no reason to advertise a potential Xbox version, for example.

Earth Defense Force 5 launched last year in Japan. It will come out in the west eventually, at least on the PS4. We know that much now, if nothing else.

The classic alien repulsion series, Earth Defense Force is going to be leaving Japan for a close encounter with the rest of the world this summer, as announced by PlayStation Asia’s Facebook page today. The announcement for Earth Defense Force 5 localization came with a translated trailer for the title, which hit PS4 in Japan late last year.

The heavily cut trailer explains the premise of the game, a retelling of the first encounter with the aliens that humanity will endure through the series, making Earth Defense Force 5 something of a prequel. While it doesn’t show a lot of direct gameplay, it is out there given the Japanese release.

Of the few details that can be gleamed from the trailer directly relating to the localization, aside from the Summer 2018 release it announces at the end, it would appear that a dub is not planned, leaving players with subtitled Japanese dialog.

One of the new announcements at Sony’s pre Tokyo Game Show PlayStation Japan show today was Earth Defense Force 5, the newest entry in the long running series that has us take on a race of invading bug like aliens, and defend the earth from their onslaught.

The new game debuted with a trailer showing off, again, a race of bug like aliens invading and attacking the earth- because if they weren’t, there wouldn’t be anything to defend the earth from, and there wouldn’t be an earth defense force (see what I did there?) needed. There also seems to be a giant frog holding a gun (no, seriously) in the mix this time around.

The trailer is fairly short, and we couldn’t get much of an idea of what to expect from this new entry when it hits. That said, no doubt that series fans will be happy with whatever EDF5 brings to the table- if nothing else, it is likely to at least provide for some nice, dumb, mindless action and fun.