For as long as I can remember, B movies have always taken a preposterous premise like a giant spider terrorizing a city and so forth. Seeing the obvious novelty in the idea, Sandlot finally brought the concept to gaming with the Earth Defense Force series. Since then the series has found a small and devoted following, but never took off like Oneechanbara. In an effort to get people ready for Earth Defense Force 2025 and introduce new people to the series, D3 decided to port Earth Defense Force 2017 to the Playstation Vita. However with so many quality titles on the Vita, is Earth Defense Force 2017 Portable worth your time or is it a poor port of a crappy budget title?
Lets look at what’s HOT and what’s NOT in our review of Earth Defense Force 2017 Portable.
HOT
Way too Many Unlockables
Easily the best part of Earth Defense Force 2017 Portable is there’s almost always something to do. The campaign starts by offering you a total of 60 missions, which can be played on a number of different difficulties. Every difficulty offers you various unique weapons and has a combined total of 150 – 200 different guns. After you finish the game’s campaign, you will unlock a new character that utilizes different gameplay elements. These include additional speed and the ability to fly, but now reloading costs you energy (along with flying), plus she has another 100+ new weapons for you to unlock. Overall you’re looking at a 100 or so hour grind to unlock everything, so there should be more than enough to do.
NOT
Low Quality Graphics
While the PlayStation Vita features a lot of amazing looking games, this has got to be the worst looking games on the system. The giant ants look dreadful, spider hairs look low res and slapped on, building destruction animations are quite simple and the drops look like something you would expect to see in the original Doom. This becomes more apparent as you go through the story, since higher-level enemies are extremely simple pallet swaps. However, Earth Defense Force 2017 Portable can maintain its frame rate even when a lot is going on (40+ enemies on screen), so at least there is a small benefit to the poor graphics.
Online Limitations
Contrary to the game’s single player mode, you will be subject to a number of limiters while playing online. The first limit is how much life you can have, so if you have 3,000 life and you’re playing normal, then you’ll probably only have 1,200 life. The other limit is what level weapons you can use, which means you can’t beat the game for your friend online. While I don’t personally mind the first limit, it can get annoying to constantly change your build depending on what level/difficulty you’re playing on. In addition to limiting your life and power, you must also deal with friendly fire. For the most part it isn’t an issue, but there will be times when you accidentally kill or get killed by someone firing at waves of enemies. Thankfully you can revive a fall enemy, though it will cost you half your life unless you have a special item. Not the biggest problems in the world, but with so few people playing online, it might be difficult to find a reliable player.
