EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 6

My first instinct with EDF6 was to treat it like a Helldivers competitor. That framing is wrong and will get you killed on Hardest. This is its own cult thing, closer to a loot-shooter roguelike dressed in PS4-era graphics than anything chasing modern AAA production values. You pick one of four classes before each sortie, load out two weapons plus support gear, drop into a mission map, and shoot everything that moves until nothing does. That loop repeats across 147 missions on five difficulties, and the design actively pushes you to replay every single one. Hardest and Inferno lock until campaign completion, and a 70-percent overall clear rate is required before weapon limits lift in online lobbies. The grind is the point. The four classes play genuinely differently, which matters a lot for replayability. Ranger is your ground-pounding all-rounder, now with a backpack tool slot for auto-firing turrets and improved obstacle traversal. Wing Diver flies on a rechargeable plasma energy system, raining down electric sniper shots and melee strikes from above, though her energy meter punishes greedy flying. Fencer is the tank option, slow but carrying four weapons with two movement-boost dashes baked in by default, making positioning feel more like a puzzle than a sprint. Air Raider is the biggest departure, now equipping three weapons, a support item, and a vehicle, with a new drone category that makes solo play far more viable than before. Mix these four in co-op and the chaos gets genuinely entertaining. Online lobbies hold up to four players, split-screen handles two locally, and mission progress is now shared between offline and online modes, which is a quality-of-life win the series needed. On PC specifically, a couple of things deserve attention. The port launched in July 2024 with a forced Epic Online Services login requirement for multiplayer, which caused a wave of refunds and negative user reviews. Sandlot patched it out by October 2024, so that issue is resolved, but the menu UX is still awkward, PC options are thin, and the game forces a full return to the title screen to swap between keyboard and controller input. Crossplay does not exist between PC and console. The engine is identical to EDF5, meaning textures are firmly PS4-vintage and some asset recycling is very obvious. None of that tanks the framerate on a mid-range rig, and the physics-driven bedlam of large setpiece fights runs acceptably even on modest hardware. What you lose in visual fidelity you gain in the sheer scale of enemy swarms, where hundreds of giant ants, jetpack-equipped aliens, and kaiju-class mechs fill the screen simultaneously. The weapon loot system is where the real hours go. Enemies drop weapons and armor pickups on death, with higher difficulties yielding higher-level gear. The spread runs from standard assault rifles and napalm grenade launchers on the low end to weapons that deal five thousand damage per second or fire twenty bouncy grenades per shot on Inferno. Finding a loadout that clicks, then watching earlier missions collapse under it, is the main dopamine loop. A fair percentage of the drops are genuinely useless, and vehicles still handle with a jankiness that no difficulty setting fixes. The opening tutorial is padded, slow, and actively annoying for anyone who just wants to shoot something large. The time-travel story mechanic is a genuine surprise for series fans coming in from EDF5, adding some narrative payoff to missions that would otherwise feel like straight repeats. New players will likely ignore the plot entirely, and that is also fine. If you need tight netcode, ranked ladders, or sub-20ms time-to-kill exchanges, this is not your game. If you want a co-op shooter that hands you increasingly absurd weapons, sends a thousand giant bugs at you, and asks almost nothing of your brain for the next hundred-plus hours, EDF6 is hard to argue against.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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