EARTH DEFENSE FORCE: WORLD BROTHERS

My first reaction to World Brothers was mild skepticism: take the Earth Defense Force series, already a niche comfort-food shooter, and rebuild it in chunky voxel blocks with cartoon stereotypes cracking jokes? It sounds like a budget cash-in. It is not. What developer YUKE'S pulled off is a genuinely disarming spin-off that swaps the mainline series' grimy B-movie dread for something closer to an animated Saturday morning cartoon, and the tonal shift earns its keep. The core loop will be immediately readable to anyone who has picked up an EDF game before: drop into a floating island of voxel city blocks, kill every giant ant, spider, or robot on the map, collect loot, repeat. What changes the texture significantly is the party-switching system. You field a squad of four characters simultaneously, each with their own health bar, weapon loadout, and a character-specific ultimate ability that charges from pickups scattered across the battlefield. Swapping between a Wing Diver who can get airborne to reach rooftop recruits, a Ninja Brother who dashes out of danger, and a Fencer soaking hits up front creates a rhythm that feels more tactical than anything the mainline games have offered at a surface level. Rescuing up to three additional Brothers and Sisters per mission, who then permanently join your roster, feeds a light collection loop that keeps the campaign moving. The voxel art style pulls real weight here. Buildings crumble into satisfying blocky debris when you fire rockets into them, and the bright palette keeps the chaos readable in a way the mainline series sometimes struggles with. The cast of international characters, from British Royal Guards to Canadian bear-people to Egyptian demigods, leans hard into cultural stereotypes for comedic effect, and the voice acting commits to the bit with genuine enthusiasm. Some of the writing lands, some of it outstays its welcome, but the game is clearly self-aware about the absurdity it is selling. Enemy variety covers the franchise's greatest hits, all reimagined in block form: giant ants, hovering motherships, and occasional kaiju-scale boss encounters that let you pilot mechs and punch through buildings. The honest knock against World Brothers is the one every reviewer lands on: mission variety is thin. The campaign's roughly 60 levels cycle through the same objective structure, wave clearing with an optional boss, without introducing many mechanical surprises as you progress. Solo players will hit the repetition wall faster. The game is noticeably more fun with friends, and 4-player online co-op runs smoothly on PC. It is also worth noting that the PC version has no split-screen support, unlike the PS4 release. Hardcore EDF veterans who put hundreds of hours into EDF5's class depth may feel the character roster, while large, blurs into stat variations after a while rather than genuinely distinct playstyles. That said, Steam players landed at 81% positive, and the consensus across critics puts it around a 76 average score, which is a reasonable measure of a game that does one thing well and does not pretend otherwise. If you are brand new to EDF, World Brothers is probably the most welcoming entry point the franchise has produced. If you are a returning soldier looking for the same scale and weapon-tree depth as EDF5, temper expectations accordingly. Either way, in co-op with the right people, it remains one of the more purely enjoyable third-person shooters in its niche. Alex, Scout Team