Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2

Genre: Third-Person Shooter

Players: 1-4 Co-Op (Local Wireless / Online)

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Review:

The Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2, released in 2024 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch, follows in the footsteps of its direct predecessor, being a spin-off game of the main Earth Defense Force series that offers a more lighthearted tone and even sillier content.

To that end, World Brothers 2 once again features a brightly-colored “voxel”-style boxy art style best known for games like Minecraft. This definitely makes for a less serious presentation, though this series has a history of a B-Movie tone anyway, so this is hardly a huge knock to the series. And to its advantage it does mean that this game can have environmental destruction.

The two World Brothers games are very similar to each other, and I have even copied over much of the text of my review of the first game, since most of it still applies here. However, there is one humongous change, at least on Nintendo Switch (and I’m not talking about the new giant humanoid enemies) – World Brothers 2 doesn’t suffer the massive performance issues the previous game had.

To be fair, it’s still not perfect – the framerate does drop a bit in places. But this is nowhere near the eyesore that we saw in the first game, with massive dips in framerates, resolution, and with distant enemies looking both blurry and with horrible low framerates. Of course, this isn’t to say that World Brothers 2 looks impressive by any stretch of the imagination, but at least it is no longer painful to look at.

For the gameplay, World Brothers 2 once again follows in the footsteps of other games in its series, with players blasting aliens and giant bugs with decent Third-Person Shooter controls. However, while other games in the series have you collecting weapons like a “looter shooter”-style game, World Brothers has players collecting squadmates. As you’re playing, you’re notified of downed comrades you can rescue, and doing so adds that character and their weapon to your arsenal.

In theory, this adds even more variety to your customizability, not just outfitting one character but a squad of four, or swapping them out with other characters with different abilities. Unfortunately, this comes with multiple problems.

Firstly, only characters in your active party get any sort of bonuses after battle, discouraging players from making use of all those other characters they collect. But even worse, this gameplay mechanic ruins the “looter shooter” elements, as characters are now limited in what weapons they can equip by a “skill level” that can only be raised by finding duplicates of that character to be rescued, something that’s completely random and will require a lot of tedious grinding.

And just to make things worse, the game isn’t even clear about what skill level equipping a given weapon on a given character even requires, meaning you’ll be getting piles of worthless weapons and won’t even know when you can make use of them.

Overall, Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 is much better than its predecessor simply thanks to its much-improved performance on Nintendo Switch. However, that doesn’t fix the numerous other issues this series has, with grindy, repetitive gameplay that takes the joy out of getting new characters and weapons. This is still an enjoyable game, but it seems like some remarkably poor arbitrary choices have made it far worse than it could have been.

tl;dr – Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 once again takes the Third-Person Shooter series’ “looter shooter” gameplay loop, adds a boxy “voxel” art style, and a new mechanic centered on rescuing allies and building up a team. Unfortunately, this ally mechanic is poorly-executed, not only actively discouraging you from fully using it, but wrecking the “looter shooter” parts of the franchise in the process. The Nintendo Switch version of the game thankfully has much-improved performance over the prior game, but that doesn’t fix all the other issues present here.

Grade: C+

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