Earth Defense Force: World Brothers

Genre: Third-Person Shooter

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

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Review:

The Earth Defense Force series has been running since the 2003 release of Monster Attack in Europe and Japan on PlayStation 2, and as of this writing there have been no less than 13 entries in the series, which has players fending off an attack by alien invaders, often featuring giant enemy bugs players must destroy en masse. World Brothers, released in 2021 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch, is a spin-off title, paying tribute to the series by referencing characters and events from throughout the franchise, but approaching the topic matter with a sillier, more cartoony art style and tone.

To that end, World Brothers 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.

Unfortunately, despite the unimpressive visuals, the Nintendo Switch release of the game has some pretty nasty performance issues. Huge framerate drops at times, as well as sometimes fuzzy resolution, with blurry resolution not too far in the distance as well as lower framerates for distant enemies. This is pretty bad, and it definitely feels like the Nintendo Switch could do better than this.

For the gameplay, World Brothers 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.

I feel like the ideas in Earth Defense Force: World Brothers have potential, but the execution here is just terrible, and it’s compounded by technical performance issues on Nintendo Switch that make this clearly the worst version of the game to get. As a result, while I like some of the ideas this game has to offer, I ultimately have to recommend players give it a pass.

tl;dr – Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 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. This game still has some fun ideas, but ultimately I have to recommend that players skip it.

Grade: C-

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