Have played the first two missions so far, and… idk, if that’d be your first contact with the series, you would be left wondering what the hell this game is all about.
Otoh, if you know the series, you can enjoy the wonderful hamfisted way they set up the premises for what’s to come, and i enjoyed that more for its C-movie plot than anything, so… i’ll check back when i have had the time to get to stage 10 or so.
The EDF series died for me with 4 when they replaced the magical ps2 physics with havoc physics. The walk animation alone felt too heavy and weird. Also the ants started goring individual screaming pedestrians iirc.
Seems as solid a jumping-on point as one could reasonably hope for- it’s a reboot taking place before the events of the previous games, and there’s some quality-of-life improvements versus 4(.1). The lyrics to the battle hymn of the EDF, however, have been dropped from the chat.
EDF is always hard to get into until you start to unlock goofy weapons imo. When you just have like, a shotgun and then you unlock just a rocket launcher, it’s a little, ’ What’s the deal with these game’s fans?’
Case in point and I’m pretty sure I told this story before, but me and my friend spent a good 10 minutes with him shooting off 100/sec unguided metal splinters into the air with me spotting about half the radar distance away. Or him equipping a giant ass missile requiring my laser sight to slowly bumble its way to King Boss Spider and Asshole Wasp Queen, sending them cartwheeling helplessly for 15 seconds. That actually was our key strategy for that mission where all our previous plans failed!
this was me before 4 came out. i saw there would be 2 new classes, new engine with 3d boxes instead of sprites, online play, and recalled insect armageddon and was like “there’s no way sandlot won’t fuck this up”. then it came out and it owned.
as did 4.1.
and 5.
i should be tired of these dumb games because i’ve been playing them for a decade now but apparently sandlot can do no wrong
I played through this about a year ago and the thing I remember most vividly is the inclusion of the giants from Zangeki no Reginleiv as frog people. Which means there’s now some gory dismemberment to be done and that is the most viscerally fun shooting I’ve seen since, I dunno, Soldier of Fortune maybe (the first one).
In my experience, unlocking the goofy weapons is actually making it harder to get into- I feel like I should be reveling in the chance to use the motorbikes and ball-bearing proximity mines and so forth, but part of me just wants to stick with the plain ol’ machine gun + bazooka because all the interesting stuff seems so inefficient and/or difficult to master.
This game is half price for the weekend. I am tempted to get it, even though I am not done with 4.1 yet. I am a little wary of the idea of starting over from scratch. But the screenshots in this thread look nice.