A couple of years ago, D3 Publisher brought the quirky shooter Earth Defense Force 2017 to the US, pleasing Xbox 360 owners with the kind of destructive chaos that you’d find in any given Godzilla movie. And considering you faced off against giant robot walkers, enormous bugs and, at one point, a huge AT-AT-style walker, that’s a good thing. Sure, the physics weren’t the greatest and the constant chatter amongst teammates got old, but it worked for what it was. Plus you could destroy buildings. Win! Now comes Insect Armageddon, a sequel that’s similar in spirit and approach, but handled a different way. Rather than turning to a Japanese developer to handle this latest effort, D3 Publisher instead called on Vicious Cycle to handle the proceedings. The gamble paid off because, in spite of some slight Americanization issues that make this seem a bit closer to Battle: Los Angeles than Godzilla, Insect Armageddon is a blast.
The plot doesn’t make any real sense, but it’s not supposed to. The game puts you in the shoes of a soldier, as part of a special team that deals with alien invaders. And boy, are there a slew coming your way. Giant insects come up from the ground, burrowing their way through anything they can find. If that’s not enough, giant metallic objects are falling from the sky, including gunships, giant Hector robots and slinky eight-legged robo-spiders, amongst other terrors. It’s up to you and your fellow EDF soldiers to stop the invasion before there’s nothing left of the city. If you’ve played EDF 2017 by any measure, you can probably get a good idea what to expect from Insect Armageddon. This game follows the same blueprint as that one, putting you into many battlefields against enemy forces on the ground and in the air. It gets completely chaotic at times, resulting in slowdown and sometimes overwhelming odds to complete the mission. For instance, how are you supposed to shoot a giant spacecraft out of the sky if you’ve got insects on the ground to worry about?
Luckily, you’ve got the tools to handle the survival. There are over 300 weapons included in Insect Armageddon, along with various soldier types, including Tactical and Armored, among others. Each bring something unique to the table, and the weapons you can put on them are cool, ranging from missile launchers to assault rifles. The only downside is the manual reload. There’s a cool mini-game where you can reload it faster if you hit a “magic point”, but it’s frustrating if you miss it even by a second. Having to run for your life from aliens while your gun reloads can get on your nerves a little bit. The game’s solo campaign is pretty good, though there are times your AI-driven soldiers don’t really perform up to speed. Case in point – when you’ve got an enormous tick on your back ready to explore, and they won’t even do you the favor of defending you. That said, the game does include a superb multiplayer component. You can play locally with a friend in split-screen, which works remarkably; or you can log on to Xbox Live and play with three folks in a co-op campaign, or six players in Survival Mode, where you face oncoming waves of enemies, trying to stay alive as long as you can.
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