Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon

by D3 Publisher

• New Intense squad based action with 3-player online multiplayer start to finish, and 6-player survival mode
• Split-screen co-op returns for local multiplayer action
• EDF's trademark gameplay where you must kill thousands of swarming giant bugs and robots in a completely destroyable city
• Over 300 weapons: assault rifles, rocket launchers, energy weapons, sniper rifles, grenade launchers and more
• Four upgradeable armor types: Jetpack, Battle, Tactical, and Trooper

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0043QSR5C
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 7.5 x 0.6 inches ; 2.4 ounces
• Media: Video Game
• Release Date: July 5, 2011
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,608 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
  • #93 in Video Games > Xbox 360 > Games > Action > Shooter

Product Description

Platform: Xbox 360

Amazon.com

Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon is an Arcade style third-person shooter based in a not-so-distant Science-fiction future. The game features individual or squad-based action against hordes of alien insect and robotic enemies where your actions are all that stands between survival and extermination of the human race. Features include: 300+ weapons, four upgradeable armor types, improved graphics over the previous game in the EDF series, co-op and local multiplayer options, a new weapons unlock system and more.

Story

In Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon thousands of giant insects and aliens once again ravage the earth, and only the Earth Defense Force can stop them. Defend the city of New Detroit against an infestation bigger and meaner than ever before. Destroy these monsters at all costs, even if it means turning entire city blocks into rubble.

Continue the fight against the alien insect horde as a member of the Earth Defense Force.
View larger.

Gameplay

Like the first game in its series, Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon is a third-person shooter featuring raw arcade satisfaction on a gigantic modern scale as players take on wave after wave of alien insect and robotic enemies. The game also features fully destructible environments in the fictional city of New Detroit. Gameplay improvements over the earlier game include: improved graphics, more weapons (now over 300), a new weapons unlock system, four upgradeable armor types, local split-screen play as well as online action, and special online modes.

Key Game Features

• New Intense squad based action with 3-player online multiplayer start to finish, and 6-player survival mode
• Split-screen co-op returns for local multiplayer action
• Hardcore 'Inferno Mode' for elite gamers
• EDF's trademark gameplay where you must kill thousands of swarming giant bugs and robots in a completely destroyable city
• Over 300 weapons: assault rifles, rocket launchers, energy weapons, sniper rifles, grenade launchers and more
• Four upgradeable armor types: Jetpack, Battle, Tactical, and Trooper
• Massive replayability through arcade style scoring, tons of weapons to collect, and multiple difficulty levels in every game mode

Additional Screenshots

Individual & squad-based action. View larger.

300+ weapons. View larger.

Offine and online multiplayer. View larger.

4 upgradable armor types. View larger.

Product Description

The bugs are back in Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon, and its no picnic for the world's elite soldiers as the most concentrated giant insect invasion ever threatens human civilization unless the Earth Defense Force (EDF) can stop them! Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon from D3Publisher (D3P), is a co-op multiplayer Arcade Shooter that gives the player the ability to destroy thousands of giant bugs and turn an entire city to rubble in an unforgettable gaming experience built for replay.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 42 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars In Short - Buy It July 5, 2011

By Gamblor

Platform for Display:Xbox 360

Fun: 5.0 out of 5 stars   

You begin with one of four armor types (classes), and are able to unlock another after a mission is complete (so, 5 missions in and you'll have them all).

Instead of leveling a character, you level your armor. I have my Battle Armor leveled to Rank 6 (with 8 being the max). It takes more XP to go from 5-6 than it does to go from 1-5. Fortunately, the harder difficulties give exponentially more XP.

There are 3 chapters, each containing 5 missions. They will take you around 15-25 minutes each. There is a surprising amount of variety in the missions - search for missing soldiers, blow up giant anthills, find a downed aircraft, etc.

The minimap shows your character's position, your 2 allies' positions (either friends or bots - after you beat the game once, you have the option of playing without bots), health drops, waypoints, and weapon drops (minibosses and bosses drop randomized weapons).

The loot is very enticing. In addition to leveling your armor (which provides you with more HP, class-specific abilities, etc.), there are around 200 weapons to purchase (ranked 1-8), and 107 weapons that are randomly dropped from bosses. After a playthrough on Normal difficulty, I had 22 of the 107. And unlike the recent Dungeon Siege III, the difference in loot (weapons) is massive and noticeable. A single upgrade to a weapon might double the damage, increase the turn speed, decrease reload times, and feature zoom as well. It's a great system.

One of the final bosses dropped a weapon called the "Air Tortoise." It fires 1 slow rocket and takes 10 seconds to reload. However, that rocket does 9,999 damage. Good stuff.

You're looking at 5-6 hours for the initial playthrough, and 50-70 minimum to level up all classes and get the best drops (and finish on Inferno!).

Pros:

- Lots of incentives to grind levels and gear, and it does not get old quickly.
- 3-player campaign co-op that scales difficulty and 6-player Survival mode (although your class is locked to Trooper for Survival).
- Decent mission variety.
- Ridiculously huge bosses. Like, square-mile big.
- Easy on Normal and hard as hell on Inferno. Something for everyone.
- Mechs, Turrets, Tanks
- Only 40 bucks!

Cons:

- All missions take place in the same city, and while there is some difference as to the districts they take place in, it's still a whole lot of "same" looking streets and buildings.
- The graphics aren't great at all, but it's a budget title, there's a ton of stuff crawling and blowing up all over the place, and the framerate is very smooth (I'd rather have that, in all honesty).
- The first half of too many missions basically tasks you with killing 300-400 ants until the good stuff gets started (again, not that bad considering they'll drop a ton of health to get you ready for the bigger bugs).
- While the bosses are huge and awesome (and aesthetically different), they all have the same weakness. After you kill the first boss, you know how to kill them all, and I'll bet that you could guess even before you play the game, haha.

Anyways, I'd recommend this game to pretty much anyone, but especially people who enjoy...

Too Human
Starship Troopers
Left 4 Dead
Massive destruction and explosions galore

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Huge Letdown and Shock at it's Brevity! Good Shooter but not 2017! August 5, 2011

By Allen H. West

Platform for Display:Xbox 360|Amazon Verified Purchase

Fun: 3.0 out of 5 stars   

As a follow-up I've played it through a second time as a different character and while brief it's intense and fun deserving of FOUR Stars - many improvements but so brief a time it takes to complete compared to the originals 53 levels but fun and challenging as hell despite it's shortcomings.

As a huge fan that has played and completed EDF 2017 at 100% four times solo without cheating over the past two years I anxiously awaited this version. I'm not saying it's bad but let's be honest this baby feels absolutely NOTHING like EDF 2017 and it lacks the grandness of scale with its variety of landscapes across 53 LEVELS - did you get that? 53 Levels with five degree's of difficulty and it took me over 4 months my first time to do a 100% completion of everything.
I played this game over two nights perhaps 8 hours total and the game was over and I had no idea that I'd just played the final Boss Level of Chapter 3 Mission five and in fact I thought I was saving wrong and kept trying to get to a new level and played the thing three times before I did a search for a walkthrough and found I actually had finished and to my shock after Three Chapters of five missions that was it? That was a WTF moment!

It's not all bad, it's prettier visually, there are some creative creatures that seem much harder to take down as it's seems my weapons are always to weak and sometimes the firefights can be intense as hell but it simply has no feel of EDF 2017 - what's in your hands "the controller" feels nothing at all whereas the old 2017 you could feel the impact of the spider webs, the splashes of acid and the explosiveness of the weapons in your HANDS to where you'd swear the controller may pop out of your hand and I cannot feel any of that with this game, literally the tactile feel of 2017 is VOID on this game.

Also, the landscapes are a rinse and repeat and you don't truly interact with the landscape like 2017 where you could walk up the skyscrapers and battle from rooftops from a distance or battle within the highway tunnel from one side from the beach to the other gully and within that same tunnel and use the immense landscape in your strategy and while the enemies can be huge the landscape lacks that visual appeal or feel. While the mechanics of vehicles were bad in 2017 and that is much improved I can't help but feel during those 15 missions that I'm playing the same mission over and over - go to a waypoint and wait to battle over and over again. 2017 53 levels gave huge variety even if much of the Japanese landscape was replicated many different strategies were required for survival.

While there's supposed to be over 300 weapons they are really cheap at giving them out and the dang Menu system is confusing as hell compared to 2017. So far I have no weapons that greatly impress me at all at normal level especially since I've been playing Borderlands GOTY for 8 months and addicted to it's fantastic first class weaponry and it took me months of constantly playing it to finish it Solo 100% with the exception of Crawmaxx. This has no replay value or timing that could come close to Borderlands addictive weapon system where there are over 17 million possible.

Recently bought Duke Nukem and hated it no matter how long it takes I could care less but EDF IA is fun and interesting but don't expect to have any feel whatsoever to the classic 2017 and if you want a value and kick ass fun then get yourself a copy of Borderlands GOY with the downloads and have months of fun instead of 8-10 hours.

Though there are a number of improvements to the original to me they get a "F" for migrating a terrific corny classic but forgot to migrate the FEEL and FUN of the corny original that could provide months or in my case two years and now I have an urge to dust off 2017 and give it a whirl with a fresh start since each time again it can be as hard as hell as you earn your weaponry and at least they let you know the game is over by running the credits this damn game ran no credits and I played the final chapter over and over again thinking I screwed up the Save because it wouldn't let me go beyond Chapter 3 Mission 5.
Three Chapters??? - Who are they kidding? A single DLC from Borderlands runs longer than 8 hours and they sell for $10 or less. What a RIP unless you get it in a bargain bin or resale disk or rental. Enjoy - just don't expect EDF 2017 - this is definitely NOT from the Japanese studio. Disappointed but will still give it a 3 star for its improvements and intense firefights as a FPS but if I were rating it as being EDF 2017 sequel it would be a big fat ZERO Stars!!!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Not the proper sequel I was hoping for March 6, 2012

By Brad Lee

Platform for Display:Xbox 360

Fun: 3.0 out of 5 stars   

Earth Defense Force 2017 became a cult-classic due to the excessive, B-movie style cheesiness combined with the solid shooter mechanics and huge variety of weaponry, ranging from hilariously useless (firecrackers) or unnecessarily dangerous weapons (Air Tortoise), to the incredibly powerful weapons (Goliath). When I found out a sequel was in the making, I got all giddy, my prayers had been answered! All they needed to do was add online co-op, what could go wrong?

Quite a lot apparently.

I want to start right off the bat and say that Insect Armageddon is not a bad game, and in some ways it improves upon it's predecessor, most notably by not only including online co-op, but upgrading it from only 2-players to 4. Technically speaking, Insect Armageddon looks much better than EDF 2017, and it adds several new types of enemies for more variety (my favorite being the wasps zipping around the battlefield shooting acid at you). The turrets and vehicle segments feel more fleshed out and much more fun overall than EDF 2017's frustratingly awkward vehicle controls.

Unfortunately though, I feel like the sequel gets more wrong than right, and fails to recognize many of the aspects that made Earth Defense Force 2017 a uniquely enjoyable action game.

The biggest disappointment comes from the "impact" of the weaponry. As I described in my EDF 2017 review, the impact of the weapons is one of the most enjoyable aspects of Earth Defense Force. It's not just about bigger explosions and higher stats, it's about seeing those insects rocket into the sky. In Insect Armageddon, the corpses vaporize almost immediately after killing them. So while the insects may start to fly into the sky, they vaporize before flying 10 feet in the air most of the time, so the impact is not as apparent, so killing all the bugs starts to feel more like a chore. It's not just the bug enemies either, in fact, many of the other enemies are much worse. The Hektors, once towering robots that recoil and bend and contort from every powerful blast of a shotgun or rocket launcher, now are agile robots that run around somewhat aimlessly, and have no reaction to your supposedly powerful weaponry. I actually thought I was doing something wrong in the first level, as my attacks elicited no reaction and it took so long to kill I honestly thought I was doing no damage. But I did end up killing it, and the result was nothing but disappointment, compared to the epic explosive awesomeness of destroying hektors in EDF 2017.

The b-rate movie corniness is also a bit annoying. While it tended to grate on the nerves a tad in EDF 2017 as well, it felt a bit easier to forgive, as the corniness felt genuine. In Insect Armageddon, the game knows all too well of its corniness, and almost attempts to be a parody of itself, except that it's not quite clever enough to pull it off. It's a bit like the latest Duke Nukem. It tries a bit too hard to make fun of itself, and ends up appearing insecure rather than funny.

Unlike in 2017, in Insect Armageddon there's 4 distinct classes to choose from. At first I thought this was to the game's benefit, as it gives the game a bit more variety. The classes include a zippy speed-based character with a jetpack, a standard soldier type most similar to the trooper in EDF 2017, a support character that can drop a turret, and a hulking heavy armor type with a shield and area of effect explosion attack. The reason why the classes fail in Insect Armageddon is because, by comparison, none of the classes are half as fun as the "Jet" class. Why bother running around when you can slide across the ground twice as fast and jet rooftop to rooftop instead? The heavy armor seems particularly useless, as the shield and area of effect attack do little to make up for the agonizingly slow movement speed and lacking ability to dodge attacks. I think Insect Armageddon would have been much better if it had focused solely on the Jet class, and just focused on more and more weapons.

But worse than the imbalance of classes is the requirement to level up each class, and how all the weapons are now split up. In EDF 2017, it was frustrating to keep picking up weapons you already have, but in Insect Armageddon this problem is made much worse, as you frequently get weapons for classes that you're not playing, and even if you do get weapons for your class, there's a good chance you won't be a high enough level to use them yet. And by the time you level yourself up and try it out, disappointment sets in when you realize it's just a marginal improvement over a weapon you're already using. The variety of weapons is simply lacking in Insect Armageddon. While it does have the occasional charming and quirky weapon, most weapons are just improved versions of previous weapons. There's also far fewer "niche" weapons that work great against specific enemies (such as the flamethrowers in 2017), making for less strategy. Having to level up classes is also detrimental to the online co-op. If you don't keep up with your friends and find yourself several levels lower, it's like bringing a pea shooter to a nuke party.

Another disappointing aspect comes from the scale of the game. EDF 2017 captured a truly epic scale, and while you would run into the occasional invisible wall, that was usually just a problem with a handful of levels. Insect Armageddon, however, has more invisible walls than you can count. Even if you're going "where you're supposed to go" you'll more than likely run into plenty of invisible walls. This is a huge problem, as a big part of EDF comes from dodging like crazy and getting a comfortable distance between you and your enemies to properly launch huge explosions. In Insect Armageddon, I died many times unfairly simply because I was dodging and retreating from giant spider web attacks only to find myself cornered against an invisible wall. This problem feels exponential when playing as the Jet class. That skyscraper right there, that one you can scale, but the one right next to it you can't. Why? Invisible wall.

In the end, Insect Armageddon is a fairly fun co-op shooter with both online and split-screen options. There's not too many like it, and fans of co-op games will likely have a blast in spite of its many flaws. It just feels like this title could have been so much more, if only the developers had recognized why EDF 2017 was so successful. The grand scale, the enormous weapon variety, the satisfying sound and impact of your over-the-top weapons is far more important than improved graphics, classes, and cheesy one-liners.