Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2
Released: September 26th, 2024
Developer: Yuke's
Publisher: D3 Publisher
Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Switch, Xbox X/S
Review copy provided by publisher
Speaking as someone who always wanted to like Earth Defense Force but never could, Earth Defense Force: World Brothers was a total treasure. I find the mainline EDF games ponderous, slow, and frustrating, but none of that is apparent in the series’ colorful, fast paced, wonderfully ridiculous spin-off.
Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 offers more glorious nonsense, which pleases me greatly. It hasn’t really changed much at all, but there are plenty of new toys to play with and, of course, an expanded roster of characters.
So many characters. Strange, hilariously out-of-place characters. They’re so great.
After all, who wouldn’t want to wage war on giant insects with an army of catgirl maids, yodelers, plague doctors, and women who think they’re thoroughbred horses?
God, I love this stupid game.
Like its predecessor, World Brothers 2 is a third-person shooter where you battle against loads of gigantic ants, spiders, robots, and UFOs. The action is fast paced, dropping you into bug-filled maps with little to get in the way of the combat. In WB2, you assemble a team of four fighters who you can switch between on the fly. Not only does this give you flexibility in battle, it makes navigating the maps a lot of fun.
Many characters boast ways of nimbly navigating the environment - some sprint, some are able to fly, while others can launch themselves forward with exaggerated leaps. Being able to swap between your team members allows you to combine these options, boosting and flying around. You can also use your nimble characters to move slower ones a lot faster, getting into position quickly before changing into someone who wouldn’t get there in time.
During a mission, several Brothers/Sisters will be laid out on the map awaiting rescue. When you pick them up, you’ll add them to your roster. Each one comes with their own weapon, a number of abilities, an ultimate move, and while there are some shared or similar skills among them, there’s an impressive amount of difference in playstyles.
Even the standard EDF soldiers have a lot of variety between them - one might summon turrets while another can cheer to buff his stats. Those with flight suits run the gamut of associated weaponry from sniper rifles to shotguns.
Regular EDF fighters are efficient and effective, but they’re nowhere near as wild as the “Brothers” and “Sisters” you collect, each one representing a given country and often fighting in ways that evoke their nation. Many of them are also weirdos, and a few are even debatably human.
I honestly can’t remember every fighter from the first because there were so many, but I can at least say Earth Defense Force 6 is repped in the sequel with a range of new EDF members. Enemies from that game make an appearance as well.
If you’ve not played the first, here’s an idea of what’s in store: There’s a Canadian in a teddy bear suit who throws rocks. You can have a vampire with a sword who summons homing bats. Obviously there’s a woman wearing an apple-shaped helmet who throws apple-shaped grenades and summons giant apples because apples.
Ultimate skills vary in utility, from massively damaging airstrikes to healing AoEs. While abilities are inherent to each Sibling, weapons can be exchanged between characters - at first, a fighter’s restricted to one single weapon type, but if you rescue a double of them, they can access more. That said, the original owner of the weapon gets a 20% damage bonus, so it’s usually a good idea to stick with what they have.
Swapping a weapon isn’t always a bad idea. You might have someone with excellent abilities but a crappy gun, or maybe you maxed out their owned gun’s stats and want to keep using them while still getting useful weapon XP. Or maybe you just love crossbows a lot and want more of them.
I love how characters feel specifically relevant to my interests. I mentioned the Plague Doctor, and she’s awesome, using a “Ghost Chaser” gun that levitates a screen’s worth of enemies while dealing rapid damage. I also greatly enjoy the yelling German in a gas mask who deploys laser turrets.
Not all Brothers are equal, sadly, with some being just too slow or limited to feel particularly useful. It’s understandable, really, considering how many there are - they can’t all be winners.
A personal disappointment is Swan Sister, the Russian ice skater who dresses like a harlequin - she looks great, but her weapon has too limited a range for her low defense stat, the shield she summons is tiny and doesn’t even block every type of projectile, and while her ultimate is incredibly powerful, the missile she calls takes so long to land that the intended targets may well be dead before it triggers.
Every character has alternate versions with different colors to be rescued, and every gun has an enhanced version that either upgrades damage or changes the behavior, such as the Thoroughbred’s rocket launcher going from firing one missle per shot to a line of three. You can also equip accessories to confer passive buffs.
While there are a tons of fighters to find, I would have liked a better leveling system for them. This area hasn’t really evolved at all from the last game.
Weapons don’t take very long to max out, and the only real post-mission reward you get for your team members is a health increase. The alternate versions of Siblings have identical abilities, and rescuing the same one doesn’t feel very rewarding when all it does is increase the weapons they can equip at the expense of their aforementioned damage bonus.
If you stick with the same four teammates over and over, you’ll almost certainly get bored before you’ve gone through the 100+ missions. Luckily, I’ve found a lot of fun in constantly trying out new stuff as I get it. I refresh my teams a lot and have made use of the multiple slots to store specific ones.
As well as simply offering more stuff, World Brothers 2 has changed some of the old weapons based on how players responded to the first game. You’ll know this because the provided summaries - written in character and regularly breaking the fourth wall - will tell you. It always makes me smirk when a character explains how some people thought their weapon was weak and promises it’s better now.
While some of the text and dialogue is funny, a lot of it’s also repetitive and obnoxious. One thing that’s carried over from the prior game is that it never shuts up - ever. Every time someone is selected, attacks, or does a move, they have to yell a phrase from the two or three they have. Scrolling through the selection screen is particularly harsh, since lingering on anyone for longer than half a second will make them say something in a loud and/or high pitched voice.
This is in addition to all the story dialogue being shouted at you throughout every mission. It can get a bit too much at times, especially if someone has a lengthy phrase they repeat until you know it by heart - I wish developers would learn that the longer the sentence, the more irritating it gets with repetition.
Some of the writing is weirdly sexist in a way that comes off more baffling than offensive. You’ve got the apple lady endlessly asserting that “even the women” have to fight this war, while the bio for the baseball player pretty much says she isn’t as good at hitting balls as men. Being “PC” comes up a number of times, and in ways that sound awkward and unnecessary.
Like I say, it’s not offensive nor even seems to be trying to make a point. It’s just moderately baffling and kinda dumb.
While the audio leaves less to be desired, the bright visuals, boldly blocky art style, and inventive Sibling designs are delightful as ever. It’s like if Roblox didn’t look like complete shit, offering a great contrast to the realistic graphics and washed out colors of the main EDF entries.
Despite unlocking so much stuff, the menus for looking at it all aren’t very good. Characters are selected from a huge list that has some basic sorting but no filters, and the emblems you can rep your team with are found in a big grid. Manually scrolling to find what you need is tiresome, and you can’t sort them by the newest acquisitions. Weapons fare better, broken up into categories, but even then it can be a hassle to navigate.
Missions are relatively short, designed to be blitzed through, and the maps border on being arenas. This is all positive stuff as far as I’m concerned. I’ve lost hours to these missions, having fallen prey to the “just one more go” cycle. Battling giant ants is addictive, and the breezy formula only makes it easier to stay hooked.
Multiplayer is given more of a focus this time, and it’s rock solid stuff. All players get to use their entire squads, and while that can trivialize most missions, being ludicrously overpowered is its own kind of fun. It really needs the ability to drop into active missions though, since waiting around until the current one's over to join a game is not really all that viable, and it'd be nice to be able to start a missions without waiting for others to appear first.
If the rest of the Earth Defense Force series was anything like World Brothers, I’d have been a fan from day one. Needless to say, I’m absolutely a fan of the spin-off, with World Brothers 2 carrying on the quick, accessible, and nonsensically entertaining action of its predecessor. It’s packed full of fun toys, drowns the player in content, and you can play as a woman who thinks she’s a horse.
She spawns carrots behind her when she sprints.
How is that not what videogames are all about?
8.5/10
