Earth Defense Force: World Brothers (Nintendo Switch) Review

Earth Defense Force: World Brothers starts off like how the rest of the game goes: silly with a lot of fourth wall breaks. In this new entry, the characters are cubed, the enemies are cubed, even the whole world is built out of cubes - its cubes taken to the cubed dimension, you could almost call it a Cubed3 kind of experience. The Cubed earth (see what was done there? Ok, no more usage of that word. Promise) is blown apart into smaller blocks that the player must go between in small levels, killing everything, which eventually brings them back together.

The action is almost entirely in the levels, with some very minor weapon or team changes in a menu. Battling happens with a selection of four different soldiers with slightly different stats, weapons, normal moves, and special attacks. The starting character is a Ranger who has a general assault rifle, with the ability to roll, and a special weapon the heals his team. Then a Wing Diver is added; one of those barely-dressed females who rides an awesome jetpack. Rapidly the team starts to expand to those with sniper rifles, rocket launchers, swords, air raids and so on. This is one of the fun parts of the game, seeing who is next on the team.

Story-wise, it is very light-hearted, such that is becomes a detriment. Frequent fourth wall breaks such as talking about reading the text and so on have never sat well with this reviewer, but even the in-game story just does not go anywhere. There are three-four levels entirely devoted to making miso soup. The character stereotypes are funny, and there are not any problems there, other than wishing there was simply more to it. Gratefully, the developer has left the EDF 4 song 'To Save Our Mother Earth' in (at least the first half), which any fan will know and love. It is odd how campy and kind of dumb the song is, but how absolutely cool at the same time for how much it just sets a strange stage for the game.

Early, getting new characters and weapons is pretty fun, but there are some things that take some of this away, such as despite all the characters, most have two to three copies of them with only minor differences. It is these peaks behind the veil that start to erode experience. Really, where this breaks down is it just lacks any depth or staying power. Despite very cool level design (design in the setting sense), there is little to actually differentiate one level from the next. Sure, there are some really cool levels like the Pyramids, or a waterfall/rainbow level, yet they all play the exact same: mow some ants down, get a second wave, kill them too. When you factor in how painfully slow a lot of the characters move, it really becomes a grind instead of something fun. Adding in the full-price cost of the game, it is going to put off a lot of players. At half the price it might be a fun pickup, but there is not enough here, and it wears its welcome out too fast for a full price entry fee.