Got Earth Defense Force 5 recently - it's exactly the same as all the other Earth Defense Force games I've played, i.e. incredibly stupid and a lot of fun.
- The main enemies are giant ants and spiders (and in EDF 5, inexplicably, giant cyborg frogs), flying saucers, all kinds of nonsense.
- Like a zombie film where no-one ever calls them zombies, in EDF no-one ever refers to the ants and spiders as ants or spiders, they call them "Monsters". Likewise the giant cyborg frog soldiers are described as "Aliens" that look "exactly like humans".
- The NPC voice lines are hilarious not just in the script but the line reads are incredible too. No idea what the direction was, something like "read this in the most ridiculous way possible".
- And there are 110 missions and every one has some unique dialogue. In a recent mission as we tried to mow down a wall of advancing giant spiders someone yelled "I FEEL LIKE NAPOLEON BONAPARTE!". Another recent classic: ""Monsters AND Aliens, the most disgusting of combos!".
- This game has like 200+ weapons a lot of which are useless, like you'll pick up the "MONSTER ZERO PROTOTYPE A" and the description will include "Due to technological limitations this weapon is almost useless". OK thanks. Another innocuous-sounding gun called like "GM 22L" will be so much better than every other weapon that it's the only thing you use.
- One of the character classes is built around calling in air strikes, usually accompanied by the player yelling "GET OUT OF THE RED CIRCLE" as they "accidentally" call one down on top of their allies.
- You can spawn vehicles, a lot of which are functionally useless (usually impossible to manoeuvre easily, often with worse weapons than being on foot).
- One of the radio messages you can send is an entire song about the EDF, line by line. Sending that to your team in the middle of a very tricky fight never stops being amusing.
- On easier difficulties the game is a silly B-movie cake-walk, mowing down hordes of giant bugs, on harder difficulties you have to spend some time thinking about weapon choices and tactics and it can be a real challenge as the enemies get significantly more HP.
In summary, this game is stupid, the UI is awful, there are an inexplicable number of built-in radio messages, the dialogue is baffling, and I highly highly recommend it to play with friends. 10 ants out of 10.