Earth Defense Force 6 is an over-the-top game that retains its defining elements while adding something new to the experience.

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The Earth Defense Force series has always embraced the inherit silliness of its alien-blasting premise – any action game that prioritises singing alongside gunplay, definitely doesn’t take itself too seriously. For EDF 6, that embrace has become an aggressive yet surprisingly tender cuddle, and it is, without doubt, the most bombastically bonkers and brilliant EDF yet.

For those who have never played an EDF game before, the set-up is simple enough. You and your team of fellow players (four players online or two via local split-screen) must shoot your way through each level from a third-person perspective, clearing the mountains, cityscapes, and fields of their alien invaders. Foes are many and varied, from hordes of giant ants to armoured gun-toting anthropomorphic frogs and swarms of deadly flying drones. Levels are fairly small environments and can be played in no more than fifteen minutes, ensuring the pace of the game is fast, frenetic, and highly addictive, not least because the combat is completely over-the-top explosive madness. Let’s face it, blowing an alien soldier through the side of a building with an enormous rocket and then seeing the rubble to collapse on their prone form will always be a delight.

There are four different player characters to choose from: an all-purpose Ranger, a flying jet-pack equipped Wing-Diver, a support-calling Air Raider, and a heavily armed and armoured Fencer. There have been a few tweaks made to each class, though nothing earth-shaking. Rangers continue to be the best all-rounder, their ability to deploy more vehicles to drive is a welcome addition. Wing-Divers meanwhile have a far more generous energy meter from the offset, allowing the player to fly to the top of a tower and rain down laser beam hell on the enemy below. Air-Raiders now utilise drones to deploy most of their attacks, ensuring a huge amount of weapon and item variety for players prepared to take on the challenge of not using any proper guns. Finally, Fencers remain reliable in their four weapons totting combo, though with a notable improvement in manoeuvrability. In short, it’s the same set of characters that you know and love, just slightly better.

There are literally hundreds of weapons to choose from, giving almost impossible amounts of variety. Laser guns, grenades, bazookas, missile launchers, mech suits, EDF 6 has it all.  Of course, this being an EDF game, far too many of them are utter pants and will only ever be used once before being discarded for a trusty shotgun. The trial-and-error approach is all part of the fun, as is bringing completely the wrong weapon for a level and being unable to kill any aliens – levels with unexpected flying creatures, I’m looking at you. Still, does it make me sound weird to say that I like all that stuff? That all this clunkiness adds to the very particular charm of an EDF game?

In fact, a huge part of the charm of Earth Defense Force is its slightly shonky quality. Whilst EDF 6 certainly makes the most of its generational leap – the armies of enemies you face are vast and screen-filling in their numbers and the draw-distance goes for miles – it also retains the ramshackle look that so appeals to the franchise’s ardent fanbase. Take the graphical detail as an example, though the visuals are far more polished, a few frames of animation are still missing from each player character and enemy model, keeping the B-movie-inspired aesthetic from previous games.

That’s not to say that a whole host of improvements haven’t been made elsewhere, because they have. Vehicles, the bane of a player’s existence in EDF 5, have been drastically improved. It may not sound like much to those who aren’t devoted members of the force, but bikes, tanks, and helicopters are now actually controllable. In the last game, daring to clamber atop a motorbike would be met with shame-faced hilarity as you immediately skidded out of control and embedded yourself in a skyscraper. Meanwhile, helicopters would crash as soon as you even thought about steering them. In EDF 6 all these problems have been fixed, and I delighted in zooming around on my bike like an extra from Akira, shredding giant spiders with my twin machine guns before pirouetting away to make my escape in a cloud of dust. It’s glorious!

Player control has been sorted out too, with your avatar happily, and automatically, clambering over any obstacles they encounter, rendering those many moments your hulking soldier was trapped behind a particularly prominent piece of pavement a thing of the past.

Talking of the past, the time-travel-based Terminator 2-like plot is surprisingly decent and cram-packed with plenty of twists and turns. Sure, it is utter nonsense, but it is oddly compelling nonsense. However, it’s likely to be more meaningful to those who have played through EDF 5, for which EDF 6 is a direct continuation.

This direct sequel approach has given developer Sandlot a decent excuse to revisit levels and reuse art assets from the last game. Swathes of levels are lifted directly from EDF 5, though this time there are time-traveling aliens altering the time-space continuum to contend with. A level that you had previously played to death is suddenly turned on its head when enormous grenade-totting androids turn up. It has led to what is the biggest EDF yet, and true EDFers already know that 100% completion will involve playing through each level multiple times with every character anyway.