EDF Insect Armageddon

This was a nice little budget title - I didn't expect that I would like it so much, but I do. The game is an excuse to let you shoot giant bugs and robots, and it does so in a really fun way.

I have been playing this for a whole month.

You get 4 different soldier/armour types to do the shooting with, and the game has 3 extended stages broken up into 5 levels each. Each level has multiple objectives in them for you to complete, such as destroying enemy carriers, anthills that spawn infinite numbers of ants or other nasties, and checking on various dropships and friendlies, as you fight the alien bugs.

The four soldiers armours are all pretty different, in effect 4 character classes:

• Battle - a tank type with good armour, a shield, and crappy weapons.
• Tactical - a pet type who drops turrets to do part of the fighting for him.
• Jet - a high mobility type that can hop and zip around the battlefield quickly
• Trooper - a standard soldier without the above special armours, but can do everything else faster or better -reloading, first-aid revives, running, dodging, bigger weapon selection.

I started off with a Tactical cause I liked the turrets for a bit of automatic firepower, but eventually I found that most of soldiers have some sort of auto-aiming shot anyways, so the turrets weren't really necessary. The first armour I got to level 8 (top level) was the Jet, and the Tactical is only slowly closing in at level 7. The other two I haven' really played much until the last week, but they each have their strengths

The weapons are pretty interesting too - there's all sorts of goodies from shotguns to missile launchers, fitting all sorts of play styles. The most notable of all of them are the Level 8 armour's weapons - they are called Pesticide guns, but they are more like clean nukes - you fire one, and everything in a 2 city block radius is vaporized (including other players) If a rifle does 400pts a shot, and a rocket launcher does 1500, these nukes do 500,000 points. That's enough to one-shot all the sub-boss type enemies, most of the boss enemies, and even the end boss will bite it in one if you manage to hit it between the eyes. (Or in a few shots if you use the nuke's splash radius damage.) This thing even permanently destroys anthills at a distance, when normally you have to fight your way up to a hill and plant an explosive charge on it.

The Battle gets a mortar version (arc fire)
Tactical gets a missile version (lockon)

Jet gets a sniper rifle (zoom in recommended)

Trooper gets a cannon version.

All of them are slow to recharge, and can't be sped up with an active reload.

The downside of this thing though, is that it's very easy to accidentally kill all the players on the map including yourself, resulting in a quick mission fail. The only player who might survive a nuke is the Battle armour tank guy, if he has his energy shield deployed and at full power, which is generally not the case.

Still, lots of fun, especially at it's price point.

Upsen.