Given the first World Brothers turned out quite well in terms of review and profits, D3 did the obvious, by greenlighting a sequel, simply called EDF World Brothers 2.
Obvious to a certain degree because EDF spin-off never received sequels, but i did like the first World Brothers, so i was more than happy to see Yuke’s (also behind EDF Iron Rain) come back for more voxel Earth Defense Force.
This is a direct sequel as well, and this time, after watching the skies so hard in case of another alien invasion coming from there, we get bitten in the ass by a monster that was inside our squared, voxely Mother Earth, Gaiarch, which erupts from its core and breaks the world apart, meaning it’s up to the EDF once again to make the planet whole by sticking back the destroyed pieces.
This is done by your team of newbies trying to find the more experienced EDF members scattered around the globe, and also new allies like an alien-esque amnesiac girl (that’s like an anthromorphized version of the Daroga enemies, since she loves the buggers and has a Daroga style hat of sorts), new and old bros and sisters, a time travelling Caesar (not the monkey), highlighted by odd giant replicas of the main EDF classes to fight as enemies before taking down a mothership.
And among other things, halfway through, after defeating a Mothership, a Primer Ring from EDF 6 goes down and sucks you and the other story-important Bros into it, so we can go back in time and other timelines to fight boss style enemies from previous EDF games, like the centipede-dragons, the Vargalta, the giant walking fortress, and of course you have to shot the Primer Ring in a specific spot to get sent back to your regular timeline, no loops this time, it just them borrowing the plot and stuff of EDF 6 for a one-off thingie.
I will say the plot eventually becomes a lot better than i expected, pretty cheesy but also pretty fun (and veering into Godzilla VS Hedorah territory by its final act, curiously enough), despite overly committing to the meta-comedy quirky tone, as this is the “funny spin-off”, so for example it opts to channel that 70s style bad dub of a kung fu film, tongue in cheek attitude on purpose but also playing up modern metahumour and self-awareness of the stereotypical accents given to the characters based on their nationality.1
And they go full ham on it, as the tutorial mission is an immediate spoof of the one in Edf 5 (and the one in EDF 6, to a degree), taking place in a base that just looks like it, complete with them referencing the now meme worthy “they look just like us” line originally said while witnessing for the first time alien frogmen… here with a twist as you fight enemies that do actually “look just like us”, as in giant sized Infantry/Ranger units shooting at you.
Basically World Brothers 2 (as the first one did) tries to be the Airplane-style (plus a lot of meta humour) comedy companion to the main series, the quirky cousin, which to a degree it makes sense, it’s not a huge conceptual stretch for an EDF spin off to try and be funny as a straight up b-movie comedy (there is PLENTY about it to make fun of, indeed), but once again, they simply try too hard to be on the joke too, and even when they do stick the landing on a gag, they never know when to quit milking a bit and often go too far and kill any latent humour there could have been, especially going overboard on 4th wall breakage, referencing EDF tropes like them having a new, actually tropical beach level to say it doesn’t look like the “coast shore missions” of the other games that would just start you off at a pier or a river in an alread reused locale.
Eventually you get used to it, and it’s not that bad because it comes from a place of sincerity instead of repressed disgust, the heart is in the right place, yes, but EDF is just plain funnier when it plays completely straight and embraces itself fully without trying to be snarky, the mainline titles and the utter absurdities done in those games are just inherently far funnier than any commentary or layer of defensive/deflective irony you can try to give them. Go back to my EDF 6 review for more on that.
As expected, the gameplay fundamentally is the same as in the first WB, though there are some small new additions (like the red boxes returning but acting as healing items for the whole squad) insteam of armor upgrades, weapon belonging to a specific unit granting extra damage and some customization options) and some streamlining done, so for example, this time around every unit has two abilities, an Evasive Ability and a Support Ability, alongside the special supermoves, and basically rebalanced the melee combat, as some of the characters in WB 1 were melee only, and even with the abilities they had to work with their main weapon, were a bit akward to use, not much of a surprise in TPS, but still.
They fixed that completely as now even melee focused units like the Cossack Brother have the main attack be ranged, alongside infinite uses of melee attacks and some mobility-centric ability, like the Cossack Brother in question doing a cossack dance to become airborne for a bit. XD
Also, other units have infinite uses of melee attacks, like the EDF 2 Pale Wing unit, in order to round out and not make others unit feel shafted, though it’s a bit weird that now most Ranger, Ranger-adjacent or story relevant Bros and Sisters unit have the ability to sprint (introduced in EDF 5) as a base feature…. most of them.
It’s odd how this basically applies to Ranger or Ranger-akin classes, but NOT the versions of the same class seen in the older games, so the Infantry from EDF 2 for example does not have a sprint, despite its class being the old equivalent of the Ranger… then unique Bros can sprint despite falling into a Fencer-like set up like gatling gun and shield (see Ceasar, for a random example).
That aside, the main allure is indeed having more “EDF bros” to collect and use in your 4 members squad, with plenty of returning but also many new cool ones, like the Merlion bros, the Turkish oil wrestler with grapple manouver, the non-Dracula vampire unit, and unique stuff like the Chilean bros that has a penguin suit and attack with turrets that activate/make harmful the otherwise harmless energy rings his gun produces.
There’s even a legally distinct Irish Umamusume archetype. XD
Thanks to pillaging from all over the EDF series, there’s a good enemy variety too, as they not only included the new foes introduced in EDF 6, but they also go back to pilfer stuff like a couple of enemies from Insect Armageddon, the scorpions (which can inflict poison status with the poison they spit out) and the robo mantises, and as much i feel the dialogue tries too hard to be quirky, i agree with them being aginst dissing Insect Armageddon just because it’s a spin off.
The new foes here also being giant sized replicas of EDF classes is good as well, since they do offer more challenge, come with a variety of weapons, and they can be pretty tough to deal with alongside the regular alien and robot foes, due to their humanoid design and IA style, and some of the new enemy variants seen in late game are quite cool.
Stages are basically a best of areas from previous mainline EDF games, including London, the European city where frogmen first attack in EDF 5, and original areas like the beach/island one and the ones original to the first WB game, making for a familiar but fairly big (for EDF standards, anyway) set of locations to battle in over the many many missions.
Stages now also have better presentation and often feature NPC soldiers already in battle, alongside some of the story relevant NPCs you meet and often actively help you in the missions (like Neon, or Scuba Bro), some that can even offer to revive you once and can be revived/rescued when fallen/defeated, and cave levels now offer some new elements, like mushrooms that can be used as improptu cover and magma that damages you but not the enemies, but don’t expect much in this regard, it’s EDF after all.
And here i will have to say that the main issue the World Brothers sub-series has is that it’s a bit too similar to the mainline series, which is a fair criticism, after all this is a spin-off, it has basically more freedom by default to try stuff of its own alongside what it’s expected…. but it doesn’t, and it also suffers – even if to a lesser degree – from the repetitive nature of gameplay and level design, which i didn’t expect this spin off to, but since it plunders from all the series, it suffers from them having too little locations to have the dozens and dozens of missions take place in, like, especially since they also recycle the new locations the first WB did, and still don’t add enough new ones, even odder since its a “World Tour” style spin-off, so yeah, they could have made more than a couple of new locations, i mean, make an Africa stage, make an Amazonian level, do an ice level.
There are some little variations thrown eventually, like the stray defense mission where you have to defend a Barga from swarms of enemies, which comes as the tail end of a set of missions where you have new experimental tanks with weapons made to deal with specific annoying enemies, and one where you basically board a tank and play Space Invaders with a bunch of Darogas approaching/spawning from a beach. Or the final set of missions where you used a drill vehicle to travel through the Earth’s core and have to protect it because its necessary to break the hardened inner layers of the core, that one is fun.
I understand it’s also a “Catch 22” situation because if it was too different it won’t be quite EDF, but there’s definitely a lot more than can be done, like creating your own EDF character by mixing and matching parts and stuff, or stuff like making the aliens-monsters playable as well, i myself would love to use the kaijus and even the regular spiders… well, later one some of the unique story bros become playable and have basically the abilities of a specific big enemy like a kaiju or a Death Queen, so there’s that, but there’s plenty more of unique insane shit that Yuke’s could potentially make to further help distinguish this subseries from the mainline entries.
That said, it’s not as immediatly and consistently more challenging than the previous one like EDF 6 was, it’s still more challenging than WB 1, but the more difficult missions, sensibly, are the ones deep in the last big chunk of missions, it does make sense, and it’s a very meaty package, with the campaign being 107 missions long (taking about 30 hours to finish on Normal difficulty), just shorter of the 147 missions of EDF 6 (the base game, i mean), pretty much as much as base EDF 5 did, and there’s a mission pack DLC with a new campaign, like in the first World Brothers titles.
Speaking of DLC and cameo characters, this time we have Riho Futaba (a DLC in two different version of D3’s mascot character/gravure model) and some really deep cut like Dragon Sister from D3’s Dragon Sisters, been never since they made a cameo here… NO wait, it’s me overthinking it, given her abilities it’s actually a DB/Journey To West reference than anything else, in reality.
If you expected more cameos from other D3 series coming as part of the season pass, you don’t get that, you do get the various notable NPCs from EDF 6, like The Professor (hope his burger ulcer is doing better) or The Colonel (not that one, more of a bootleg one that’s actually Nega SGT Harman from Full Metal Jacket), so it’s a bit disappointing, BUT the DLC story campaign does involve using a knockoff Mechagodzilla-Grimlock, soo…
In many ways, the WB spin-offs have more sensible design decisions and are what mainline EDF games would be if they were developed with some budget by a normal developer, but without straying from the base formula established since the first EDF game.
If anything, the issue is an odd one and the same one could level at the first WB, the same issue i praised on the above paragraph: it doesn’t even try to distinct itself from the mainline games that much, a thing that at least IA and Iron Rain (also developed by Yuke’s) did, regardless of what you think of them, in terms of gameplay anyway.
One could expect the team at Yuke’s to go wild because it’s a spin-off series even more unbound to logic and “reason”, ripe to include all things EDF and beyond, but they sticked to the formula…
… still, nothing that can’t be “fixed” in a third entry, and i can’t deny that World Brothers 2 does improve on a lot of issue the first World Brothers spin-off have, it’s still a lot of fun, it’s always nice to see an EDF game that runs decently (most of the time anyway) and streamlines things in more reasonable fashion, without being too different, meaning it makes for an EDF game i could acually recommed as an entry point or a “compromise” if you find the mainline games to be too janky and weird and outdated (or too much niche), which is perfectly understandable.
This i actually recommend to even the EDF agnostic, if you played the Sandlot developed titles and weren’t willing to put up with such old fashion game designs and budget graphics.
Maybe not for full price, so wait for a Steam or PSN sale and grab it.
Do it.
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