To further prove how Earth Defense Force 4 port-expansion for PS4 and PC, EDF 4.1: The Shadow Of New Despair, was when the series really started getting popular worlwide, D3 Publisher figured just making DLC mission pack for the main game wasn’t enough, and so had developers Clouds Inc and Giga-Rensya Inc spun a spin-off game from EDF 4.1 assets, releasing first as a digital download on PS4 and then PC via Steam.
This being Earth Defense Force 4.1: Wing Diver The Shooter, which indeed focuses on the Wing Diver unit/class, presenting a “gaiden” story of sorts that has a Pale Wing/Wing Diver unit face off alone against swarms of enemies, but this time in a 2D vertical shmup fashion.
Sounds fun and frankly it’s perfect to make a spin-off in this style off a series that already has so much “arcade DNA” in it, there’s very little more arcade than 2D shmup action.
Sure it used 3D models from the mainline game of the era, but gameplay is classic 2D spaceship shooter that scrolls and for which “tate mode” is a thing…. which i have to admit feels weird, since you basically never miss the enemies even though they look more in the distance or foreground, there’s a bit of disconnect due to them reusing the 3D assets from the EDF 4.1.
from a technical standpoint, this is basically D3 doing the ol’ Tecmo Koei thing of fashioning out a new Samurai or Dynasty Warriors spin-off from an earlier mainline entry, it basically reuses old assets A LOT, the same enemy models, with some little new in terms of enemy variants or new stuff in general, aside from the mission dialogue, with the usual cheesy so bad it’s good english voice acting we’ve come to expect (and love) from the series to accompany the wafer thin plot that sees basically a Pale Wing/Wing Diver squadron on their own separated mission, one that runs concurrently to the events of EDF 4.1 story. Or something. Doesn’t really matter much.
There’s very little to say in terms of gameplay besides “it’s a 2D vertical scrolling shmup”, more of a bullet hell, but alongside the two weapons max load-out it does retain the energy manegement system of the Wing Diver class from mainline EDF titles, which means you have to keep on check how much the weapons use up of the energy reserve, as the speed dodge that gives some invulnerability frames also taps from the energy tank, and draining it to zero means you can’t shoot and barely even move about.
There’s also very little in terms of stages, it’s just 6 stages of arcade lenght, GJ, credits, and back to the main menù you go.
It compensates by being very hard, again, as i said more bullet hell than Capcom’s 1942, so in this case Easy is kinda mandatory at the beginning, and by “Easy” it means more of a regular “Normal” difficulty setting, so it’s on the hard side of things regardless.
As i’m used to play ol’ Cave bullet hell games, i personally didn’t find that hard, i was able to fairly quick get used to the gameplay and finish the game on Easy in 1 hour tops without too much effort.
It’s not unfair and it becomes obvious the game expects you to play on Easy first to get used to the gameplay and learn the stages… but it also become quite clear how you’ll basically see everything EDF 4.1 Wing Diver The Shooter has to offer in 1 hour tops, and the rest is grind.
Which isn’t a issue per sé since EDF as a whole is built on grinding for harder difficulties, but maybe they could have made like twice or thrice the stages to make the grinding less repetitive, because having just 6 stages to play means you’ll have to redo Easy mode at least twice to gain enough armor pieces and maybe get a new weapon that’s 15 levels above what you have and hence atomize the opposition into mush, and then being able to tackle Normal.
Most likely you won’t get a new weapon that’s useful enough to tackle the next difficulty tier, because the game relies on the same lunatic RNG for weapon drops, with significantly better odds when you play anything above Easy… which you can but if you die during the stage you simply won’t keep the weapon crates you obtained, though unlike EDF 4.1 (and any EDF mainline game before 5) you do get to keep the gained armor pieces/extra HP even if you die, and there are some weapon drops that are stage specific and less random.
As explained, this means you will have to do runs where you simply have upgraded yourself to being too strong for that difficulty setting, where you can turn the spiders and ants into compost with few shots, before you can even attempt the next difficulty tier, and while in mainline EDF games the harder difficulties forced you but try new tactics to even have a chance of keeping them at bay or kill them fast enough to stand a chance against the bullshit… here not so much.
While the harder difficulties offer more difficult bullet patterns and tougher enemies, they don’t change patterns or appear in bigger swarms during the levels, so armor is basically a must that eventually (and by design) saps most of the challenge out of most boss fights, and one wonders why they didn’t use more enemies, since they were lifting them from 4.1 anyway, like the dragons or the good ol Hectors from EDF 3/2017?
Also, since it’s uses just the Pale Wing/Wing Diver class, this also limits the kind of weapons you’ll able to equip, though you get a decent amount imported over, 80 more or less, more than enough to have the usual ridiculous bug hunting fun you’d expect from an EDF game.
Apparently there are 6 extra missions to unlock, but i assume it will involve doing all the missions on Inferno without dying or some stupid shit like that, which i’m not that invested in doing here since there’s very little to see in general, even with the free Training DLC, but we’ll get to that soon.
Lennght aside, otherwise there aren’t huge flaws, the controls are good, the enemies that will start shooting at you will be highlighted to distinguish them from the ones that won’t, so it’s not complete unreadable chaos, it’s not insane “pop a blood vessel” bullet hell difficult, it’s doable even if you aren’t too big on these… with some practice, but it’s doable, you even get a mid-stage bonus bout where you can score extra HP items and even rare item crates drop if you do well enough, and you can actually decide to start the stage from the beginning, from the middle or the final boss section once you reach it on that difficulty setting.
You just wish there was more to it in every sense of the way, maybe have a 2 player option or online co-op or something, or any proper secondary mode… that is, until they released the free DLC “Training Mode”, quotations needed because it’s kinda that but actually not really.
while it teaches you some basics and tests your ability for the challenge posed by the harder difficulties, “Training Mode” it’s actually more of a challenge mode with diverse tiers of missions, like avoiding all enemies without weapons, killing just a specific enemy, racking up a high enough combo, checkpoint races, killing a tough mini boss enemy within a limited runtime, etc.
It’s very nice and it helps address a bit the “content famine”, even more since it’s free DLC, but it can’t quite fix the fact there’s very little content (which is strange since EDF games are packed with missions, even if they reuse the same 7 big areas and the enemies over and over) to even replay and grind on, making it feel very repetitive even by EDF standard, and it was kind of hard sell for 20 bucks MSRP, which at the time could get you the base EDF 4.1 game on Steam.
Overall, EDF 4.1 Wing Diver The Shooter is not bad but it’s too famished, even if it was just meant to bide time leading up to Sandlot releasing Earth Defense Force 5, it’s okay and fans of the series that like the idea of a shmup spin-off will get some fun out of it…. but just get it when it goes on sale.
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