EDF 4.1 First Impressions
Well, I got EDF 4.1. And it feels great.
After seeing the trailer for it last time, which I featured in one of my EDF: Insect Armageddon articles, I really wanted to get my hand on that game, largely because of the not-Jaeger VS not-Kaiju giant punch out. So far, I haven’t gotten there yet. My real-life stuff ate up most of my time, so I didn’t play much. I am currently being curbstomped by giant spiders in an underground nest on the sixth level. On Normal. If giant insects do invade Earth one day I am just going to slather myself in honey and barbecue sauce and get it over with quickly.
My own incompetence aside, the game is pretty damn fun. As with EDF: IA, there are four classes available.
The Ranger is the basic soldier guy with a bunch of weapons and no special abilities. However, he is far from boring, considering that his arsenal is varied enough to make a few subclasses out of it, from combat medics, to sniper, to rifleman, and to explosives expert, which is my favourite. Carrying a grenade launcher in one slot and a rocket launcher in another means that everything around you is going to be reduced to chunks and specks on the ground. For reasons that are rather obvious to me now and should’ve been when I started the mission, they are not really good for cramped underground tunnels.
The Ranger is a rather reliable class for learning the game due to it being a generalist class. Which I am probably going to stick to for the next ten or so levels.
The Wing Diver gets a jetpack that allows you to fly around, with an energy bar that gets drained when you fly around or firing most weapons. Once the bar is depleted, you can’t fly or shoot most weapons, meaning that you are basically dead if a single giant ant is nearby. It is a pretty annoying mechanic that slams the flow of the game to a rude halt, which is a shame since dashing across the air a shooting at giant bugs is pretty fun.
The rather skimpy outfit is explained in-game as a weight-reducing measure, presumably to make flying around easier. Sure. And I binge on the office snacks to selflessly help cut down on my co-workers’ snack consumption.
The Air Raider is the class I wanted to play the most, for … reasons.
With two weapon/equipment slots and one vehicle slots, the Air Raider is the support class of the game, which is why I got stomped when I decided to use him for direct combat the same way I used the Ranger. The second time round I wised up and called in a tank instead.
After this article I’ll be heading to farm for a Depth Crawler first. As far as I know, that’s the only decent vehicle I can bring underground. If I need to face giant insects I rather do so inside an armoured vehicle.
Last and definitely not least, the Fencer. Oh boy.
The Air Raider gets to summon armoured vehicles into battle. The Fencer is the armoured vehicle.
Being able to dual-wield artillery cannons and Gatling guns and bear down on the insect horde is amazing. While you are really, really slow by default, your bullets are just as fast any anyone else’s, and they are bigger and more numerous. And if you prefer to get in close, you can equip a shield and a melee weapon and go medieval on the bugs. Can’t say I’m too eager for that though, since I have a tendency to get picked up and chewed on whenever I try that.
So far, I’m having a blast with the game. I just hope I get to finish this before EDF 5 comes out on Steam.