Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 – PS5 Review

Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 is a follow-up to 2020’s EDF spin-off and, as before, is developed by the EDF b-team Yuke’s who were previously better known for making lots and lots of wrestling games.   This one continues the previous game’s light-hearted approach to the entire destruction of Earth by aliens, adopting the same cheery banter and child-friendly voxel visuals.

This year has already seen the mainline sequel, Earth Defense Force 6, just a couple of months ago infact, and with that game representing months and months worth of grinding, it might all be a bit soon for hardcore EDF fans to be getting onto a new title.  We certainly felt that way when World Brothers 2 dropped on our desk but this game has its own unique style and energy.

Before we get into that, you probably ought to know what the game is about.  As a series generally, the EDF games feature level after level of medium-sized areas that are beset by aliens who take various b-movie sci-fi forms.  Most notably, they like to drop armies of giant ants in front of you but it can also be flies, wasps, spiders, robots and God knows what else.  They then task you with clearing out each level with your pick of an insane amount of weapons.

World Brothers adopted the same approach but mixed it up a bit.  From the original plot, the aliens have shattered the Earth into multiple pieces and you’ve got to find a way to put it back together while fighting on those pieces, to the constant commentary from the EDF fighters, the game was always intended as a sillier take on the already ridiculous series.  And this sequel doesn’t change a thing.  In fact, after you successfully saved the Earth in the first game, the aliens have gone and blown it up again.

Yep, much like EDF6, World Brothers 2 is more than happy to recycle what came before.  In fact, it’s not really recycling when you’re just doing exactly the same stuff as before and often in the same locations.  In the same way that EDF6 didn’t really care about innovating, neither does this game.  Instead it’s just a case of slapping on more levels, taking the count from 60 to 100+, and letting you get on with more of the same stuff.

Playing this after EDF6 is probably the best way to go just so that you don’t feel like you’re playing a massive DLC pack for the first game but either way this will all feel far too similar.  The differences between this and the first game are hard to spot but, that said, it does feel better just in terms of the overall pace and playability.

Where the main games have you picking a class and taking it out to battle in either single or multiplayer, World Brothers 2 sees you picking a squad (in single-player, you can still take just one fighter out in multiplayer) and then switching between them in real time.  Instead of the four basic classes of the main games, you now have individual characters who fall into one of several archetypes.  So you’ve still got your Rangers, Wing Divers, Fencers and Air Raiders but here you also get lots of wild and varied characters to try out.  Each one comes with new weapons and accessories too.

Every level has two or more characters that need to be rescued before they can join your ranks but then you can put them in your main squad and start using them.  The interface outside of main gameplay isn’t the most intuitive though so you won’t really have a good grasp of what a character can do until you use them in battle.  As with the main games, you’ll end up with lots of weapons that are a pain to use and will invariably settle on your favourites.

Having a squad of easy to switch characters is great though.  We mostly settled on a group that had a Wing Diver (for swiftly moving to new areas and getting to downed allies), a new class type that had turrets, a fencer with some decent mid-range firepower and a Jason Vorhese lookalike pop star who had a shotgun that was, oddly, great at range.  But you’ve got so many options and combinations to play with even if, as we said, a lot of them are borderline useless.

In terms of changes from the previous game, you do get a couple of extra skills per character.  These are okay but not game-changing.  The super moves (called SP moves in the game) work as before, and they’ll take up most of your attention as you search for energy pickups to allow you to activate them again.  The way you manage those moves, individual character health and reloading is key to success and you will have to switch between all four characters for most missions if you want to survive and that’s where World Brothers 2 is the most fun:  when the action is just tough enough to keep you on your toes and force you to think tactically.  And it’s really good at that.

The presentation is pretty much as it was in the last game.  The cheery and colourful voxel style is the same as it was before but it does look nice at times.  It’s a shame they don’t ever leverage the lower processing demands of that style into giving us insane numbers of enemies though as really this just feels like the usual amount of foes, or even fewer maybe.  You’d think that with these simplistic models you could absolutely ramp things up but World Brothers 2 stops short that.

The audio is alright.  The music is good and there’s tonnes of voice acting.  The problem is that the dialogue is just so constant and ridiculous that it becomes annoying.  Do you really want to hear characters complain about breaking nails or have the sort of conversations that you’d get in a JRPG set in a high school or whatever?  Well, even if you do you’ll still likely get irritated.  And the plot is kind of bollocks to be honest, especially as it is just recycling ideas from the first game.

When World Brothers 2 is at its best, it really is a lot of fun though.  Flying around (pieces of) the world, blasting aliens with exotic weapons is never going to be a bad time and where EDF6 felt a little stale, World Brothers 2′s manic style does give the series a shot in the arm.  Whether or not you really want another game and another 100 levels of ant-killing action is up to you though.  Die hard fans might not like the cute nature of the game, or might just be bored of the whole thing, and younger audiences might find the team management side of things a little too fussy but if you’re in the sweet spot, this game might be exactly what you’re looking for.