Earth Defense Force 3 should really be renamed to Earth Destruction Force 3 as I’m sure I’ve destroyed way more buildings than aliens while playing. That being said, if you like mindless shooters then you’ll love this game but if you don’t you’ll probably hate it. Through a whopping 53 levels of endless bugs and machines you’ll unload a ridiculous amount of ammo on some generic nasty invaders. So grab your machine gun and rocket launcher and let’s head into battle.


Epic action... kind of.
From the main menu you simply select level 1 one and you’re ready to rock. Once in game you move around with the left analog stick, shoot with a button, swap weapons with a button, enter vehicles with select, and let auto-target do the rest. You can of course use the right analog stick to look up and down but it’s extremely touchy and snaps back into place when you release it. So for most of the time you’ll just run around with your trigger button held down, as you have unlimited ammo, and watch as your gun aims at any nearby nasty invaders. You can also jump, dive to the left and right, and strafe but none of these are really useful. Scratch that actually, strafing with the left and right triggers is decent when you’re in a fix.


He's big but he's a pushover.
Every single level has you killing every last thing that spawns on screen. Some mix it up and require you to take down large spaceships that constantly spawn enemies but for the most part you’ll just shoot until there’s nothing red left on your mini-map. It’s fun at first, but gets pretty boring and repetitive especially considering some stupid enemies wander off into a corner of the map and you have to track them down before you clear the level. Also there are no death animations on the bugs, which you see a lot of, and when you shoot their corpses they bounce around with physics that make it look horribly unrealistic.

Then there’s also the issue of powerups which on their way from the Playstation 2 Simple 2000 days have remained the same and are still flat textures. They’re not boxes in the road they’re just straight up textures. It looks incredibly ghetto in an otherwise beautifully rendered world. Armor pickups give you armor, weapons unlock weapons at the main menu which you select before a mission, and health heals you. It’s all really basic and they all drop completely randomly from any and all enemies. Although you’ll have to play levels on harder difficulties to have better weapons drop.