As you progress through the game enemies get larger and larger and they get more powerful weaponry. The AI doesn’t really ever change, things just get more crowded and more deadly. Up the difficulty setting and you’ll get a multiple of what was on screen on the setting below it. On the Inferno difficulty setting there is so much on screen that things slowdown to unplayable levels and you’re dead extremely quickly. I really don’t know how anyone could beat the game on that setting. Well really I don’t see how anyone could want to play through the game on more than one setting unless they live and die by gamer points.


You will hate the Mech.
After about 10 levels things get more epic in scale and you’ll be taking out large portions of the city and thus you get access to vehicles to help you in your rampage. The only good vehicle is the tank that drives and fires like you think it should. The Mech turns so incredibly slow and moves at turtle like speeds, but is necessary to master during some levels unfortunately. The Helicopter feels like the first version of planes in Grand Theft Auto 3 AKA a tacked on extra that people really weren’t supposed to find. And finally the speeder bike gets you places fast, although awkwardly. It’s an incredibly mixed bag of vehicles that are all possible to pilot but a real chore in practice.


Neat you can swim. Oh wait I can't shoot, oh god.
What’s actually the most fun in the whole of EDF3 is the fact that any weapon that shoots a kind of missile or mortar can take out any sized building. Shoot a rocket at a huge skyscraper or that crazy Shanghai building and they both crumble and fall to the ground. Heck there’s even a level where you have to take out a gigantic building to get to a helicopter on top. It absolutely hilarious to go running through the city firing off rockets that were supposed to hit bugs but which most of the time hit all the nearby buildings. When a level finishes it’s crazy to look back at the massacre and see that you have just completely destroyed a city. It’s just unfortunate that hardly anything in the city is very interactive and you rarely see scared pedestrians running away.


Oh there are bug caves too and boy are they black.
I guess the biggest surprise of EDF3 is that the graphics are actually amazing. The character models, enemy models, the sprawling city, and all the textures look great. The effects are crap and the physics are laughable but the city as a static object looks amazing. The sound doesn’t fair that well though as the music is forgettable and the sound effects made me turn off the sound at times. Some of the machine gun bullet sound effects make this piercing noise that will drive you insane.

Overall it’s fun at first but gets really boring after a couple levels. I couldn’t play much more than a couple levels per sitting, but that’s just me.

All the menus are in Japanese but other than that it’s fine.

• Graphics
  
• Large amount of weapons to unlock
  
• 15ish hours spent across 53 levels
  
• Offline Co-op

• Boring and repetitive
  
• Horrible sound
  
• Horrible physics
  
• Lacking level design
  
• Vehicles are a chore
  
• Would be worth a Simple 2000 price but not a retail XBOX 360 price