Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2

World Brothers 2 provides excellent upgrades to mechanics from the first game to make this one feel even better to play.

I’m absolutely a fan of the spin-off, with World Brothers 2 carrying on the quick, accessible, and nonsensically entertaining action of its predecessor. It’s packed full of fun toys, drowns the player in content, and you can play as a woman who thinks she’s a horse. She spawns carrots behind her when she sprints. How is that not what videogames are all about?

Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 is a bit of a mixed bag. It probably has the best gameplay in the series, but loses some of the scope and campiness of the mainline games. Also, the timing of its release is weird, coming out only 2 months after Earth Defense Force 6. While I reviewed the PS5 version of World Brothers 2, and found it ran beautifully, at the time of preorder, the Switch version was $46.79 CAD, while the PlayStation version was $66.99. That’s pretty major savings to consider if cost is an issue. If you’ve never played an Earth Defense Force game before, Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 would be a great place to start. If you’re already a diehard EDF fan, then this is a quality entry. I just wish the series staggered its releases more.

In a series that is quickly running out of fresh ideas, World Brothers 2 leans into being fast, fun and cheery. It might struggle to find an audience with both casual players and hardcore EDF fans but it certainly offers up some enjoyable alien blasting action.

While it's not all that different from its predecessor, Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 proves to be a worthy follow-up, offering more missions and more Brothers to collect, and ultimately just being more fun in general. Whether you're an existing fan of the series or want a fun way to dip your toes into it, World Brothers 2 is easy to recommend.

World Brothers 2 is a great introductory title for those new to EDF, as well as longtime fans looking for a more straightforward experience that allows for quicker experimentation.

If you can get past the childish and highly repetitive English dialogue, Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 is a great option for players looking to mindlessly blast giant insects, aliens and Kaiju to bits with their friends, either online or with a local buddy.

It's a 7 if you don't care about trophies. Takes about 60-80 hours to complete all levels on all difficulties, and that part's fairly fun. After that, however, it takes about 250 hours more of just reloading levels ad nauseum in order to get all the weapons for the achievement. Some of the characters are so rare that even after dozens of hours of reloading you'll be lucky to see them even once. Then just pray that they even have the weapon you need (they usually don't). It's absurd, and dumb. Game would've been pretty good if they simply didn't give duplicates you already have. Or even a way to target specific characters and weapons (You kind of can but the pool is extremely large). But in typical Yuke's fashion, a single very bad decision made the game ****. Same developer who thought 60-second reloads and enemies that could stunlock you forever was smart in Iron Rain, so... yeah, not sure why I expected better. Just posting this because I wish I'd have read about this before I bought it and wasted my time. Hope it helps somebody avoid the same mistake.