Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain (PS4)
Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain is an entry in the bug-shooting series that diverges a good bit from the typical Earth Defense Force formula. Moving away from sci-fi camp, this entry aims to appeal to Western audiences more than usual with a grittier look, more serious presentation, and even a new development team working on the title. For series purists, these details may sound like a recipe for an unfaithful installment, but learning this game diverged from the norm actually got me more interested. My only prior experience with the series was Earth Defense Force 2025 and I found the supposed simple fun the series promised was instead far too repetitive and mindless, so a game that was deliberately eschewing the usual formula seemed like it had potential for shedding some of the EDF series’s worse conventions.
Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain takes place on a version of Earth under attack by aliens. These aliens, known as Aggressors, have a wide range of mechs, spacecraft, and alien species on hand for their invasion, but they also can produce giant versions of Earth’s bugs to serve as their standard ground troops. As a result, not only will you be blasting away giant ants, scorpions, and jumping spiders, but you’ll be contending with more advanced and creatively designed foes. The Harvesters for example are large machines shaped like tortoises who launch out energy arms to snag your fellow troops to capture them while the Sideros aliens are large agile beings who can spring backwards and unleash a salvo of energy blasts to mix dodging with aggression.
This third-person shooter will lean on the series’s trademark approach at times of just littering the battlefield with so many enemies it is practically inevitable you’ll be surrounded, but in this entry, the campaign is designed rather intelligently to avoid that defining the action. The plot of Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain follows you rejoining the Earth Defense Force after helping to stop an invasion seven years ago, coming out of your coma just in time for the Aggressors to attempt another attack. As you begin playing through the game’s 52 mission campaign, you’ll find new elements rolled out at a pretty reasonable rate. Many missions introduce something new, be it something simple like introducing a new bug type or alien or something truly unique like run-ins with the rebel group the Kindred Rebellion that play into the game’s underlying focus on the people of the devastated Earth not exactly being fully on board with the Earth Defense Force’s methodology and favoritism in what they’ll defend. The game does give a little bit of character to your supporting cast, although the radio personality Livy might be the most interesting for being a very upbeat although somewhat nervous sounding bit of brightness in a game that otherwise leans more on macho military types to round out the roster. The personal side of the story is not a huge presence, but while not every mission has something brand new, there are periods where it builds up to something new well, such as the introduction of the enormous Gargant walkers. You’ll spend a few missions watching what it can do from afar before it comes time to take it down, the spider-like mech having more gravitas since it’s not only tough, but you’ve spent a bit seeing it as something imposing and powerful before the big showdown.
Level variation can shake things up a bit as well, moving away from fights in large cities that crumble during the action to ideas like moving through cramped underground tunnels or trying to defend an EDF base from damage. Even though Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain does generally do a good job of mixing in new considerations, it isn’t above a few missions that are just familiar alien faces thrown together with each other in slightly different ways than before. It helps that these don’t break up the momentum of build-up periods or will lean into other elements like really cranking up how many enemies there are at once compared to normal. There will definitely be times out on the battlefield where you’ll be surrounded and just firing into the crowd and waiting for them all to die, but with even regular ants having varieties that might resist certain weapons or take more punishment before going down, there can be a bit of thought put into how you prioritize enemies, when you choose to run, or how you utilize your weaponry. In fact, one way the game keeps up the variety is by having a few missions more dedicated to the new toys it is giving you such as introducing a mech you can pilot or giving you special armor right before a mission that suits it.
Members of the EDF make use of a special armor called PA Gear that can increase or augment their abilities. The Trooper doesn’t get much use out of it, this standard class what you start with, but right away you can also swap to Jet Lifter if you would like to fly around the battlefield. Down the line, Heavy Striker joins the selection, this slow moving PA Gear not only more durable and able to project an energy shield, but any weapon you equip will also be duplicated so you can unleash two streams of weapons fire. The final two PA Gear types are essentially variations on each other, but the two Prowl Rider variations bring with them an exciting prospect. Normally their defining feature are wires they can fire and pull themselves towards the action for a somewhat limited but swifter twist to the Jet Lifter, but activate their Overdrive and a giant domesticated bug will drop in for you to ride into battle atop. Normally, Overdrive is a once per mission perk you can activate that makes all your weapons fire far more quickly and allows unlimited use of a gear type’s special abilities, but the Prowl Rider getting to call in a scorpion to briefly play as certainly gives the class an exciting angle. Mechs, vehicles, and those giant bugs can be a bit unwieldy though, the player needing some time to learn their movement and aiming, but they can still be power trips despite that.
For regular weapons, Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain will usually have guns unlock at a set rate, although you also need to invest the money you earn from missions and the gems you pick up from dead bugs into purchasing them after they’re unlocked. Spacing out the unlocks also helps to avoid stagnation some, a player working up from early simple tools like assault rifles, shotguns, and sniper rifles to more advanced and unusual options. You’ll start getting missile launchers and laser rifles, large swords that can be used to deal heavy damage or launch beams of light, and eventually even things like a limited satellite laser or a laser cannon so powerful you have to stand still as its beam keeps growing larger and larger as long as you can maintain it. Very few things are locked from use based on your PA Gear save more obvious things like the domesticated bugs for Prowl Riders only, but you can also set extra items for use during the mission that can be as simple as healing or grenades or involve calling in those mechs and vehicles. There is a penalty to your end of mission rewards for doing so, Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain scoring your performance and providing rewards based on it, some missions even having collectibles to find for earning special unlocks. Quite importantly though, when you do get your hand on new goodies, you can go to a practice range to figure out what they even do instead of having to learn how to use them in the thick of battle.
Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain definitely is an improvement over Earth Defense Force 2025 even if it shed some absurdity and spectacle in parts to get here, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has figured out everything yet. You can bring two regular weapons into a mission and most of the time they have infinite ammunition, the player needing to sometimes reload or let a weapon cooldown so you aren’t just constantly firing mindlessly. However, despite there being considerations on a mission that do mix up what you’re doing some, Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain can still boil down to pointing, shooting, and waiting for the targets to go down a lot of the time. An enemy type may have a weak spot you need to target, but the wide range of weapon types also means the game doesn’t ask for too much responsive play to somewhat accommodate it. A level can be basically unwinnable though at times if you don’t bring in weapons with the right range, and while punishing a player who only wants to use swords isn’t too crazy, there can be spaceships up in the sky that are just short of firearms range and having to retry a longer mission because suddenly a foe decides to fly a little higher can be disheartening. Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain does supply some of the series’s supposed focused on simple fun though, the player’s individual actions not complicated but they still need to protect themselves, focus down the right enemies, and prevent huge swarms from getting out of hand to succeed.
Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain can be played in co-op with up to five other friends to tackle the missions together and offers higher difficulties if you do wish to pursue the more expensive unlocks, but there is also a competitive mode on offer that sees the EDF and Kindred Rebellion facing off not against each other, but in a race to take down more Aggressors and collect the energy gems they drop. Mercenary Mode is probably the better choice than direct combat with other troopers considering the sometimes overpowered weapons that can be brought to bear, but this combat race format isn’t too exciting since it doesn’t encourage much direct engagement with the enemy players.
THE VERDICT: Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain gives you a bunch of bugs, aliens, and robots to blast, but thanks to its missions always trying to do something at least a little different, the simple action doesn’t become too rote. The weapon unlocks are staggered to give you new things to play with periodically even if making you have to then buy them after is a weird limiter, but as you continue through the campaign you will find the shape of the battles changing just enough that you have to put a little thought into how you approach the shooting. This third-person shooter does sometimes lean on just throwing a lot at you instead of making many complicated foes that require more intelligent approaches, but it does a bit more than relying on the satisfaction of clearing out huge armies to make its action a bit engaging.
And so, I give Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain for PlayStation 4…
An OKAY rating. Clearing out the Aggressor forces can still tap into the one-man army idea of the other EDF games, or possibly a six man army if you get a co-op group going online. However, Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain makes that idea a bit more interesting than happening to be the one guy good with a gun standing in the crowd of ants and firing until they’re dead. The mission designs can introduce jolts of difficulty as you need to figure out a new enemy or how to handle things like the Gargant’s ability to spawn back-up baddies until you destroy the right pieces of the mammoth mechanical menace. The game still doesn’t ask you to ever get too involved in a battle, weak spot targeting and prioritization of foes usually being all you need beyond picking the right weapons so you don’t ever come up short. You can settle into some useful tools although enemy durability means some early weapons fall off and encourage some arsenal exploration, and the slow weapon rollout at least lets you more closely consider what advantages a new weapon variant might bring. Still, designing missions for most every weapon to be viable can be what holds back EDF some, but this entry does get a little closer to ways to fix that. Being able to call in a mech or vehicle as an item instead of one of two attack options you can bring frees it up to be a more fun ace in the hole rather than a potential load not worth sacrificing a gun over, but Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain adding in ratings for your performance also moves it away from simple fun in a way as you need to worry more about mission time and how much damage you take. The action doesn’t feel complex enough to make such considerations worthwhile, those stats are often determined more by enemy health and numbers because the swarms can surround you with ease or allow for members to slip through in the chaos to hit you. However, because the missions are paced to keep things varied enough, you can more easily focus on the action and let its simplicity be its charm, the game never getting basic since it throws in new ideas often enough to avoid full stagnation.
Perhaps series fans may consider Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain an unusual outlier for the changes it implemented, but reevaluating the foundations of your series’s formula can lead to helpful changes. My hope is future EDF games did at least learn something from the little shake-ups found here, but even though it definitely considered where the franchise’s gameplay style could be improved, it still feels like it is aiming to tap into similar ideas and thrills. You’re still gradually getting more powerful gear to clear away huge hordes of massive foes, the tone is just a bit different and the missions a bit more varied. Then again, it seems some of the EDF series’s appeal is doing the same simple thing over and over so maybe an entry breaking from that design could rankle fans, but if you don’t play it primed to think less of it, this alien shooter finds at least a decent middle ground between consistent novelty and the trance-like gameplay format of straightforward bug blasting action.