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@JustinMcElroy You make an excellent point yourself. I guess I'm just confounded by the paradox you kind of pointed out in your general response - you and I, like most gamers, "love the occasional clunker that hits me in the right spot," right?

So here's the paradox - with the flood of games coming down the pike every single week, how is anybody supposed to find that clunker of a game that they'd love if they tried it when everybody is calling it a clunker?

Justin,

My main disagreement with your review is that you failed to look below the "kill these bugs" surface of this game (yes, there is something there, hear me out), just as you likely did with EDF 2017. I'll use that game as the basis for my argument, since I played it for two or three months solid and have only owned EDFIA for three days.

The plain fact of the matter is that 2017's B-movie charm only lasted through one playthrough at most, when the novelty of shooting giant ants with rocket launchers and the so-bad-it's-funny voice acting started to wear off. The real charm of 2017 was not just the killing of bugs, it was the fact that it offered so many different & creative *ways* of killing bugs - not only with the wide variety of weapons to choose from, but the variety within those weapon classes as well.

The genius of the Earth Defense Force series, both in 2017 and IA, is that it locks those bigger & better weapons behind a door of higher difficulty, forcing you to take on tougher challenges and explore the full depth of the action if you want to experience everything the game has to offer.

In 2017, the intrigue came in finding out just how crazy the weapons actually got, like the homing missile launcher that shot a giant purple dildo of death into the air that eventually crashed down into a pile of enemies five minutes later, or the innocuous-looking bombs that could be tossed into a pit of spiders and would cause an apocalypse-sized explosion when all triggered at once. In IA, I'm wondering just how flight-capable the Jet armor will get at higher levels, how much a walking tank the Battle armor will resemble, or if the Trooper will get to fire that giant dildo of death again - and along the way, I'll discover the strategies necessary to survive at those higher difficulties, because I'll have to.

I'll admit that there are a few things that disappoint me in IA as compared to 2017; the lack of underground or non-city levels, the small number of campaign levels in the first place, and the fact that the voice acting has gone from B-movie charming across the board to now range from occasionally sort-of amusing to barely tolerable. But, it makes up for it by including the new armors and online co-op.

To be perfectly honest, your review reads like you played through the campaign once on Normal with the same armor the whole way through, which is the entirely wrong way to play if you want to get any enjoyment out of it.

If you don't want to bother putting in the time to find out just how big the purple dildo of death is, this isn't the game for you - and that perspective is what I feel was missing from your review. EDFIA does have its redeeming qualities, but you've gotta sweep some dead bugs out of the way first.

To #14, QI is a legal Scrabble word - it's just in the new 4th Edition of the Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary, while the Scrabble web site uses the 3rd Edition as the database for its search engine.

For anybody interested in the history of Scrabble, word games in general, and the really hardcore tournament scene, I'm currently reading "Word Freak" by Stefan Fatsis and it's really good.