Thank you D3 Publisher for sending us review codes for the game and DLC!

EARTH DEFENSE FORCE: WORLD BROTHERS is a third-person shooter where you destroy aliens that have come to the world and split it in pieces. You must assemble a team to use to gun down these vile creatures and send them back to where they belong. It is a spinoff title from the mainline Earth Defense Force games that uses a voxel art style - everything is in the shape of blocks, from characters and enemies to the world itself. In the intro, the (cubic-shaped) world is split into pieces, and you have to protect what's left of the world from alien attack!

There are many types of enemies that are capable of taking out Earth's many defenders. The common ones appear as giant bugs, such as ants, spiders, and bees. Ants are the easiest to deal with, as their AI is fairly simple. They run around, pause occasionally and spit orange projectiles that deal damage and slow you down. The spiders jump around and slow you with webs. Bees fly and shoot spikes down on you. There are also red variants of enemies that have more health and some more buffs. For example, red ants also gain the ability to grab people and shake them around, causing them to be unable to do anything. To save someone, you need to hit the ant they are being captured by. Other enemy types are mostly robots or ships. You will run into flying drones that shoot lasers, giant walking robots that use plasma weapons, and more.

In every mission, you are tasked to exterminate all enemies in the area without dying. You also have the option to save fallen soldiers for them to be able to join your team. Of course, the missions get harder as you progress through the game, so you need to assemble a good team in order to do so.

In order to fight enemies, you need to create a party using the teammates that you save from every mission. Most missions have three people to save, so acquiring a good team is not too difficult. The people that you save vary from actual soldiers, ninjas, catgirls, and more. If you get a duplicate, then it will level up the original. By the end, there are over one hundred to choose from, and you level each one individually, so there is plenty of replay value if you enjoy raising up powerful teams.

You need to assemble a team to fight. There are four people in the team, so when you go into a mission, you have at least three allies. You can swap between teammates to use the weapons and abilities that they have, so it is best if you have a variety of classes in your team. The people that you save specialize in a single thing, such as assault rifles or snipers. The classes decide what their abilities will be and the mobility that they have. For example, a wing diver will be able to fly, but won’t have that much health. If you get a fencer, it might move slowly and have quite a lot of health. Because of the fact that you can switch between people during missions, you can fly into battle as a wing diver, and then switch to a fencer to deal a lot of damage up close. Switching characters happens instantly and is only a button press away, so things can get quite chaotic as you bring out the best weapon for each situation. Each character on your team also has their own health bar, so juggling them all to keep everyone alive is another part of the strategy to keep those aliens at bay.

Another important aspect of strategy is weapons and special skills. Each character starts with access to a limited number and type of weapon, and as they level up, the weapon pool grows. If you max out a character's level, you can wield whatever you like with that character. As with other EDF games, weapon drops are random and you get drops at the end of a level that you can then equip to your characters in the next level.

Each character also has special skills. These can be activated when you fill up a meter called the SP Gauge. You fill this meter over time as you play, mostly by killing enemies. Once it's full, you can unleash a powerful attack that is unique to that character, and if done correctly, can be quite devastating. Each of your four members has their own meter, so you can fill each of them up and release four of these devastation attacks in a row if you wish to. It's a lot of fun to turn around an alien invasion in style!

There is online multiplayer in this game, so that you can play with your friends if they happen to have the game as well. There are up to four people that can be in a game, and they each get their own party. This means that if there are three people, there will be at least 9 NPCs roaming around and shooting enemies. On PC and Switch, every player requires their own copy of the game - there is no split screen on this title. The PlayStation 4 version is the only platform with split screen support for up to two players. We tested the PC version of this game online and it played really well, with no noticeable lag. It was honestly a ton of fun with characters running around everywhere. It's also nice that you can bring back other characters who have fallen - and playing the role of a medic can be a full-time job if you have a full roster of sixteen world brothers running around!

EARTH DEFENSE FORCE: WORLD BROTHERS has a bit of mild language, (d*mn, h*ll) and of course violence as well. When certain characters get hit, they might swear a little. Violence is to be expected, but no humans are harmed by the player. The aliens you kill might also spew a little blood when shot. There are also some characters that wear bikinis and things like that, but there is not a lot of detail to see given the voxel art style. Another thing is that there are characters that worship other gods, such as an ancient Egyptian demigod. Many of the characters you can play as also fall into stereotypes, so characters of various ethnicities might have an accent. The voice acting is all very well done, and the title makes fun of itself and its characters quite often.

I really enjoyed this game, and if you like games that have you shooting at waves and waves of enemies, this one is for you. If you are a fan of other Earth Defense Force titles, I think you'll enjoy this one; I think it does a great job keeping the fast pace the series is known for, while taking the self-referential humor over the top. If you've always wondered if Wing Divers (flying warriors) are afraid of heights, this game will remind you countless times that they just might be.