The day I received Earth Defense Force 2017 (EDF 2017) for review I had some serious high hopes, as this quirky shooter with the Sci-Fi B-Movie lineage offered a chance to just have some mindless fun. It had been awhile since I had played a good straight up third-person shooter, so I was anticipating hours of good game play. The story line is simple, the Earth is invaded by Giant Ants, Spiders, Robots and UFOs in the year 2017, and your unit is tasked with taking back the Earth and repelling the invaders.

The gameplay is very straight forward, if not a bit over simplified. You take your character and locate the mayhem, kill everything in sight and move on to the next stage. All the while, you should be picking up items when you can....if you can. As you get deeper into the game, limited strategy involving weapon choices and the use of the environment for cover become more involved while trying to complete stages. If you make one wrong turn, or choose a weapon ill-suited for the task, you will be swarmed under at an alarming rate and starting over. There are a handful of usable vehicles at different points, but many times they are better used as eye-candy or cover than truly being helpful.

One thing that annoyed me consistently was the stage being cleared before I could pick up all of the drops. While the armor and ammo are useless at that point, there was many a time a new weapon drop was within my grasp when the stage ended and the cut scene began. It would be nice for your AI teammates to allow you to get the last kill instead of finishing off the Invaders with a dozen or more drops still unclaimed. Not only did this tick me off, but I had flashbacks to Ninety-Nine Nights and how much this resembled the poor handling of the same scenario in that game.

The controls are laid out as expected (for the most part), with the left analog stick and d-pad controlling directional movement and the right analog stick controlling the camera. The button layout is a bit strange, as the `X` button is used to fire your weapon and the `Y` is used to "Aim Upwards`. `A` jumps/rolls and `B` switches weapons. The triggers and bumpers also control various firing and movement (rolls and strafing). One item to note involves control of the in-game vehicles. In order to gain control (or get off) of a vehicle, you have to press the Back Button. There is no on-screen prompt to alert you, and sometimes this is awkward to do when you are under full assault. Instead of all the redundant use of the d-pad, triggers and bumpers, the functionality of this feature may have been better off located in one of these slots.

Now that you have the background and basics of the game, the letdown of what you are playing starts to slowly creep in. The minute you load the first screen, it becomes quite clear that the graphics, audio and physics are not even close to performing at a next-gen level. I had the sensation that I was plugged into an Xbox or PS2, with a small nugget of quality details seen here and there. However, as you get moving into the game, the sinking feeling gets worse and worse.

The physics of <...