The voxelly Earth Defense Force: World Brothers is out this month
The cute spin-off lets you squish blocky bugs on a square Earth
I couldn’t believe it when I searched the RPS tag system and didn’t find any mention of Earth Defense Force: World Brothers. I thought the site was doing that thing where it searches EDF-free universes again, but the IT department assures me that the multiverse toggle is off. It seems we just didn’t know that there was a cute spin-off of gaming’s greatest bug hunt, and that it was out very soon. This month, actually.
World Brothers looks like the toy version of the main series. The spin-off is based in a parallel world where everything is made of cubes. The Earth is square. The aliens are blocky. Even yer da looks a bit boxy, truth be told.
The goal of every level is to rescue team-mates to buff your squad. As you grab a downed colleague, they’ll slot into your arsenal, letting you swap between them. They each have unique powers, so you can swap from a ground-based ranger to a flight capable wing-diver, letting you move your team to the tops of buildings. From up there you can rain bullets down.
Otherwise, it’s all pretty familiar. Loads of enemies, loads of bullets, loads of chants of, "EDF! EDF! EDF!" from the cupboard in which we locked all of the RPS founders. There's multiplayer, too, so if the previous games were a bit much for the little ones in your life, this might be a solution to all that. I wasn't even slightly scared by those cubic ants.
Impossibly, it’s out May 25th on Steam.