Global Defense Force, now better known as Earth Defense Force 2, was a 2005 PS2 sequel to Monster Attack, which was a budget game about fighting giant insect aliens. EDF2 was later ported to Vita as Earth Defense Force 2 Portable and received a new character, a handful of new levels, and additional weapons at the same time. Monster Attack was a 25 mission game with only one playable character and a couple of enemy types, so it was never going to pass as anything other than a budget game. EDF2 raises the stakes dramatically with 71 or 78 levels depending on the version. There’s no questioning the value for time, but how does the gameplay hold up?
The core gameplay loop is the same as always. Each level drops you into a large map and tasks you with killing all the monsters before they kill you. You start out fighting only relatively weak giant black ants and will face more, tougher, and more combinations of aliens as the game progresses. Each enemy has a chance of dropping some combination of health packs, armor, or weapon crates when it dies. Health keeps you going in the current level, armor gives you more health for future runs, and weapon crates may contain new weapons you can use later. EDF stands out from other horde shooters because of how quickly the power scaling gets silly for both you and the enemies. For that reason, it’s really key to play on Hard to have the most fun. It’s the highest difficulty that you can reasonably play without access to loads of armor and weapons, and since weapon drops scale with difficulty, it provides the most variety.
Like later games, EDF2 plays radically differently depending on your class and equipment. The Ranger class is mostly the same as the Ranger from EDF1, but maintains a wide variety of weapon types so that you have options covering every combination of range, DPS, and raw attack that you could possibly need. Pale Diver, this game’s name for the Wing Diver, makes her first appearance here and is surprisingly feature complete considering that. She has basically all of her weapon types from 4.1, just with more jank in terms of balance and weapon behavior. Air Raider also has most of his features, but vehicles summons are notably absent – Portable still follows the formula from the first three games where a preset number of vehicles spawn on each map.
EDF2 is a huge step up if you’re coming to it from Monster Attack, but hardly anyone will be in 2026. These days it’s much more likely that you’re coming to it from 4.1 or 5, and it has some obvious flaws from that perspective. The most inescapable is that both the PS2 and Vita struggle mightily to run the game on the busiest maps. Framerates can easily dip into what feels like single digits when firing powerful weapons into large numbers of enemies, and enemies with high fire rates can trigger massive frame rate dips on their own on certain levels. Although technical jank is expected from this series, EDF2 is easily the worst in this regard. AI and hit detection are similarly problematic. The game features a couple of complex underground maps where enemies can get stuck in corners and take ages for you to find, and the spider enemies are very fond of cheating and shooting you through underground walls.
Still, that’s the sort of thing you can get past if you’re playing an EDF game. Balance is a bigger issue holding it back. It’s most problematic for Air Raider, who has extremely limited tools for dealing with bosses that can only be damaged from underneath or underground enemies since most of his attacks hit from above. Taking on the final boss on Hard as Air Raider is a huge test of patience if you haven’t played Hardest in advance to earn better weapons, because you’re fighting a distant enemy with specific weak points and immunity from above, and all of his strongest weapons on Hard are at least one of short range, imprecise, or dropped from above. It’s understandable that the original levels weren’t designed for a character who didn’t exist in 2005, but adjustments should have been made to either Air Raider’s capabilities or the maps to make a natural fit.
Balance and technical jank prevent this from being close to the best EDF game, but it’s still worth playing if you enjoy the series. Other than ants and spiders, nearly every enemy in the game will be new to you if you’re coming from EDF3 or later. Even if you know how enemy strength typically progresses in these games, it has some nice surprises with enemy variants and setups you might not expect. It’s also the only game to feature a London map, so if you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to see giant ants crawling on Westminster, well, this is what you’ve been waiting for.
Conclusion
Overall, EDF2 is fun, but not essential unless you’re trying to complete the series. It’s much better than EDF1, but everything it does was refined further in later games, and most of those are now much more accessible than this. A handful of poorly designed levels can make the challenge feel unfair, and the semi-frequent issue with being damaged through walls undeniably is unfair. Still, it has some fun missions, and if you’re looking for an excuse to use your Vita again, you can’t do much better than the value for time of this game.
Rating: 80%
Time to beat: I reached 70% completion in about 100 hours before deciding the remaining Hardest and Inferno missions were too grindy for me. Beating Hard with one character would probably take 10-20.
Price: $20 digital on PSN or a bit more than that for a used physical cart. The Vita store never has sales anymore, so those prices aren’t likely to change much.