Monster Attack is the first game in the Earth Defense Force series, but at the time it was merely the latest entry in a line of experimental budget games known as Simple in Japan. It was only ever released in English as a barebones European exclusive, meaning there’s no voice acting whatsoever and the over-the-top writing that EDF would later be known for is completely absent. Still, although its status as a budget game and the basic localization mean that there’s not a lot of content here, the outlines of later games are very much visible.
Monster Attack features 25 missions across the standard 5 EDF difficulties. Also like later games, enemies can drop either nothing, one of two types of health pickup, an armor boost for future missions, or a random weapon that is revealed after completing the level. Unlike later games, the Ranger class is your only option and most weapons are fairly grounded. There’s an assault rifle with a 999 round magazine and a few rocket launchers that shoot implausibly quickly, but there’s nothing even starting to approach the absurdity of later games.
Enemy variety is a similar story. Ants/red ants, queen ants, transport ships, and drones/red drones all function almost exactly like they would in later games, and the alien walkers fill a similar role to Hectors in EDF4. There are a few boss levels against monsters that are even more obvious Godzilla clones than usual, although they’re much smaller and have a small fraction of the usual EDF boss health. That, plus the mothership fight in the final mission, is the entirety of the enemy variety, however. You’re going to be shooting a whole lot of ants and drones over these 25 missions, and since the PS2 could only handle so many enemies on screen at once, several enemy types get by on being stupidly tanky rather than having challenging moves. The walkers in particular can take ages to kill with most weapons, but they’re so slow that you can often finish them off long before they’re able to attack you.
Speaking of PS2 limitations, they actually don’t impact the game as much as you might expect. The frame rate definitely takes a hit when too much is happening at once (or when you even think about using flamethrowers), but it renders hordes of enemies and even destructible buildings without too much trouble. Thanks to some clever use of LOD tricks, it even manages a very respectable draw distance for large enemies and smaller ones can be spotted at range by using scopes. It’s very impressive that so much of the EDF experience is recognizable here despite the limitations of being both a budget game and an early PS2 title.
Conclusion
All that said, this is a hard recommendation unless you just want to see where the series started. The lack of weapon and character variety is an obvious drawback, as are the small number of enemies and missing story, but you also have to fight deeply unintuitive controls and mission design that often relies on enemy spam to create difficulty. Playing at the top two difficulties doesn’t change anything about the missions like in later games, nor do they reliably drop stronger weapons, so there’s also not much incentive to keep playing after clearing one difficulty. The good news is that it only takes around 2-3 hours to complete one of Easy/Normal/Hard, but unless you’re desperate for RetroAchievements points, continuing after that will just be a lot of grinding through nearly identical missions with nearly identical weapons. Overall, a mediocre experience.
Rating: 70%
Time to beat: 2-3 hours per difficulty. The last two will require some grinding for armor and weapons if you don’t do the early difficulties first.
Feel free to leave a question or comment below!
For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041