giant ants from outer space.

 giant ants from outer space.

Some games are startlingly clever. Others are elegant, refined and beautiful. Some ask us to solve cryptic conspiracies, while others still demand cunning, intelligence and finesse if they are to be mastered. The Xbox 360's Earth Defence Force 2017 boasts none of these things. It is simply absurd. It’s a game of ludicrous cartoon violence, where your rocket launchers have infinite ammunition, where your tank drives like a dune-buggy, and where you are expected to fight off alien invasion with nothing more than some shouting soldiers, a bazooka and a machine-gun. 

The Earth is under attack by UFOs, giant ants, towering robots, Godzilla-clones and monstrous jumping spiders. Your job is simply to destroy them all, one by one, without stopping to breathe. The kneejerk response of “they don't make them like this any more” soon fades into “they never made them like this”. And how could they? EDF2017 is a torrent of explosions and laser beams that diminishes any other game you can imagine. Giant ants swarm over buildings, blasted apart by your missiles. The ants are replaced by robots, the robots are replaced by spaceships, and then these in turn fade into even more colossal robots. By the fiftieth level of carnage your tiny soldier has killed thousands and finds himself toe-to-toe with a 200ft tall cybernetic dinosaur which rakes the cityscape with kilometre-long energy blasts. 

EDF2017 is so hyperbolic, so packed with collapsing buildings and flailing, exploding viscera that you can't help laughing. The swathes of reviews that dismissed EDF as just an over-the-top shooter with UFOs, giant ants and a cybernetic Godzilla were missing the point: this is what games do best. It's wild, ludicrous, brilliant, mad and, most of all, it's funny. And cheap too, at less than £20. Well, it kept me off the streets anyway.