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EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 5

Sjukob

Arcane
Joined
Jul 3, 2015
Messages
2,052
Alright, I've got through 40 missions so far. Mission 38 is truly the best one I've seen in the game, just a massive open battlefield with lots of vehicles and enemies, heaven for air raider and his air strikes, spamming phobos bomber non stop and watching it blow up everything in sight literally made me laugh manically, calling for massively powerful tempest nukes to send fucking frog giblets flying on to Mars was also crazy fun.

Death incoming
EDF5-2019-07-16-11-11-42-79.png


I keep playing on hard and the game is pretty easy so far, I wouldn't call it a cakewalk but if you avoid unnecessary risks it's hard to die. I've seen people struggle on certain levels, but I didn't find anything truly difficult yet, I think very early levels were harder, like missions 5 and 12, where they send a lot of ranged opponents after you and you don't really have a good equipment at that point to handle them well. Although I must admit that mission 40 was the first point where I looked at it and thought "What the fuck is this ?!", it is a scary and demanding one for sure (hence the name "Brutal battlefield"), you just get killed from every direction, but I was able to handle it well on the first try, ranger piercing weapons for the win.

Brutal
EDF5-2019-07-16-11-18-26-01.png


Battlefield
EDF5-2019-07-16-11-19-05-01.png


As for the classes and weapons, my views changed a bit. Wing diver still sucks, shortly after I made a post about beating the first 20 missions, I found thunder crossbow and a heavy plasma launcher that made her quite effective for some time, thunder crossbow was pretty great with it's fast charge speed, good accuracy, big range and low energy cost (why can't her other weapons be like this ?) and plasma launcher was just all around good even if it was quite energy hungry, but now enemies outscale them and I still haven't found worthwhile weapons. Her close range combat is pretty decent with rapiers, lances and some other stuff, but she's fragile, you can seriously hurt yourself with some weapons (not even talking about explosives here) if you aren't careful enough and energy managment is annoying, I always compare her to ranger and his shotguns that are super strong here and in my eyes she losses to him, ranger just outdamages her and he's safer to play with his bigger healthpool and weapon design. Of course it's still not the end game, but I have to play through hard first to unlock other difficulties and get access to better stuff and wing diver keeps on being horrible, the situation with other gun types hasn't changed much: mid range lasers are still trash, homing and special weapons are useless, kinetic weapons still have insane energy costs and snipers still do no damage. I have obtained stardust cannon and that level 15 plasma laucnher that does 7k+ damage per shot, but stardust cannon drains all your energy in a couple of shots and the plasma launcher is meant for end game cores, because of it's slow charge speed and big energy cost, though I have no idea how anybody uses that weapon when projectile itself is super slow and blast range isn't that big. So my opinion of wing diver just keeps getting worse.

Ranger still looks very good to me, really liking his G&M-A23 rifle and shotguns of course, he's fast, durable and does a lot of damage, it's fun to play him, though there's one thing that concerns me. Everything besides shotguns and assault rifles is pretty lackluster, launchers can't outdamage rifles and shotguns, their projectiles are slow and I don't need their AOE, when my shotguns and rifles pierce through enemies. Some hand grenades have pretty huge damage slapped on them, but they aren't as convenient to use (and if you finger slips, you will kill yourself), so I avoid them. Sniper rifles are ok, but they are still outclassed by long range, high damage assault rifles (like the said G&M-A23) that just kill stuff faster, I feel like sniper rifles damage per shot needs to be way higher.

Here, some guy made calculations on DPS for each weapon category and you can see why shotguns rule this game. By the way, check his channel for more EDF related info and guides, there's quite a lot of good stuff there.


I feel like air raider is the most overpowered class in most scenarios, air strikes are very strong and devastate just about everything on the map, his vehicles allow him to safely tank massive amounts of damage while still killing insects and there's a lot of great stuff on top of it as well. He's very good in almost any scenario, though some people say he's bad in underground missions I found them very easy to do with turrets and depth crawlers. He only kind of struggles with killing teleportation ships, but it's still very doable.

For fencer I only want to say one things, his ranged combat is really lacking for now because he doesn't seem to get any good ranged weapons until much later, you really need to get close with him to start killing and it's annoying when you have to take down flying enemies or just take a big risk of hugging a shotgun frog that can destroy you very quikcly. But otherwise I'm happy with him and he's fun to play.
 

Sjukob

Arcane
Joined
Jul 3, 2015
Messages
2,052
Here's some helpful stuff for you:

http://leafierlemon.com/edf5/calc.shtml? <-- info about enemies: hp values, attack damage, credits etc; and levels: enemy spawns and which weapons you can get there

https://www.reddit.com/r/EDF/comments/81sg3d/edf_5_weapons_missions_translations_guide_updated/ <-- equipment lists for each class

https://fearlessrevolution.com/viewtopic.php?p=96114#p96114 <-- cheat table for Cheat Engine, allows you to pick up everything on the map by enabling and then disabling "Disable max loot pickup radius" option
 

ultimanecat

Arcane
Joined
Mar 19, 2015
Messages
575
Good news! They ported Iron Rain to PC just like I hoped!



Bad news! It looks like it might be one of the worst ports of a Japanese console game in a few years. Game starts locked in Japanese with forced tutorial level before options become available, can’t run beyond 1080p 60 FPS, actually runs at much lower resolution and is scaled up for some reason, and mouse and keyboard are emulated joystick controls resulting in bad mouse acceleration and general movement weirdness when hitting different keys at the same time. Some of this seems to be fixable with third party software to modify Unreal engine settings but honestly I’m not interested in going back to lazy console code-dumps from Japanese developers.
 

Ezeekiel

Liturgist
Joined
Dec 19, 2016
Messages
1,783
Bizarre considering EDF 5 was an ok port aside from having physics tied to fps and thus occasionally suffering when a lot was going on on screen.

Different dev though, right?
 

Falksi

Arcane
Joined
Feb 14, 2017
Messages
10,539
Location
Nottingham
Only ever played the original but that was awesome. Second I see this available at the right price I'm all over it.
 

ultimanecat

Arcane
Joined
Mar 19, 2015
Messages
575
Who knows who did the porting, but yeah, Iron Rain is a spin-off done by Yukes instead of Sandlot. It also uses Unreal, which means the port really shouldn’t have been this bad but can probably be fixed by mods if the devs don’t patch it (which, being a Japanese game, is very possible).
 

ADL

Prophet
Joined
Oct 23, 2017
Messages
3,682
Location
Nantucket
I'm skipping Iron Rain. It's clearly a tech test for EDF6 which will hopefully be next gen console-based because the CPU of the Playstation 4 is the only thing holding Iron Rain back.
 

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