Earth Wars is a game that I played on PS4 after getting it for free as part of my PS+ games one month. I finished it last week after nearly a solid year of chipping away at it because playing it for any more than about 20 minutes at a time made me want to vomit in my mouth.
The story is set after some aliens show up and make a mess of planet Earth so you and your squad have to get in there and get rid of the aliens. Truth be told, the story had a lot more going on than that but by the 4th area or so I was so sick of it's technobabble that I just started skipping everything. Aliens are bad and the power suits used by the Earth forces may or may not also be killing them or something like that, who knows and who cares?
Earth Wars really falls down though in it's gameplay department. Each major section of the game is bookended by a mission where you'll kill a big boss alien. After you kill the boss alien you are given a real timer that usually counts down from something absurd like 60 hours. From there you play sub missions which usually involve finding an item, racing around a zone or killing a certain enemy and you are rewarded with skills for completing these quests. The missions start to get dull and samey right in the first zone but by the end of the game every missions is basically "hey, go kill this major boss again" and it becomes even more tedious. Finishing a mission reduces the timer by a handful of hours so clearing a few missions gets you to the next big story beat but you actually have to CLEAR the mission for it to count. Meaning if you spent 20 minutes on one mission only to fail it near the end, then have fun doing that all over again unless you want to leave the game running for 60 ACTUAL hours.
The gameplay within these missions is even worse. Imagine a game like Odin Sphere or Muramasa but as if it was designed by a guy who was extremely high on very powerful painkillers for the entire development cycle. It's wooden, unresponsive, nonsensical, confusing and a whole ton of other adjectives that mean bad things. Your character controls like your controlling one of those paper puppets with the butterfly pins so that the child who made it can manipulate the joints. The enemies animate just as atrociously so usually combat is dreadful yet manageable but there's one clawed enemy in particular that is so fast and powerful that you are guaranteed to lose about half your life bar to one EVERY TIME. Everything is just so janky and difficult to control and for a fast paced action game like this that's very clearly trying to be Odin Sphere or Muramasa but IN SPACE it's a massive letdown.
I do want to end on a positive note so I will say that the backgrounds and nicely drawn and the does use an interesting skill system. You sort of have this network of nodes where one half is stat boosts and the other half is your movements. So you can junction +X attack to the first, second or third swing of your sword so you can either spread that damage out or just do what I did and make the first attack hit like a truck and then everything else just be a shitty follow up to try and proc the death effect from my sword. There is also a crafting system that I expect wanted you to make elemental weapons to exploit weaknesses and stuff but you just make a weapon have a death attribute that you can just smack a normal enemy until it gets the effect and then dash around the field until it dies, rendering all non boss combat trivial.
Clearly the developer of this game had their heart in the right place. It's a terrible, horrendous, irredeemable shitty mess but a clear effort was made and I can respect that. However that doesn't excuse the game itself from being as bad as it is. I got it for free and I want my money back
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