Earth Wars: A Godawful Mess

Earth Wars is by far one of the worst indie games I've ever played and I'm the kind of Steam user that spent 25p buying a game called "Oppai Girl" so that's saying A LOT.

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

Earth Wars

Here's a game I'm still playing but it's taking me so long to finish it I felt like I'm just going to go ahead and talk about it now.  It's also not very good

Earth Wars, also known as Earths Dawn (I discovered literally just now as I tried to Google information about the developer) is a 2D side scrolling action game about people beating up aliens.  I lost interest in the game so quickly that I now just skip all the cutscenes but from what I can tell aliens came out of the Earth and now you have to retake what was destroyed as part of an elite squad that all decide to use swords instead of guns.  You have to battle your way across North America killing big bads and doing other random missions such as saving soldiers or finding items until the problem has been solved. 

The first thing you'll notice right off the bat is the art style and game play are extremely reminiscent of games such as Odin Sphere or Muramasa but sort of like the poor mans version of this style.  The visuals are sort of "chunky" and nothing animates very well.  Couple this with the fact that combat is very busy with explosions and particle effects flying everywhere and what you have is a very visually frustrating title.

But I didn't download this game for free of PSN just to look at it, dangit, I came to play!  Unfortunately the game plays like a pile of rotting assholes and is generally frustrating and just flat out not all that fun.  It's again, trying to imitate the fast melee type fighting that you find in games like Muramasa but it's clunky and quite often the character doesn't quite do the exact things you want them too.  Also there's no "impact" when attacks connect and you have no real feel for exactly how much damage you are doing.  Also there's no variation in attacks or combos, you just mash attack on the thing until it explodes into tiny pieces and then dash to the next guy to repeat the process.  I'm even at a point now where my weapon has a death effect on it so I just mash until I see the icon and then run away until it the death kicks in and I get to move on.

Speaking of a lack of variation the missions are absolutely abysmal.  You get the main story missions which have you fighting through a map to fight a big enemy which are kind of cool but these sections are always book ended by pointless "free missions".  The free missions have you running through the same drab environments again and again to do such exciting things like "Kill X of Y", "Find Z of this item" or "reach location with time limit".  Once you've done enough free missions to run down a timer you get to do another cool mission but these last about 5 or 6 minutes before it's back to the boring grind again.  The game seems to have an embarrassingly small amount of content but just has you do boring shit on the same 4 or 5 maps to pad things out and make you think that you got your moneys worth.

But the worst part is you MUST do these free missions because they get you skills which you have to activate on your, quote from the steam page, "Massive Skill tree".  The only thing massive about this skill tree is the size of the interface that you have to scroll through to get to each skill to activate them but the skills you get are all samey drab bullshit.  Most of the skills are stat increases or passive bonuses and the "active" skills that you get are all dumb shit like "Guard".  That's right folks, I'm 8 hours in and JUST got the skill that lets me block attacks.

Now I'm being very harsh but it's easy to see that Earth Wars had a lot of ambition behind it.  Clearly, the developer oneoreight has some good ideas but due to a lack of time/money/talent, whichever, the game just turned out a bit crap.  Of course, I'm not one to give up so I'll play it through to the end and if my opinion changes I'll be sure to make another post but I very much doubt it.  Even though I got it for £0 off PS+, I feel ripped off.  Don't spend £25 on Steam or whatever for it, just go and buy literally ANY game made by Vanillaware instead.