You look around as an explosion is set off near you, and it causes your ears to ring. Dirt and concrete are flying through the air as you run further into the fray. You see a different kind of soldier run past you as they attack the giant aggressors that are invading the Earth. What will you do to survive this apocalyptic event? Find out in our review of Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain.

From Developer Yuke’s and D3 Publisher, comes the next entry into the Earth Defense Force series. You are immediately thrown into the battle as Earth is being overrun by giant robots called Scourgers, and likewise giant ant creatures that have descended from the hive ship. Your mission is to fight them back with the combined Earth Defense Forces. These forces are made up of soldiers from all around the world, united for the first time for a common goal, survival. Defeat the enemy and drive them from your home.

Graphically, Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain, looks like an older style PlayStation 2 game. The character models for the male characters are fine but the female characters, with a few exceptions, look like they just took the male characters and swapped them over to the female character creator side. There are quite a few options for your character, so choose wisely. Getting into the game you will see that it does take some time to load in the full range of textures for the buildings, the enemies, and the character models. Once they are loaded up they seem a little bland to me personally.

Mechanically the game moves like any other shooter, and the controls are basically the same as most shooters as well. There is not a big learning curve, except for overdrive mode, but that’s simple as well. As you progress through your missions you will earn coin to be able to buy new weapons to take on the bad guys. The missions are pretty lackluster themselves. You start a mission at your menu selection area where you can pick new weapons and abilities for the mission. Once you start the mission you are dropped in and told what to do. For the most part, I was able to go to point a, and kill enemies at point b, without much of a time constraint or issue. There really wasn’t much challenge in the game for me.

Story-wise, I can get behind an alien invasion of the planet, but giant ants? I mean they are technologically able to build a spaceship hive and robots that mimic humans? Are they having human envy? Your character is a low-level grunt who gets a special core after his, or her, the entire unit is wiped out. Then they destroy the hive ship by themselves, and then you are out of the fight for so many years before the real story begins. It all just seems a little too farfetched for this science fiction fanatic.

Note: Our copy was reviewed on PlayStation 4 with a code provided by PR.