EARTH DEFENSE FORCE: Iron Rain Review for PlayStation 4

Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain by developer YUKE’S and publisher D3 Publisher Inc., is a third-person shooter. In it, you play as a member of a task force assigned to deal with alien threats.

After the game’s opening mission, you get to customize your character’s appearance. While the character creation options weren’t nearly as robust as they are in other games, I appreciated its inclusion. Not only did it help me feel unique, but it also added to the story element that your character is some sort of special “super soldier.”

Although the story hails your character as a super soldier, the only real evidence of this is the inclusion of a rage mode called “overload.” Overload allows you to have unlimited access to your gear’s special ability and drastically shortens reload times for a set period of time. The downside to this is that, unless you get a hold of a special item, you can only use overload once per mission.

In creating your character’s loadout, there are four options: weapon 1, weapon 2, items, and gear. Weapons 1 and 2 are your primary and secondary weapons. Items are the recovery items you can bring with you. You can only carry one of each type of item and the amount of items you can carry is influenced by your choice of gear.

Your gear type is similar to your soldier class in other shooting games. It determines what type of special ability you have, be that flying, a quick-dodge, or something else. To begin with, you only have access to 2 gear types: trooper and jet-trooper. As you progress through the game’s story, you will unlock additional gear types. Each gear type has stats for offense, defense, mobility, and number of support items that can be carried. For example, the jet-trooper has the most mobility of the gears, but to balance things out, its offense, defense, and item storage capacity are below the other gears. Each gear also has access to a special ability; for example the jet-trooper can fly. Each of the special abilities is governed by a “special” meter that will slowly deplete when the ability is in use and recover when it is not being used (unless you’re in overdrive mode, in which case you get unlimited use of the ability for the mode’s duration). If the meter hits 0%, then you will have to wait for the meter to reach 100% before you can use the ability again.

It is also possible to summon vehicles in the game. Vehicle summons are treated the same as items—you can only carry one of each and it adds to your item total. Supposedly there is a limit of only being able to summon 4 vehicles per mission, but I never carried enough vehicle summons to test this. While I usually do better in vehicles than I do on foot, I found the controls for the vehicles in this game to be very clunky. Simply trying to aim was difficult and I found that I could accomplish more on foot. Also, vehicles have limited ammo while ammo for most on-foot weapons is unlimited (something of a reverse of how it is in other games).

The game also has access to both local and online multiplayer, but I was never able to test it. Overall, I enjoyed my time with this game. As such, I think a fair rating for it would be 8/10.

Check Out the Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain PS4 Launch Date Trailer:

For more information on Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain, please visit the official website,