Best When Harrowing
I had never played an EDF before this, though I had been hoping for a PC version for a while now. Luckily, despite the ultra low-budget and Japanese nature of the game the PC port turned out pretty well. Keyboard and mouse feel just fine and performance is great. The UI is entirely keyboard driven, which is a slight annoyance, but forgivable.
It's surprisingly hard to describe the appeal of the game without resorting to useless observations like: "It's just dumb fun!" Personally I lump it in with horde-based FPSes like Serious Sam, but if I'm being honest it probably has more in common with Dynasty Warriors, a series I have a pretty intense distaste for. Many missions also have a Gauntlet quality to them where you are forced to divide your time between taking down enemy spawners and the enemies themselves. EDF is probably at its best when it feels slightly too hectic and you're under intense pressure from multiple sources and forced to make and execute upon quick decisions while under extreme duress. In those moments, EDF 4.1 excels.
Unfortunately, one of the biggest problems with the game is its difficulty tuning. Normal felt far too easy for me, while Hard was just slightly too hard. This is especially true at the very end. The final handful of missions throw some hot bullshit at you and felt more or less impossible for me to complete on Hard. Beating these last few missions on Normal was pathetically simple, especially with my over-levelled arsenal of weapons. Having to choose between laughable and impossible isn't a great feel.
That said, for the most part the game plays fair and out of the just-under-100 missions there are very few clunkers. The game lasted me a while (23 hours) with missions that range from five to thirty minutes long. Although the game has a reputation for being the same thing over and over, new enemy types are being introduced consistently as the established ones become routine. This continues even into the late game, and are not just relegated to recolored or larger versions of old enemies. A couple missions feel like cutscenes more than anything else, and some have poor signposting-- such as putting the player into a "survive against impossible odds for 5 minutes" scenario without actually spelling out the terms of the mission.
There are some major fundamental issues that I hope would be corrected in any future EDF games. Speed is one issue. The player just moves too slowly, to the extent that I wouldn't suggest putting much time into any class besides the mobility-oriented Wing Divers (and even their bursts of speed are highly limited). The character progression system is also problematic. This involves picking up prize boxes from dead enemies that either contain a new weapon or that add to your max HP. While I love that each class has wildly different arsenals, that there is room for developing one's own playing style within those classes, and even that some of the weapons are intentionally very flawed, it just ends up being the case that a very small portion of the weapons will make up the majority of your playtime. The procurement of these upgrades and weapons is also a problem. Since missions end automatically, I tended to try leaving the last bug alive while I slowly trundled around giant, empty maps picking up prize boxes. Since the weapons you get are levelled based on the difficulty level, this compounds the overall issues with the difficulty curve-- remember when I said Normal was too easy? It's even easier when you have a bunch of overpowered guns. Being less than fastidious about collecting boxes will lead to a severe under-levelling problem, at which point replaying old missions to grind for boxes becomes an unfortunate possibility.
Perhaps they'd be better served moving to a straight kill-for-XP system? On the other hand, some of my most harrowing and fun moments have come from moments of weakness where I put myself into bad situations by chasing prize boxes, so I do see the value in what they are doing here. It's just a somewhat busted system.
Overall I'm really glad they released this for the PC and I'm very interested in a possible sequel.