This is what Helldivers 2 would look like in 2017

Monster attack also known as The Earth Defence Force overseas (Do not confuse with the SNES title) is the iconic yet obscure action game where you play as a marine on duty to stop the alien invasion on earth by kicking the ass of each and everyone of them.

This game is obviously inspired by Starship Troopers and a lot of other kaiju Japanese movies like Godzilla and a ton of more obscure ones, with these movies in mind it’s not really hard to figure out what the gameplay would be like.
Pretty simple, pick a mission, kill aliens, get new weapons and upgrade your armor, rinse and repeat. If you’ve played any future entry it’s literally the same thing except it looks worse and play worse but the game is primarily the same.

But ignoring all future entries, the armor system always seemed weird to me like why do I have to grind armor items to get more HP, wouldn’t it just be easier to have a classic RPG level system based on kills since that’s what you do 90% of the game! It gets really tedious to walk to every dropped item just to get a scrap of health or a duplicated weapon.

I won’t be too harsh about it since it’s part of the simple 2000 franchise and if you are not aware they were pretty much bargain bin games before they were even released, the goal was to make cheap games hence the 2000 in the name since it’s 2000 yen per game, so for that price I’d say it’s a pretty cool experimental game and it would eventually lead us to where we are now so bless you simple 2000.
So yeah it’s just a worse version of what you can play now on consoles, it looks bad but it has REALLY cool destruction physics for a ps2 game, it plays like crap with the second stick for aiming not being available by default you actually have to enable it, it’s really repetitive with very few enemy type of weapon variations, and it’s very grindy if you actually want to finish all difficulty.
I honestly wouldn’t recommend playing this entry it’s just not as good as the later entries obviously, but hell if you want to melt your ps2 with massive explosions at sub 15 fps in local COOP go for it.

The name "Monster Attack" reminds me of when I was in my late teens staying up late on a Saturday night so I could record anime on the sci-fi channel using VHS. It wasn't so prevalent at the time. Whilst waiting I would watch whatever bad horror or sci-fi movies were being shown on the run up, it became such an ingrained memory as an adult I would later host bad movie night with friends where we would watch Sharknado, wolf cop, Killer Clowns from Outer space and other dubious films.

I guess it really helped solidify not only my love of B movies, but also due to the PS2 of just mid budget game equivalents as it seemed there were so many of these at the time before everything started being swallowed up in consolidations now days. Back on the PS2 this was such a line of thinking that a simple series) of extremely mid budget cheaper games was launched. A bizarre mix of titles some of which make Dead or Alive Volleyball look tame. A big selection of these got Western releases in the West and a couple even became successful enough to spin off their own series. Some of these are still going to this day such as Onechanbara and Monster Attack, you see Monster Attack is actually the first in the Earth Defence Force series.

The Simple Series 2000 was apparently named this because the games would cost 2000 yen which today is just over £10 and considering this fact, Monster Attack is really quite good. All the staples of the series are still here. There are giant ants, UFOs, walking robots and giant dinosaurs. You can get in tanks and helicopters and there is even a nifty hover bike. Buildings collapse in chunky explosions as your stray rocket accidently slams into it with smoke from the collapse. In some ways despite the progress made in a lot of areas in later games there is actually something extremely pleasant about the simplicity of the game here.

I feel the scale a lot more in Monster Attack. My character is small compared with the surroundings, it's slightly more claustrophobic in some ways. The music and designs have a lot more of a retro inspiration with purple spinning top robots and UFOS with purple bulging discs to the sound of music like it was played on a Theremin. Things collapse and explode with surprising impact through my headphones with beefy explosions and the game doesn't out stay it's welcome. An issue I have despite my love of the later games but at 25 missions it is easily played in a couple of evenings. You only have a generic trooper and as you kill enemies they will occasionally drop weapons and armour boxes to expand your overall health and give you combat options. The growth rate is such that at the moment playing through easy, normal and hard I haven't had to grind at all as it curves out nicely.

Where the game does fail for me though is on two fronts, original design and localisation short cutting. On the original design front it's incredibly easy to bounce off of this game from it's base controller setting, it's pretty evident even here on backloggd because the initial set up is truly abhorrent. This mode doesn't allow you to manually aim vertically or use the right analog stick. It's basically unplayable and it's utterly baffling how this was thought to be a good idea as the standard set up. There is a control option that allows you to move with the left stick and aim with the right like a traditional third person shooter in the settings that makes this infinitely more fun though you can't remap the other buttons which I would have preferred but that's the lesser of two evils here. Equally it has a cinematic cam that makes you watch the UFOs as they burn and descend into epic explosions when you destroy them. It gives a great field of view blurring you out and looks pretty awesome. What isn't so wonderful about this though is that enemies continue their relentless assault upon you with a fixed angle and no reticule. Just terrible idea, you need to turn that off in the settings to then the game plays pretty well.

The second issue is the localisation. It removed all the voice acting from the game. I get it might not have been worth dubbing it financially but it also didn't add subtitles to the point it even removed the tutorial messages at the start of the game for the controls. Such an odd decision and it makes the levels feel so silent without them. I had to watch a playthrough with the voices and subtitles to see what was actually missing. It's kind of night and day.

Those two pretty glaring flaws aside though I can see why this super cheap budget game got a franchise because 21 years later it is still extremely fun to play and the idea of giant insects, robots and monsters attacking cities will probably never get old. Whilst I would still recommend the later games over this, it's still not a bad place to start the series.

+ Basic idea is just fun to blast monsters and robots.
+ Has pretty good pacing and levelling curve compared with later games.
+ Holds up really well...

-...after changing the settings. The starting controls are bafflingly bad.
- Localisation removed all voice acting and even the tutorial boxes. Really impactful on the overall experience.

if this is the low point for the series then that's an extremely good sign. what the hell is it with japanese b teams and making absolutely cracked third person shooters???

honestly i was more surprised by how fully formed everything here felt despite it being a budget title. sure there's a lot of lag, but that crunchiness just makes the massive kill counts more cathartic

go play zombie zone and come back here. tell me which one feels more budgeted