When the Earth falls to an extra-terrestrial invasion, humanity becomes an endangered species. Earthfall is a four-player cooperative shooter that challenges players to survive hordes of ruthless alien drones and their inscrutable masters. Traverse the Pacific Northwest with friends or AI teammates in a desperate guerilla war against an invading extraterrestrial force. Fight against the ever-changing horde and save what’s left of humanity...

Earthfall is pretty much a Left For Dead clone. When we received this for review I didn't read any of the press information or look online for any clue as to what it was about. I always like, wherever possible, to come to a game without any preconceptions of what to expect.

I'm no stranger to last generation console games. There are a bunch of us that regularly go online and play old PS3 games. So when I fired up Earthfall on the Xbox One I was amazed at how poor the graphics were. It's got a RRP of £25 - or £35 if you buy the "Deluxe Edition". "Deluxe" in this case means you'll be spending £10 extra to get 12 additional weapon skins, 4 character skins and the game's soundtrack. To be fair the music isn't too bad, so it might be worth it if you're a collector of game scores.

In many ways this felt and looked more like an Xbox / PS2 game. The controls are also a bit of a joke. I'm one of those weirdos that likes to change the Y axis of the camera. You can do this, but it isn't overly easy to find. Likewise the look and aim sensitivity is all over the place and finding how to change that was also a chore. Most games have both of these under Options. What you had to do here was go into the controls menu and then scroll down (not easy to do as the menus seem to have been designed for PC users with a mouse) below the control preset options.

I set the aliens AI on easy and the AI of my team (playing in solo mode) as expert and I still found the boss on the first level to be a pain. In fact, one play through and I was absolutely bored of the game. It offered nothing new, the controls were clunky, the graphics poor and it just didn't seem like a lot of fun. Not only that, but the same old aliens attacking in waves just got too repetitive too quickly.

I did like the electric barriers that you could pick up and place in doorways so that the aliens couldn't get at you, but you could still shoot at them. But other than that I just found this to be a cobbled together patchwork of bits taken from other games, but it felt like all the wrong bits had been "borrowed".

There was potential here for this to have been fun and engaging. It's a little more lively playing online with real players - although you have to watch out for that one person who hoovers up all the guns and medipacks.

This is more of a miss than a hit. It's clunky, dated and a little unpredictable on the difficulty. One minute it's easy, the next it's punishingly difficult.

4

Darren Rea