A third-person shooter without a crash-cam, without dynamic lighting and without any semblance of a narrative; Earth Defense Force should be two steps back for a genre tackling its way into the number one spot of mainstream charts, and it is. But that's the point.

A slapstick caper more akin to Cro-team's Serious Sam than anything Epic and shiny, EDF 2017 is a 1990's shooter with one brain cell and two oversized testicles. Missions are single segments of over-the-top preposterously paced action set-pieces in which the two buttons – jump/shoot – are the only concerns of any player over the legal age rating (12). The core experience is a point and shoot candy-store of blasting, with tacked on weapon choices only affecting play in the more extreme difficulties. The short-comings are infinite and range from frame-rate to manoeuvrability and will understandably mortify the full-price payee but as a budget shot of nostalgic crazy, EDF is far from uninspiring.

The experience of the single-player campaign (a co-op is present), though brief and shallow, is graced with an evolution in challenge provided by the presence of more aggressive and numerous foes partnered with the acquisition of a greater arsenal of typical proportions.

At once the reason an entire generation loves a medium and the very embodiment of why it is detested, EDF 2017 is a tangled web of paradoxes. Fun, tiresome, aggressive, staid, beautiful, ugly and very, very silly – buy it.

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