Earthfall

The world has ended, I’m with my buddies and I’ve got a pistol with infinite ammo, I’d say this was Left 4 Dead but something is a bit different. The zombies are little more hunched, a little more grey and a little less human. In fact, they’re not human at all.

Saving the world from eerily familiar alien hordes.

Earthfall is a solo or multiplayer FPS that pits four remnants of a human town against some underwhelming aliens that are rampaging and at times swarming. It will not stand out from the other dozen games of its type but it is another reasonable choice that - at least - doesn't require lessons.

It's not every day that a cooperative first-person shooter hits the market. Does Earthfall have what it takes to scratch your co-op itch?

Earthfall has some great flashes of fun, but lacks the imagination and balance needed to sustain it for very long.

Earthfall is a cooperative FPS with a few interesting ideas that it fails to deliver on. Built on a poor foundation of unsatisfying combat and repetitive mission structure, every aspect of the game is mediocre at best. With some serious retooling, its light building mechanic could be an interesting twist, but there’s little reason to play Earthfall in its current state with so many better examples of the genre already out there.

Parts of Earthfall present a certain charm, and the co-op shooting experience could certainly be fun with the right group of friends. But it’s hard to get away from the fact that Earthfall is a lesser incarnation of a decade-old game, with fewer modes and missions, at a higher price.

You cut through the maze of white picket fences, with a shotgun and only a couple of shells in hand. In the distance, you can hear them chittering. The three friends with you are growing nervous. “Need some health,” one of them says. Suddenly that dreaded alarm bellows and out of the bushes jumps a massive beast, capable of slaughtering you all in a few swipes…only for half of it to suddenly disappear into a wall and become stuck. Its giant hands are swinging but failing to reach you. You all shrug your shoulders, put a hundred rounds into the monster, and then move on.

Earthfall is a co-op first-person shooter that pits you and your friends against hordes of aliens in an attempt to escape unscathed. It takes its influence from games like Left 4 Dead, however when I saw the trailer I thought it could be something a bit more like Extinction from Call of Duty: Ghosts as you face off against different aliens, trying to escape the nightmare. Unfortunately, for as fun as Earthfall looks, it has a lot of faults that make it a lot less appealing to play.

Leave it for dead.

The Left 4 Dead franchise was one of the defining reasons for the rise in popularity of co-operative multiplayer shooters during the previous generation, and looking back on things, it’s kind of crazy to think that neither instalment ever made its way onto the PlayStation 3. However, the genre has taken a bit of backseat in recent years, and with Valve refusing to release a third entry in any of its series, the baton is passed down to other creators in an attempt to emulate the experience. Developer Holospark is aiming to pick up those pieces with Earthfall, but can it replicate those fond mem...

Players drop into dreary Pacific Northwest America as up to four different personalities in Holospark’s Earthfall, searching for salvation while fighting off hordes of an alien invasion. The co-op First-Person Shooter (FPS) leads through ten linear levels of extra-terrestrial carnage, innovative defence building, and… not much else.