EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 4.1 The Shadow of New Despair
BANGER · Shooter · 2016
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $8.99.
- Length
- 22.7h
- Value
- $0.40/hr
- Reviews
- 95% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 4.1 The Shadow of New Despair is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, AMD Radeon HD 7870 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 （2GB Model or higher）, 8 GB of storage. Windows only.
It's a fight for the future of the planet between the Ravagers, a merciless swarm of alien invaders, and the Earth Defense Force (EDF) in this third-person shooter.Play as four different classes in over 80 missions with a range of 800 weapons at your disposal.Co-op play supported.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $7.99. That was November 2022. 72 discounts in the 10 years on record. They run about 50 percent off, roughly 7 weeks apart. Today's $8.99 at 55 percent off still sits 13 percent above the floor, so a deeper cut exists in its history.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 2 percent on value. It is pricier than 73 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 95 percent. It outscores the games it most resembles, including STAR WARS™ Battlefront ($4.99, scores 47) and Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon ($6.99, scores 59).
79 from critics against 95 percent from players, and the player number comes from people who own the game.
This site sampled 447 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 1 was written by a buyer who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 75 percent of the 487 reviews written there were positive, against 95 percent overall, and those are 6 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 22.7 hours. Doing everything runs 264, 12 times as long.
The drop-off
51% start to <1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
71 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
To save our mother Earth from any alien attack From vicious giant insects who have once again come back We'll unleash all our forces, we won't cut them any slack The EDF deploys! Our soldiers are prepared for any alien threats The navy launches ships, the air force send their jets And nothing can withstand our fixed bayonets The EDF deploys! Our forces have now dwindled and we pull back to regroup The enemy has...
the game is AWESOME! one small issue, the gameplay (although good) is more fun with other, and the playerbase is... Mostly korean, japanese, or chinese. not knowing ANY of those three languages makes it hard to communicate, so it's really just chance-based on multiplayer lobbies. Apart from that, buy it, it'll change your mind. Also why do crosshairs exist in this game? you can close your eyes, equip a minigun, and...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 4.1 The Shadow of New Despair scores 94/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/410320/earth-defense-force-4-1-the-shadow-of-new-despairThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 13, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.