[quote name='Brak']I wouldn't call that "freeform".
I'd call that "boring".[/quote]

Then it's not for you!

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I started EDF thinking 2 players should just plow through it. And then I thought it would be best to hoard weapons. Then I figured It'd be better to go back to the start, and fight through the harder difficulties of early stages, to get some REALLY nice guns. I figured out I didn't have to play the game straight through, and that ANY way I played it had it's own rewards.
With those 2 weapons, and 2 characters, we came up with varied strategy and varied styles, such as:
Jumping around with Rocket launchers like a drunken astronaut...
Stopping hordes of enemies with weak, high rate of fire machine guns, only to blow away the clumps with rockets...
Same as previous, but replace machine guns with spread shotgun (That weapon was amazing!)
Defeating huge enemies by getting in point blank range, and shotting them into the stratosphere with a shotgun...
Making paths in the caves into safe zones by placing remote guns at both ends, and then enticing the enemy to attack with random rocket shots, until they dashed into our remotegun trap of death...
Sniping distanced hordes and then WATCHING as the enemies who where alerted to you suddenly came at you in a wave of destruction that most other games have yet to mimic...
Getting a friend to ride a helecopter to a high tower, and then snipe the enemy to him, so that they overtake the structure, and then blowing it up with bombs or rockets from far away, and wathcing as every enemy on the tower dies, as you friend pummels back down to earth, amist the green blood..
Each difficulty brought new strats, too. What was oncee able to be one-shotted now needed 3 shots. What could once be contained by 1 player with a max-damage wep now needed both players to control. Where once 1 player could bring down a ship before the hoard reached you, with their trusty sniper rifle, you now needed both players PERFECTLY shooting as early and as swiftly as you could, to accomplish the same result.
I also loved the strat of equiping 2 rifles with long reload times, and switching between them, between shots. This let you achieve a more continuous rate of fire, that at times, just seemed unfair.
REALLY, if having each stage in a game have multiple difficulties, which can change your approach to them ENTIRELY (basically making them NEW stages), seems -Boring-, then this just isn't the game for you!
I remember the first time you get to fight the Ant (Spider? I forget which) Queen. After that long mission, my little brother and I barely had any health left. Fellow EDF man screams "We've found the queen! She's E-NOR-MOUS!", and this had us so freaked out, we just shot rockets into her den. The NPCs charged in, and all we could hear where the sounds of spiders and ants dying, and see the stream of green goop she was shooting. We never even saw HER, it was just a ballet of explosions. When "Mission Clear!" popped up on screen, we let out loud "YEAH!!!"s, as we walk into the room, no sign of the slain ruler, trying desperately to collect the weapon and armor drops.
The only other Action/adventure co-op games this Gen that compared to the scale of EDF, FOR US so far has pretty much been RE5... and that's only in certain instances. Gears 2 tried, but I just don't find human-esque enemies anywhere near as interesting as something with it's our unique shape and abilities. King Spider with 100s of minions > Mutated Brumack or whatever it was... (And lets not even talk about the alien Mothership! Now THAT was an epic battle.)
[quote name='SynGamer']Apology accepted
It's not that I didn't like that game, I actually enjoyed it, even with all the technical failures going on around me. But i see achievements as something that can extend the life of a game in a FUN way...not tedious playing through the game a handful of times. There are plenty of games i'll jump into with a friend (online) on the hardest difficulty and have a blast because of the challenge. This game took both of those options away.[/quote]
For EDF, those achievements where just tagged on milestones to the REAL reasons you where beating the game: Weapon collecting! I'd hate the cheevos too, if that's all beating the difficulties added. EDF games rewarded you for beating difficulties back when they originated on PS2 I believe, so this is a case of "yay, you completed something that was ALWAYS a milestone in our series!!"
I think cheevos should always be 2nd place to games rewarding you IN GAME for what you do. That's something that achievements have made most developers FORGET about. Shouldn't an in game reward be reason enough to do something in game, and an achievement just be icing on the cake?
The biggest problem with EDF's achievements, is that Player 2 doesn't get them. That REALLY was a BAD, BAD oversight.