6/10, surprisingly alright, but you are not missing much by skipping it. It starts off okay, and really, it has a lot of interesting things going for it, but it quickly loses its charm, too much too quickly to be recommendable in my opinion.
I went into this game as someone who was introduced into the series by EDF 5, and have since played all other EDF offerings on steam. I was looking at this as a kind of pilgrimage to see the earliest available EDF on steam, even if it is a spin-off.
The game had a very strong start as it actually gives you mechanics you would expect from "normal" games - primarily that every class can run. It was very wild to see fencer run, and outrun enemies. WD glides across the ground and can easily make the distance without consuming ANY energy. There is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ spectator mode if you go down. Enemies, while not very varied, are interesting enough. The big spider enemy is quite something to behold. There were very functional sentry nests, a tank and a mech (that spawn in-map), at least for Normal. Really, this game should have been a fever dream that I would be eagerly doing a 100% on and wanting more.
Sadly, this game has completely atrocious pacing. Instead of spawning all enemies at once it just keeps spawning them in small groups, and all around you. Personally, I found that this made the fights very annoying as instead of having this one big, clear horde going after you, it is instead a battle of attrition. Enemies are all around you, and there is a never-ending trickle of a few from every direction. There might be a bigger horde at the start, but when this spawning starts it just ends up feeling dragged out. This is because as the enemies get tankier/deal more damage and force you to rely on kiting them more and more, one graphical feedback you get is that the horde chasing you gets smaller and smaller. Here, instead, it feels like there is a dozen of enemies always around you and there is just no way to get rid of them. Add to that that the game chose a more "realistic" visual theme, and instead of giving you vibrant colors and sometimes absurd enemies to look at, you just have an endless mush of dark tones that you need to concentrate on to see where the enemies are. You can't even rely on the radar as for some reason it "pings" and only shows you the enemies for about a second every 5 seconds. Then there is also the fact that there are a lot of fights against minibosses, that, while look cool and create stress, are also very tanky. On harder difficulties this becomes even worse as it feels like the enemy health scales much faster than your weapons. I think just the switch from "Normal" to "Hard" gives enemy HP pool a 4x multiplier.
Your progress is locked behind your character "rank", basically levelling system from RPGs. There is a currency pool that you unlock most weapons with, but of course, some of them have to be locked behind weapon boxes. At the very least, those drop semi-consistently from bosses, and there are only a few of these weapons so it is not too bad. The bigger problem is that the weapons feel kinda underpowered and not that fun to use. Some are quite interesting, and at least the ones I tried were functional, but the reload to ammo count on them is just too much. It felt like at least half of the time I was waiting for the gun to reload. There is an unexplained, but somewhat intuitive mechanic to halve the reloading time by timing your reload correctly, but imo if I have the time to concentrate on that there are not enough bugs trying to kill me. Weapons feeling weak might be a product of me working up only through half the levels, but by the end of the normal campaign I was already struggling to motivate myself to finish this game. Ranks for every class have to be grinded out separately, so this slow start has to be repeated for every class before you see their peak.
Finally, voice acting. Characters deliver their voices in a very bland, almost bored manner, especially the HQ which drive the story. It was almost depressing to listen to. For some reason there are also random voicelines of your squadmates being played periodically that make zero sense. For one, these play even if you disable the AI squadmates and go in alone. For two, these are played completely randomly with zero regard for the situation you are in. These voicelines can go urge you to go close hive that spawns enemies when there are none, or complain that you are getting overrun when there is just one enemy left. Instead of being this endless source of possible slapstick comedy they are just annoying.
Overall, this is not a terrible game per se.
Campaign on normal took me about 5 hours to finish, and if you are an EDF fan it might just be worth it to witness what this game has to offer.
If you haven't seen EDF and think about getting into it, look into getting 5 and then 6, instead.
