EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 4.1 The Shadow of New Despair

The EDF's fight against the Ravagers spans four classes, over 80 missions and 800 weapons, with online co-op available too. At ≈ $2.46 from Kinguin, this is a timely opportunity for players seeking large-scale battles against alien swarms. Its Steam rating of 95% across 7,803 reviews offers another point of reference. Full controller support is included, alongside English and Japanese audio and subtitles, making the broad mission lineup easier to approach with your preferred setup. At $19.99 from Kinguin, you get a shooter with four classes and online co-op; 95% from 7,803 Steam reviews offers extra context.

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95%Steam Reviews7.8K reviews65OpenCritic/100

Released: Jul 18, 2016

Action · Third-Person Shooter · Co-op · Online Co-Op · Aliens

KinguinEARTH DEFENSE FORCE 4.1 The Shadow of New Despair PC Steam CD Key·Platform:·Checked 2026-11-01~~~ $51.38~~-95%from~ $2.46(~ €2.20)ALL-TIME LOWSave $17.53 vs SteamBuy now

EnebaEARTH DEFENSE FORCE 4.1 The Shadow of New Despair Steam Key GLOBAL·Platform:·Checked 2026-11-02-87%~ $2.50ALL-TIME LOWBuy now

K4GEARTH DEFENSE FORCE 4.1 The Shadow of New Despair Steam CD Key·Platform:·Checked 2026-11-02~~~ $18.76~~-86%from~ $2.55(~ €2.28)ALL-TIME LOWBuy now

GAMIVOEarth Defense Force 4.1: The Shadow of New Despair EN/JA Global·Platform:·Checked 2026-11-01-87%from~ $2.57(~ €2.30)ALL-TIME LOWBuy now

GamesPlanet DE·Platform:·Checked 2026-11-01~~~ $18.73~~-59%~ $7.61Buy now

GamesPlanet FR·Platform:·Checked 2026-11-01~~~ $18.73~~-59%~ $7.61Buy now

GamesPlanet US·Platform:·Checked 2026-11-01~~~ $19.99~~-60%~ $8.08Buy now

Newegg·Platform:·Checked 2026-11-01~~~ $19.99~~-60%~ $8.09Buy now

All-time low ~ $5.99across Steam & third-party storesat the recorded all-time low

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Price History

Past 36 months · Updated daily

Historical Low~ $3.342026-07Current Low Across Stores~ $16.92Kinguinvs. Historical Low+407%

Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.

DLC

DLCMission Pack 1: Time of the MutantsLoading store offers

DLCMission Pack 2: Extreme BattleLoading store offers

01About EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 4.1 The Shadow of New Despair

As an EDF soldier, fight swarms of giant alien insects and their machines in this third-person shooter. Four classes, over 80 missions and 800 weapons set the scale of the battle for Earth's future. Steam players rate it 95% from 7,803 reviews.

Credits

Developer

SANDLOT

Publisher

D3PUBLISHER

Steam player reviews

95%positiveOverwhelmingly Positive7,803 Steam reviews

Lowest recorded in 36 months

$3.342026-07-30 · KinguinBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.

Language support

Language	Interface	Subtitles	Audio
English	Yes	Yes	Yes
Japanese	Yes	Yes	Yes

Steam PC edition data · 2026-11-02

02Before you buy

Modes and scale

The Steam PC game supports single-player, multiplayer and co-op. It features four classes, over 80 missions and 800 weapons.

Controls and languages

Full controller support is available. English and Japanese are supported with audio and subtitles.

03Frequently asked questions

Who does the EDF fight?

The EDF fights the Ravagers, an alien force including giant insects and combat machines.

Is co-op available?

Yes. Online co-op is supported.

How much mission and weapon variety is described?

The description lists four classes, over 80 missions and 800 weapons.

Popular Steam reviews

Native-language selection · 10 reviews

Selected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.

RecommendedSteam player

07/24/2016

I blew up the city to stop the aliens from blowing up the cityShow moreShow less

33.7 hours at review630 people found this helpful

Not recommendedSteam player

01/05/2018

I SO much wanted to give a postive review, because initially (both in single and multi player) the game seems awesome enough to overlook the ridiculous menu system and many glitches and bugs. But I quickly found that there are just SO many problems with this game that I have to write something to try to offset the wildly, ridiculously positive reviews it gets. Do NOT be sucked in by the "overwhelmingly positive" reviews unless you have carefully read the following. Then, if you're still enthusiastic to buy it, more power to you. Meanwhile, you fanbois who will bash on me for this review, well, that rolls off my back, because this opinion is carefully thought out after approaching 100 hours of game-play. 1) The ridiculous clipping issues are completely untenable. As just one example, there are multiple levels in which you fight giant spiders that fire web strands. If they catch you in these strands, they drag you toward them, doing lots of damage to you as you are dragged. You can shoot these stands to break them, but it takes a lot of firepower to do it. But the spiders can somehow "sense" where you are, through buildings and even through entire MOUNTAINS. So, you repeatedly find yourself in a situation where you cannot even SEE the spiders, much less fire on them. Yet, they are able to web you and start dragging you... THROUGH a mountain or building that can't be destroyed. So, you will die because you can't even get one shot at these things, yet they can pin you against the side of a building or mountain, just tearing you up, and you're helpless. Worse is when two or more work on you together, which often happens. So, as you're trying to get free of one web, you're just caught in another, dragging you two directions and doing tremendous damage to you. Die, and die again. Restart the map, and restart again. RIDICULOUS!!! YOU can't see through a mountain, so they shouldn't be able either. YOU can't fire through a mountain, so they shouldn't be able to either. And this is just one example of clipping issues that will kill you countless times. 2) This is worse than Starship Troopers, where you're perpetually asking the question, "WHY am I forced to take on waves of giant insects while armed with a peashooter? Ohhh... but you can gain better weapons as you win missions. Except that very quickly you start seeing the exact same drops again and again. There are dozens of weapons for your class that you'll never see, but you'll see the same lame-azz weapons mission after mission. Ohhh... the "fix" is that you're supposed to "farm" for better weapons by playing missions on "hard" or "hardest" or "inferno," so that you get better and better weapons that drop on those levels of difficulty. Except that you have the same problem as before: The SAME weapons keep dropping, so you have, like, one barely-decent rocket launcher and one barely-decent shotgun, with all the rest of your weapon possibilities being garbage. And all the really awesome weapons you read about never drop. You are ALWAYS and ridiculously underpowered! Do NOT believe the fanbois that will claim that you just have to keep "farming." What they are really saying is: "I endured the GRIND, so YOU should have to also." So, be aware, this game has GRIND like you'll rarely see! If you have countless hours of your life to devote to just this game, and you enjoy, I mean ENJOY, playing the SAME mission again and again and again and again and again and.... again and again and again and..... again and again.... just to try to get some decent weapons, then, by all means, you'll LOVE this game! Normal people, however, and those who also live a real life outside of mommy's basement, quickly find the absurdity of the weapons progression to be, well, absurd! 3) Everything I've said thus far concerns single-player. A whole new level of absurdity is achieved in multiplayer. There, you have both armor and weapon-level limits for each mission. These limits ALWAYS put you at a radical disadvantage! For two-player, the mobs get 1.8 times harder to kill. Yet, now, you are weapons-level limited, so it's even harder to kill them. Furthermore, the number of mobs doesn't scale reasonably, so it feels exponentially harder in multiplayer! Ohhh, you want to uncheck the two checkboxes that would allow you to NOT have armor and weapons-level limits? Sure you do, but you can't. Those are LOCKED. How do you unlock them? Well.... Brace yourself.... ALL you have to do is complete a net-total of 70% of the game including all four character classes. That's it. Just play about (no kidding) 1200 hours of (mostly repetitive) multiplayer (much of which is to farm weapons), about 350 completed missions, with all of the character classes, and you can finally "earn" the privilege of unlocking those checkboxes and thereby finally be able to bring your best weapons into the fights. Ohhh, but you'll still have the problem you had from single-player: You CAN'T get those better weapons without farming in the harder modes. You thought that "normal" was hard? Ha! Silly you! Normal ain't anything! You want to just enjoy some casual play, thinking that "hard" means hard, and "inferno" is for the hard-core fanbois that have nothing better to do with their lives than feel like "winners" because they can beat "inferno" levels? Sorry, there really IS NO NORMAL! "Normal" is very hard! Even "normal" is FAR from reasonable. The higher missions (85+) are just INSANELY, STUPIDLY hard, even on "normal." And why? Well, because, see above. YOU didn't invest 500+ hours into farming weapons on the off chance that you'd get one of the rare drops that gives you a semi-decent weapon. So, you'll wade into battle with your peashooters and have to hit the mobs 2 to 100 times (no kidding) to kill them. Meanwhile, hundreds of them are swarming you, and you're overwhelmed. This is worse that Serious Sam, because you don't just respawn and keep going. In THIS game, you die and you must restart the whole mission. Again and again and again and again.... Well, I did that "again" bit to you once for effect, but, seriously, I cannot BEGIN to do justice to how RELENTLESS the "again" in this game is! You have never seen grind like this before; I sure haven't! So, here's the deal. The game is a rip-off at $30! It's an insane rip-off at full price. At, maybe, $5, the average gamer is going to get enough value out of it. But you have to ask yourself ONE question.... Are you a HARD-CORE shooter who lives in mommy's basement and has nothing better to do with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours to just TRY to get decent enough weapons to progress, or are you a more casual gamer who likes to play other games and has a REAL life? Put another way: Is your entire identity wrapped up in beating games like this, or is your identity wrapped up in REAL-world accomplishments and relationships? If you answer "yes" to the former half of those two questions, then this game is for YOU, and you will derive great personal satisfaction out of knowing that you are just WAY more bad-azz (as a gamer) than people like me who complain about the weapons-progression system and grind. If you answer "yes" to the latter half of those questions, then STAY AWAY, because this game is soul-sucking in its relentlessly overwhelming difficulty and grind. It is NOT fun to die continually on the "harder" missions, all the while being absurdly underpowered, and where the ONLY "answer" you'll hear is "farm for better weapons." And you'll just "love" almost beating one of the harder missions (after trying dozens of times) and find that the game glitches, one or more of your partners are disconnected, and you're left alone. I really could go on and on. There are multiple other things about the bugs, the glitches, the HORRENDOUS menu system, and much more. But you have been warned. There is one primary sort of gamer that this game will appeal to. ALL others should pass on this!Show moreShow less

39.1 hours at review39 people found this helpful

RecommendedSteam player

08/13/2022

Thank you, Badger.Show moreShow less

4.5 hours at review469 people found this helpful

Not recommendedSteam player

01/02/2017

"Are you just mercenaries? Fighting for scraps?" I tried to like EDF. 96% positive user review score. Steam likes it. Twitch likes it. Mainstream critics like it. Unconventional critics like it. This is going to be my last review of 2016, and I really wish it wasn't. I really wish that I could just ignore what I've seen, and brush off that I didn't like EDF. Just buy another game and move on without saying a word. But EDF--EDF is an unfathomably pointless, outright dumb experience. There's no dimension to it, no depth, no purpose. You just shoot things. The entire game is shooting things. There's not many enemies, and the game is massively padded to the point where several missions are virtually identical. Most of the time you'll be shooting things from very long distances unless you play the Fencer class, which is the only way the game can get in anyway involving. The gunplay isn't even GOOD. The enemies are utterly massive which gives a great sense of scale, but at the same time it means that you'll never miss. Some of the soldiers even say "You can close your eyes and still hit em'." Hit indication is limited to a very hard to see tracer effect on the bullets which can barely be seen because of the foliage that constantly covers the maps. In any other game, this would make the gunfights nonfunctional, but because the enemies are so big and so dumb that you will always hit them, it merely becomes a matter of lacking precision, rather than not knowing where to shoot. The game is so dumb that even the lack of basic features like this don't even hurt it. Because again, you do nothing. You complete each mission when the enemies die. There's no score. You don't get bonuses for having saved people. There's not even a timer. You're not even guaranteed a reward, you can complete missions and get absolutely nothing because of how the timesink functions. The *point*, to use that word lightly, of EDF, is to obtain better weapons so you can fight stronger enemies to get even better weapons. That is nothing new, there are hundreds of games like that. But where games like Diablo, Warframe, Borderlands, Path of Exile etc. at least have the common decency to disguise the grating minutiae of what you're doing, EDF provides nothing. This is the game about nothing. Buying a game titled "Timesink" where you continuously scrub dishes to get better cleaning equipment would be even less transparent than what EDF does. You kill insects and robots. The end. It's baffling to me. Videogames have existed in recognizable form since 1962, putting this new year as the 55th year that this medium's existed. We've got games where you can feel like Indiana Jones. We've got games where you can make your own story. We've got games that people question if they're even games because they're that arcane. But EDF makes it's mark, because what we don't have yet is...a game where you kill ants. Is this it? Is this a $50 game? Is this something people buy and think "Oh, wow, I can call an air strike on spiders!" and that's a marvel? That is the accepted emblem of an "overwhemlingly" good game, that acceptance of the most unbelievably banal? This is exactly the type of game that these obnoxious PC elitists would bash as being infantile console trash in the early 2000s, but here we are on the edge of 2017, and this is the Hot New Thing. The first Borderlands was more daring than EDF. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Borderlands of all games. But I get it. It's got four classes. It's got arcady sound effects. It doesn't try to be homogynous and overly balanced. The (intentionally?) terrible voice acting brings to mind the arcade hits of the early 2000s. There are times, brief moments, where you are surrounded by what seems like infinite enemies, and you feel that sense of scale, that primal sense of danger, that the rest of the game so painfully fails to invoke because you can shoot blindfolded and still win each mission. It's like Starship Troopers! Everyone like Starship Troopers right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGe6017JwPwShow moreShow less

7.8 hours at review24 people found this helpful

Not recommendedSteam player

07/01/2021

Pretty mixed thoughts on EDF 4.1, I was looking forward to playing an EDF game, especially after I'd heard so much about the series being the "best worst games ever" and with 4.1 being a more preferred by many over 5, I picked this one up. Do I hate it? No, I don't hate it. Sadly however I found it a lot less user-friendly and developed than I'd have liked, I'm not enjoying it and don't feel I'm getting anywhere so can't justify continuing to play it. I've got a lot of thoughts on why I felt this way so to try and keep this more simple, I'll put the issues I had down to three factors: Controls I found it to be pretty clunky, I ended up rolling around at 45 degree angles as the Ranger for example as there isn't a sprint or the ability to roll forward. Playing the Fencer, the heavily-armed tanky unit, was satisfying until I realised that there isn't really much fun when you want to get somewhere, you can thrust forward a bit over and over but nothing more. It just ends up feeling bothersome. You'll also end up using weapons strangely too, aiming assault rifles at unusual angles because "it fires that way", it's plain silly... Accuracy may increase with the "level" but why should a weapon be so bad by default? It makes some of them It's practically unusable unless you're willing to aim wrong. User Interface/Experience The interface is strange, there isn't a cursor so you end up clicking to select and using WSAD to move around the menus, menus that don't always feel intuitive. Every time you start the game you'll be notified with a popup "You will use the mouse" etc., it's badly translated and shouldn't even be a message you need to see. Things like that add up. Progression Now this is the seriously disappointing surprise to me... It may have been the dealbreaker. I suspect it also is to anyone that values upgrade systems and customisation. There's no real armour upgrades, visual or functional, just an number that goes up that's essentially just health. Aside from that one health value, you also won't have any kind of progression with your character, no stats, no skills, nothing. What you will get are guns, guns that only level-up when "looted" again, that's it. I feel like a lot of depth is lost here, it could be so much more. Oh and sure, you can change two colours on your uniform but that's hardly of much value. It'd be nice to at least have several armour sets with different stats for each class. It would nice to have something to feel like you're progressing yourself and not just random weapons. So, in summary, things just don't sit right for me here, especially from a game that was released on PC in 2016. As someone that's played a lot of games, this one feels like it offers something grand but forgets to give you the full suite of tools to embrace it. A strange experience.Show moreShow less

2.4 hours at review21 people found this helpful

Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.