Earth Defence Force 2017

• Go into the Options menu and turn Camera Effects off. This will prevent the camera suddenly abandoning you mid-firefight to focus on something else.

• While you can skip the "Easy" difficulty, the game is meant to be played in multiple playthroughs. You progressively get better weapons as you beat more levels, and even the earlier levels on the higher difficulties are impossible without weapons that dropped from the last levels of the easier difficulties. I'd recommend you start at the second difficulty and move forward from there.

• The game gets about 600 times better if you include a friend. It goes from a mediocre budget title to a hilariously awesome B-Movie co-op game.

• When you invade the Ant Nests underground, the Bounding Gun weapons are very, very good to use.

• You do not have a reload button, but you do have infinite ammo. If at any time you aren't under attack and you don't have a full magazine, just fire into space until you reload. There's nothing more terrifying than running out of ammo when you're surrounded by spiders.

• Turrets are amazing, and are always worth taking as they effectively add another player who cannot be damaged and has a kickass machine gun. They won't target weak points though, so they really can't take out anything that requires you to hit a specific point to inflict damage (e.g. UFOs).

• Weapons drop randomly based on the stage you are playing, so if you want something specific you can check the drop chart (I believe Gamefaqs has a detailed list) and do that until you get it. A few things I highly recommend are the Lysander Z, ZEXR-Gun, Stingray MF and AF100.

• Armor drops give you the same amount on any difficulty level (1.2 per icon), so if you want to farm up your HP I'd recommend doing it on Easy.

• The Health display stops at 9999, but your actual max HP can go higher than that. I have no idea what the actual cap is, and you should never need to go that high, but it's an option if you're stuck.

• Rolling is faster than walking. If you need to get somewhere in a hurry, turn slightly to the side and start repeatedly rolling in that direction.

• The final stages in Hardest and Inferno are horribly brutal, and you need to play them differently than you did the lower difficulties. Farm up health, bring turrets, and keep your distance. When a tide of bugs approach, just throw out your turrets, activate them, and start rolling in the opposite direction. A good setup for most levels would be for P1 to have the Stingray MF/ZEXR-Gun and for P2 to have a Lysander Z/ZEXR-Gun. P1 tries to thin out swarms while P2 goes for critical targets like UFOs or artillery robots.