As of August 16th 2024, I can no longer launch the game without having the EGS installed.
Not EOS - the full Epic Games Store has to be installed to launch EDF6.

When I try to launch the game without EGS, a window appears titled "Epic Online Services Update".
This update never succeeds, the loading bar gets stuck and nothing happens.
There is no error message. Launching EDF6 is impossible in this state.

I found an old forum post (for a different game) that says installing EGS will fix this problem.
Lo and behold, installing EGS does allow me to launch EDF6.
But uninstalling EGS prevents me from launching EDF6 again!

I didn't complain about EOS being required, lots of games secretly use EOS in the background.
But I draw the line at needing to install the full EGS onto my computer.
Please fix this, and all of the crashes too, then I will change my review back to positive.

This is not the first time this year that a B movie-inspired Steam game about shooting bugs added a third-party account requirement that wasn't previously necessary. In this case, it also happened to be an Epic account. Not Epic Games Store, mind you, but that was never going to go over well with Steam users. The requirement also wasn't disclosed until release day.

If you came here wondering why reviews are "Mixed," there's your answer. On the bright side, it's less intrusive than you'd expect (though more than you'd hope), it isn't necessary for offline gameplay, and the developer claims to be looking into removing it. This doesn't seem to have been malicious; just painfully incompetent.

As for the game itself? EDF 6 is the best EDF yet. If you liked any of the previous games, you'll like this one. If you haven't played any of the previous games, this is a great place to start. You'll get a little more out of the story if you've experienced EDF 5's story, but that's not a hard requirement. But one warning: if you played EDF 5 particularly recently, you might want to wait a bit before playing this. These are long games, and EDF 6 reuses a lot of assets and most of its systems from EDF 5. You're going to burn out if you play them back to back.

Genuinely a good continuation of the EDF series. There's criticism to be made on its reuse of EDF 5 missions and poor "cutscenes" but the new enemy types are great and the enhancements of each class are phenomenal. So you'd figure the negative review is due to having to create and login to Epic to play but no.

While incredibly annoying and unneeded the login isn't the main problem, it's the god awful desync and constant disconnects. Been playing this series co-op since the 3rd game and none were this bad. The closest is EDF 4s memory leak issues but that was manageable. My group can't go one session without at least 3 disconnects and every revive is followed by "how, you were no where near me". This desync is becoming a bigger and bigger issue as we get weapons with larger AOE as there's no way to tell if you're about to nuke a teammate or not.

Now, are these new issues related to the Epic requirement? No way to know for sure but Epic is a blight so probably. I'd rather we not be able to play with all 10s of fools who bought it on that cancer referred to as a "store" than have these issues.