Helldivers is without a doubt one of the most fun, frantic, and chaotic multiplayer games I've ever played. To successfully pull off your missions, total cooperation and communication is required between your teammates. Unfortunately, me and my friends do not have these abilities and so we usually end up screaming at each other, shooting each other, and barely making it out alive of every single level.

The game-play is seen at a birds eye view POV, however feels just as good and often even more frantic than many first person shooters I've played. Enemies are near constantly trailing close behind you, giving you no time to cool off ever. You need to constantly manage when to shoot and especially when to reload while also keeping track of your objectives as well as pulling them off. You'll also need to find time to call down one of this games core combat mechanics: stratagems. With these you can call in extra ammo, guns, bombs, and any gear you might need along your mission, however it is very easy to kill your team mates with these stratagems, which leads me into another amazing part of this game.

FRIENDLY FIRE IS ACTIVE ON EVERYTHING. everything you do WILL kill you AND your teammates. you will probably die an equal number of times to your own teammates as you do to your enemies, and its absolutely awesome. it contributes so much to the hectic feel of the game and really makes every match play out in mass panic as you try to not instantly die to everything that happens.

Unfortunately There is not really a proper campaign or story to this game, but the multiplayer is infinitely re-playable and seems to never really get old. Though Helldivers 2 is out now, there is still a decently active community online, and I'd still strongly recommend giving this game a shot if you ever find it on sale.

For Democracy!

Helldivers is one of the more unique games I have had the pleasure of playing in the PS4 era. At it's core it's a top down multiplayer shooter with heavy references to the political satire adverts from the original film adaption of Starship Troopers. Sounds pretty crazy but that's only the start, this is a bizarre game where you have to rely on the community as much as your own skill to complete it and playing well with others is vital as killing yourself or your squad mates is as easy as the aggressive aliens you're fighting.

The goal of the game is to fend off three rather different, though equally aggressive races from progressing towards earth in a giant galactic war. Each player starts the game on the bridge of their own starship which is essentially a hub with each station acting as a menu for something from changing your characters clothing, weapons and skills to bios of characters and enemies. From here you can choose to either go out on missions on your own or join a squad of players (up to four) to try and take down harder missions together.

Each race has a good variety of units to fight from smaller easy to kill aliens that sound off alarms to huge armour plated killing machines that render pretty standard weapon load outs useless. You have the Bugs which are extremely similar to the bugs from the afore mentioned Starship Troopers movie, very organic, largely close range and quite often burrow underground. The Cyborgs, which are almost steampunk, tend to be heavily armoured, use a lot of guns and can also deploy tanks to the battlefield. Lastly there are the Illuminate which are the "apple" of the alien world, super slick, white armour, advanced technology with cloaking and lasers.

These races are fought in a tri-front war with each front being measured by points gained through successful missions completed added to a bar on each front. Every person playing this game commits to the war effort, this is all online, measuring how well humanity are doing. Push an alien race back far enough collectively and you can take on their homeworld and wipe them out for good (if the community beats all three races it all starts over again). Working together on the right front is key to victory for the community, but working together in missions is just as important as harder missions gain more points but are near impossible to play through without a team backing you up, this game can be hard.

Once on a selected planet for the mission there are a number of objectives for your team to complete across the map, defending missile silos, killing certain targets, saving survivors of a ship crash etc. The harder the level the more missions there are, completing them all gives you extra points towards the community victory as a whole. At the end of every mission your squad has to activate a beacon to call in a dropship to come and pick you up. This causes every alien to home in on your location causing a bit of a last stand situation with every mission you face, it's tense and pretty action heavy. I haven't begun to explain how crazy those can be, as I believe Winston Churchill once said "Friendly Fire, Isn't." Every shot you can take can kill your own squad so accuracy and positioning of your squad are super important as an accidental team kill can be the difference between success and failure.

If you do die or kill someone by accident though you can bring them back using stratagems. These are epic, before every battle each player can equip up to four of these plus the default revive stratagem. Despite the names, these are actually drop pods launched from your orbiting starship providing weapons, additional ammo, jetpacks, assault mechs, vehicles, mines, bombing raids, distraction beacons etc. as well as bringing dead players back to the battlefield.

These can kill you.

The pods slam into the ground from space, if you stand underneath one you will die, though explode would be more accurate. Sometimes reviving someone else will kill you, throwing a stratagem in the wrong place may blow up someone's tank, killing them, you or even your whole squad if truly unlucky. (There are options to kick trolls who are doing it on purpose though in like 70 hours of playing I rarely encountered that) Precision, timing, knowing when to run and what stratagems to take to compliment your squad and alien type are key. Some missions with groups of people we would get wiped out yet five minutes later with a new squad on one of the hardest settings we're running through like experienced commandos.

The presentation is pretty decent, the visuals aren't amazing though they certainly do the job effectively with pretty good looking enemies and weapon effects with decent music and voice acting. There are a variety of planet types, desert, swamp, volcano, snow etc. that effect the game slightly (slow to move through water and snow without vehicles and jet packs) but they all feel kind of empty, barren except for the odd rock, mountain or crevice. I feel the planets could have been more interesting to travel around.

The game has one big flaw though, repetition. It has provided some of the best, not to mention, tense moments in any co-op I've played in years where you struggle through rooting for the last member of your team alive to revive you, surrounded by aliens, low on ammo but the mission objectives are really quite boring and get old pretty quickly on the bland maps your pretty cool looking squad traverse. It's a pretty big flaw in an otherwise unique experience with fantastic gameplay but I really wouldn't let it put you off and urge you to give Helldivers a try while the community is still active.

Recommended.

+ Stratagems are a really cool mechanic.
+ The community victory and absolute need to work as a team are great design choices.
+ Large option of weapons, upgrades, vehicles and strategies to try.

- Planets and missions get pretty repetitive.

A vontade maior era de jogar a continuação que lançou esse ano. Mas eu não tenho como, então fui testar o primeiro e simplesmente: diversão.

As mecânicas são ótimas, é gostoso atirar, ter que fazer combinações de botões para chamar reforços, ressuscitar amigos, receber munição e etc cria uma tensão legal nas partidas.

E o fogo amigo sempre proporciona momentos engraçados.

Ótimo joguinho pra jogar de galera.

Daqui uns anos descubro se o 2 é tão ou mais legal que esse.

I feel bad for not discovering this sleeper hit sooner until I became addicted to Helldivers 2. Despite many aspects being carried over to the sequel, the top-down perspective adds its own unique moment-to-moment gameplay scenarios while still maintaining the signature Helldivers experience of simplicity, chaos, and fun. My only issues with this perspective are that the shared camera can sometimes feel like a hindrance when players get momentarily side-tracked, taking cover can be frustrating as it immobilizes you, and not being able to move while viewing the map feels cumbersome.

If there is one aspect I prefer in Helldivers 1 over 2, it’s the progression system because it is more streamlined. You unlock new weapons, stratagems, or perks simply by leveling up or completing a planet, which adds to the sense of progression as you rank up. Additionally, collecting 10 samples gets you research points, allowing you to upgrade your arsenal and improve the usefulness of your tools, which Helldivers 2 lacks. It makes the weapon balance in Helldivers 1 more refined and encourages me to use multiple different primary weapons.

In terms of the presentation, Helldivers 2 outshines Helldivers 1. However, I won't be too harsh in this aspect, considering that Arrowhead was a smaller studio back then. More importantly, this game was released on the PS3 and PSVita, enabling crossplay with the PS4. So my expectations for the graphics weren't going very high. Nonetheless, I still want to give credit to the crunchy sound design and well-made music. The presentation is overall very good, but not that remarkable.

In summary, what I am trying to convey is that even though they transitioned the essential elements of Helldivers into a third-person perspective very well with Helldivers 2, Helldivers 1 remains distinct and not obsolete. It is evident that Arrowhead Studio already achieved its main goal remarkably well even with a few rough edges.

I still prefer Helldivers 2 overall, but I can absolutely see why others prefer the first game, which still holds up as somebody who just played it for the first time recently and came from Helldivers 2. Strong recommendation if you are looking for more fun co-op shooters and especially dig a top down perspective with twin-stick shooting.

A top down co-op shooter where you are probably going to be killed by friendly fire more than by the three enemy forces. Amusing/terrifying use of Starship Troopers/American foreign policy style setting. A lot of different support features to call in and upgrade, even without any DLC, vehicles, airstrikes, heavy weapons, turrets, drones, etc. Three different enemy forces and 33 enemy types, different difficulty planets and different forces will make you use different loadouts to fit the situation.

Without the DLC the guns could use more variety, and upgrades are repeated. Terrible camera when you get four people. Joining players tend to drop on you. Lack of mission variety. Only one type of sidearm and a lot of players ended up wanting to refund upgrade points when they ended up hating the burst fire feature they gave the pistol.

Very fun game but it does start to become a grind to level up and it can be too easy if you have two or three people with you that have the slightest idea of what they should be doing.

Uff por dios , top 3 mejores juegos coops para jugar online o local con amigos, la de risas y tension que genera este juego es de no creer. Helldivers es un twin stick shooter de esos que son realmente adictivos debido a lo solido de sus mecanicas, el hecho de que tenga fuego amigo hace que se distinga del monton haciendolo una experiencia mas reservada y no tan frenetica. No puedo hablar mas del titulo, es asi de simple, tenes 2 o 3 amigos con ganas de reirse un buen rato? ni lo dudes y menos con lo barato que llega a estar en steam

A very fun coop twin stick shooter that doesn't hold back from challenging the players with its mayhem and onslaught of enemy and friendly (!) attacks.

Things I liked:
- unique use of the D-pad through Stratagems
- community focused overarching mechanic
- responsive and snappy gameplay
- great couch/online co-op

Things I didn't like:
- connection issues
- enemy variety