Genuinely think they found something totally new here with the objective capture/deliver gametypes and the destruction engine. The latter really makes things just the right amount of predictable, with the play space shifting around players' actions. There's a very good and satisfying to learn skill ceiling involved with figuring out how to best use that destruction to your advantage. At first it's a pretty spectacle and a fun toy, but soon it opens up into a way to take control of the environment. An enemy team is capturing an objective. Do you enter from their floor? Break through the ceiling and drop in from above? Maybe you destroy the floor beneath them, dropping the objective to the next floor down where you've already set up to take advantage of its new placement?

It's a hell of a lot of fun.

A little game about running around in the dark and capturing footage of monsters.

The camera gimmick is really what sets this apart from, and maybe above, its inspiration. At the end of each run you watch back all the footage you've captured. Every little goofy interlude, every discovery, every monster, and hopefully every dead teammate and every scream of horror all on display. This is when the game clicks—just you and your three friends watching your pratfalls and missteps and laughing along.

The fact that you have to watch it back really encourages you to get in character and want to "improve" your footage.
Every time I go out I want to capture the best, funniest footage possible. Making sure I hit selfie cam to capture my own death, or getting little found footage film-type interview clips from my friends, or capturing random objects we're goofing with in-between the jump scares all improve the experience. An ideal clip from this game is all about the pacing of nonsense clips between the scares. The ebb and flow from "oh, a floating orb.. hi orb" to "hey a little spooky guy-- hi little spooky guy." to "THE LITTLE GUY GOT KYLE" is the magic of the game.

Adding to this is the items you can buy between missions. I dig that almost every item in the game is less "utility device" and more "toy to play with". You can buy soundboards, and boom mics, and interview mics, and party poppers, and clappers to make noise. One of my favorite experiences in the game was goofing off with the boom mic when, upon being attacked by a monster, every one of us yelled and peaked/blew up the mic to a deafening degree.

Have played a few hours over a few runs of this game and really dig it. It's an ideal "hanging out with the boys" type of game

The logline of Helldivers 2 is that a third-person shooter hasn't been this satisfying to play since Metal Gear Solid V. The things it does right sound simple, like your ability to dive to the ground and aim in any direction from a prone state, but their integration and the smoothness of how it all comes together is anything but common even in big titles in the genre. It's a level of polish that should be commonplace and rarely is.

All the way up to release I was skeptical of this game. I mean, how could the series survive a transition from top-down to high budget third-person shooting? Could a team the size of Arrowhead pull it off?

Well, they did. I've played a lot of third-person shooters and this is, on a moment to moment basis, one of the best feeling ones I've played.

All that needs to be said about how good this feels is that even when the servers were broken as shit my friends and I kept trying to play every day. No matter how long the queue was, it was worth it to get in and play. It's that good.

I've been distracted from it by Dragon's Dogma 2, but I've dumped 70 hours into this thing so far. I'll be back for more.

This is kind of a "Crisis Zone done right" situation. It's mostly the same core—you're a big guy with a shield and a full auto machine gun mowing down hordes of enemies and destroying every bit of the environment in sight—but with a higher fidelity presentation and one important change on the gameplay side:

Enemies aren't bullet sponges in this one. That's the big thing that pushes it over the top. Every enemy in Crisis Zone takes just a little too long to die, but never had that issue in Razing Storm. It's just pure big dumb explosive nonsense. A fun time.

Just stick top arcade mode. Avoid the truly horrendous "story mode".

I do not like the bug robot enemies. That's the real beginning and end of this review. I like the spectacle on display here, the return of weapon switching from TC3, the return of changing your position in battle a la Time Crisis: Project Titan, the look of it, etc. So much of this is so very good.

But I just hate fighting those bugs. And not in a "oh, it's just a tough enemy" way—just that they're poorly designed enemy encounters.

The scarab beetle types are annoying because any enemy that is only defeated by holding down the fire button on an SMG for 10 seconds is boring to fight. The flying ones are just annoying. The hopping ones are only in like one boss fight so they're not even worth a mention. But all of them share a problem: they force you to save your weapons rather than use them. Don't waste your shotgun because you might run into the flying guys later! Hey, don't use that SMG! You might need it for a beetle fight!

The balance between TC3 and 4 really shows this. In TC3 I feel like there's much more room to use each of the weapons and play around with what balance was best. If I didn't have an SMG in a room full of big baddies, I could still manage with the basic pistol or other guns. In TC4, I feel punished when I arrive at a beetle fight without any SMG leftover. Or a flying bug fight without the shotgun.

Other than those enemies—which thankfully aren't in much of the game—I had a great experience playing this with the Move controller on PS3. It's not as good as a true light gun on a CRT, but man it's a lot faster and more accurate than I expected it to be going in.

Probably the one I played most in the arcades. The full realization of what TC2 was going for with its blown out presentation, over the top setpieces, and alternate weapons. Here, TC3 is all about mastering which weapons you use against which enemies in which circumstances to best stay alive and manage your combo. It's really fantastic.

And bonus modes return as TC3 comes with "Rescue Mission" mode, an alternate path through the story with added sniper missions (think Silent Scope) that really change up the pace.

This, TC1, and Project Titan are the gold standards.

This game has one hell of a compelling presentation. Debris flies all around you as the environment is blown to bits in every gunfight. It's something ripped right out of a John Woo movie. A level of gunfight destruction gaming wouldn't really see again until, what, F.E.A.R.?

Unfortunately, I find this game to be a bit "all style, no substance" for me. I just do not like the full auto machine gun gameplay in this. To compensate for players having a machine gun with a massive magazine, they just give every enemy massive health pools so that the entire thing turns into a bullet sponge waiting game. Hold teh trigger for 2 seconds until the basic enemy dies, then switch to the next basic enemy.

Bosses are where this gets way worse. Every one of them, save for the tank which I really dug, feels about twice as long as it should be. There's too much holding the fire button down for 10 seconds at a time, emptying your mag into a static boss, only to repeat this process again on its fourth, fifth, sixth or however many phases. The tank is the only fight that never felt like it dragged on too much for me; it's just so much more dynamic than the other fights, with both the player's position/angle and the tank's patterns totally changing with each "phase" of the fight. The rest of them just feel like they repeat the same phase over and over.

Still, a great bit of spectacle. There's a bonus mod that lets you use the classic TC pistol instead of a machine gun and I should do a replay and see if that improves things for me.

Maybe controversial, but I think I'm not as hot on this one as most. I think the change to the scoring and combo system is for the worse—I prefer TC1's more punishing time limits—and for as propulsive and exciting as the setpieces can be in TC2, it all feels like a half step to TC3's full realization. You get some weapon variety here, but it's more a stepping stone to 3's full weapon changing system.

TC2 just represents a half step toward more complexity, but not far enough to really pull me in as its own unique take on the series. The only thing holding it back is really that feeling that it's stuck between the worlds of TC1 and 3 in terms of design.

Crisis Mission Mode, where you perform a series of short shooting gallery challenges, is a fun addition that extends replay value, but it's got nothing on TC1's full blown original campaign on PS1.

Still a must play for any fans of the series or the genre. All the strengths of the original are mostly still here.