After sinking close to 30 hours already I feel confident enough to recommend this game as I think I’ve seen everything outside the hardest difficulty.
Helldivers 2 is everything that makes videos games fun shoved into a nice 40 dollar box. All you need are three other friends and this game shines with the amount of funny and chaotic events going on. It’s so easy to get immersed in the raw excitement of the battlefield. Characters screaming voice lines while wave after wave of gunfire going off, explosions and artillery shelling the life out of anything as well.
The game is about you being dropped into battlefields as you complete objectives in the chaos. These can vary from setting off a missile to rescuing civilians, all the way to things like killing priority enemies or outposts. Despite the lack of mission variety, things never really seem to get old. Each planet seems to have unique generation for the battlefields, and while some can feel kind of similar, background modifications will change the type of enemies that are common, and the usual hazards you’ll have to deal with. I expect them to add more as time goes on to keep the game from getting too repetitive.
Now the shooting feels good. Weapons are loud and powerful, however they also take some knowledge to use correctly. Enemies usually have specific weak points to take them down. I think this aspect makes the early game especially challenging, as many players will just fire with reckless abandon at armored enemies when they should be pacing their shots better. Still I quite like this, hoard shooters rarely demand much more from you other than shooting at anything that moves, the fact that recoil control is very important as well makes for some fairly engaging combat. The reload system makes everything more engaging and brutal too. Each reload completely loses whatever you have in the magazine, encouraging you to fully use up a mag, even to your detriment at times, over a premature reload. This leads to you getting caught with your pants down needing to reload at the worst times, which I really love. Now I can’t praise the stratagems enough, any player being able to call in serious firepower leads to hilarious team killing and amazing visuals where enemy groups are refined into paste before your very eyes. It’s nice that the player has so much agency, the ability to call strikes down whenever and wherever you want, there is never a situation where the game tells you no.
It’s in the details where things really shine though, blood and dirt coats your character the longer you’re alive. Explosions kick up dust that makes the battlefield impossible to traverse after some time. And the way the dialogue is written in this game is hilarious, every voice line uttered by the Helldivers fills me with energy and makes me chuckle.
Helldivers 2 is a blast. After a couple games to get the hang of the difficulty and to figure out how to play, you’ll feel like a total badass as you take out legions of robots and bugs, and then you’ll die. You’ll die so much. But it will be funny. Everything in this game is funny. Orbital bombardment of your friend’s location to kill a bug is funny. Your Helldiver screaming their head off as they blast waves of bots with a machine gun is funny. Flattening an entire bug camp with overwhelming artillery is funny. And all of this is fucking cool too.
Despite all my praise I do have small issues with the game. Not enough to really criticize for, as many of these problems can be fixed with small patches. Weapon balancing is a joke, some weapons are straight upgrades or have features the game never really lists. I don’t mind weapons being strong, the real issue is how weak some of them are. The regular pistol is completely overshadowed by the machine pistol for example. Their damage differences are so negligible there’s not a single reason to ever use the pistol ever again. Then there’s the issue of weak stratagem calls like the laser canon or certain artillery assists. Many of these can be better if they have features tweaked, like a tighter spread, faster deployment, or better armor piercing. Armor is a weird one, some armor have special features that give you more grenades or stims, some augment your limb health or let you throw grenades farther. These bonuses are not made equal, and having more equipment is going to be the better option pretty much every time. Lastly some expensive upgrades feel pretty underwhelming. The ship upgrades are meant to augment your gameplay and make things you use better, but these upgrades are really not made equal, and people usually just skip the final upgrades because they’re so expensive and grant pretty much nothing.
Even with those complaints, the devs seem cool and definitely want this game to succeed. I can’t wait to see what upcoming updates will bring to it.
Play Helldivers 2 and become a hero to super earth, or die trying. Co-op shooters are pretty prevalent these days but this game has something going on that a lot of others lack. There’s an energy to it all, where you and your friends are constantly panicking and laughing as you deal with the overwhelming threats thrown at you.
Helldivers 2 is everything that makes videos games fun shoved into a nice 40 dollar box. All you need are three other friends and this game shines with the amount of funny and chaotic events going on. It’s so easy to get immersed in the raw excitement of the battlefield. Characters screaming voice lines while wave after wave of gunfire going off, explosions and artillery shelling the life out of anything as well.
The game is about you being dropped into battlefields as you complete objectives in the chaos. These can vary from setting off a missile to rescuing civilians, all the way to things like killing priority enemies or outposts. Despite the lack of mission variety, things never really seem to get old. Each planet seems to have unique generation for the battlefields, and while some can feel kind of similar, background modifications will change the type of enemies that are common, and the usual hazards you’ll have to deal with. I expect them to add more as time goes on to keep the game from getting too repetitive.
Now the shooting feels good. Weapons are loud and powerful, however they also take some knowledge to use correctly. Enemies usually have specific weak points to take them down. I think this aspect makes the early game especially challenging, as many players will just fire with reckless abandon at armored enemies when they should be pacing their shots better. Still I quite like this, hoard shooters rarely demand much more from you other than shooting at anything that moves, the fact that recoil control is very important as well makes for some fairly engaging combat. The reload system makes everything more engaging and brutal too. Each reload completely loses whatever you have in the magazine, encouraging you to fully use up a mag, even to your detriment at times, over a premature reload. This leads to you getting caught with your pants down needing to reload at the worst times, which I really love. Now I can’t praise the stratagems enough, any player being able to call in serious firepower leads to hilarious team killing and amazing visuals where enemy groups are refined into paste before your very eyes. It’s nice that the player has so much agency, the ability to call strikes down whenever and wherever you want, there is never a situation where the game tells you no.
It’s in the details where things really shine though, blood and dirt coats your character the longer you’re alive. Explosions kick up dust that makes the battlefield impossible to traverse after some time. And the way the dialogue is written in this game is hilarious, every voice line uttered by the Helldivers fills me with energy and makes me chuckle.
Helldivers 2 is a blast. After a couple games to get the hang of the difficulty and to figure out how to play, you’ll feel like a total badass as you take out legions of robots and bugs, and then you’ll die. You’ll die so much. But it will be funny. Everything in this game is funny. Orbital bombardment of your friend’s location to kill a bug is funny. Your Helldiver screaming their head off as they blast waves of bots with a machine gun is funny. Flattening an entire bug camp with overwhelming artillery is funny. And all of this is fucking cool too.
Despite all my praise I do have small issues with the game. Not enough to really criticize for, as many of these problems can be fixed with small patches. Weapon balancing is a joke, some weapons are straight upgrades or have features the game never really lists. I don’t mind weapons being strong, the real issue is how weak some of them are. The regular pistol is completely overshadowed by the machine pistol for example. Their damage differences are so negligible there’s not a single reason to ever use the pistol ever again. Then there’s the issue of weak stratagem calls like the laser canon or certain artillery assists. Many of these can be better if they have features tweaked, like a tighter spread, faster deployment, or better armor piercing. Armor is a weird one, some armor have special features that give you more grenades or stims, some augment your limb health or let you throw grenades farther. These bonuses are not made equal, and having more equipment is going to be the better option pretty much every time. Lastly some expensive upgrades feel pretty underwhelming. The ship upgrades are meant to augment your gameplay and make things you use better, but these upgrades are really not made equal, and people usually just skip the final upgrades because they’re so expensive and grant pretty much nothing.
Even with those complaints, the devs seem cool and definitely want this game to succeed. I can’t wait to see what upcoming updates will bring to it.
Play Helldivers 2 and become a hero to super earth, or die trying. Co-op shooters are pretty prevalent these days but this game has something going on that a lot of others lack. There’s an energy to it all, where you and your friends are constantly panicking and laughing as you deal with the overwhelming threats thrown at you.