The west's answer to Earth Defence Force, and man does it live up to the title. A great combination that takes on some of the best aspects of sci-fi to create a uniquely fun satirical take on authoritarians conquering the galaxy.
Visually this game is highly cinematic. There's a large variety of planets each with their own weather effects lit in day and night, with vivid colour schemes and contrast. All of them make for wonderful backdrops for your destruction to rain down on and you'll regularly be recreating the cinematic moments from classic action films just by playing the game. There's a lot of film references and inspirations that are worn on its sleeve and all of it used fantastically, down to the hilarious satirical setting and voice lines peppered throughout. The music adds to this as it's highly atmospheric and while the title theme is the most memorable tune I appreciate the tense 80's synths that fill the space between bot attacks.
I've mentioned this idea before of 'generosity' as a design concept and HD2 encapsulates it perfectly. You have a ship that is bedecked with orbital weapons, heavy weapons to drop down to you, and a hangar loaded with attack ships to call in. You have your standard array of light and medium arms, grenades, and all of these things deploy in style. You start off where most games leave off and while you do have to unlock and upgrade a lot of this, you still feel like a one-man army from the get-go.
The next thing this game gets right is not only giving you a ton of stuff to play with, the vast majority of it has a reason to exist. The two types of enemy have very different units that require very different equipment to take on properly. Bugs come in huge numbers, low armour, and prefer melee while Bots have smaller numbers, heavy armour, and prefer ranged firepower. So while some gear is made obsolete by upgrades, there's still plenty of weapons and stratagems to experiment with along both tactical lines.
The enemies themselves are takes on familiar concepts, Bugs being 40k Tyranids by way of Starship Trooper bugs, and Bots being 80's Terminators by way of 40k Orcs. Even the human faction of helldivers have a 40k space marines by way of Destiny 2 guardians feel. While the comparisons might sound reductive, the focus here is on high quality DNA being used in ways we all wished the respective IP owners would use them. The bugs are a fun and simple introduction to the game's core mechanics and as you increase the difficulty new enemies are introduced that require you to make use of your weapon and movement options, coordinate with your team, and communicate with them.
The bots being so tactically different, heavily armoured, and coordinated make them quite a steep difficulty curve to adapt to as you'll need that late game gear to stand a chance, but once you get to grips with their fighting style and weak points it's every bit as satisfying to shoot down drop ships and bomb their heavily reinforced bunkers. Don't get me wrong, you'll still get curb stomped occasionally but you aren't penalised for lives lost. Quick reinforcements and those powerful stratagems to back you up mean it's easy to bounce back and it makes the victory feel all the more hard fought for.
Missions meanwhile offer something to do besides blasting waves of enemies. You'll have to make your way across the map to various way points, interact with terminals to play mini-games, and adjust the settings on radars, open pipes, and unlock ICBM silos. It's simple stuff but easy to keep in mind amdist the chaos of enemies baring down on you at the same time. That said there can be some tedious wait times for bars to fill, long walks from one side of the map to the other, and at later difficulties you'll want to avoid setting off encounters you don't need to. This can slow things down but it's never long before you're back to combat. Plus while the objectives are a fun 2nd layer of things to do, they can get repetitive at the 30hr mark - thankfully the simplicity leaves plenty of room for new tasks to be implemented down the line.
Speaking of expansion it's also worth addressing the Warbonds. Functionally they're a masterclass in non-abusive ways to implement battle passes. I genuinely never thought I'd see the day! Still part of me feels like for the way it works and what it is, they could have built this points > shop system in any number of ways besides the structure of a battle pass. I almost feel like it sanitises battle passes conceptually and I don't know how to feel about that as I'm quite against the abusive trends they're historically associated with. At the very least HD2 shows the rest of the industry that live service games aren't the problem just the predatory practices that accompany them.
In conclusion HD2 is beautifully presented, designed, put together, and most importantly fun to play. It has its flaws of course, going single player isn't nearly as strong of an experience, there's some bugs which show up from time to time (from visual issues to straight up crashing mid-game), but when it works it easily outshines those blemishes. The studio are rolling out patches with new weapons, vehicles, and balance adjustments regularly so I'm confident this will all get dealt with - not to mention that it's exciting to have a game releasing new content that isn't exclusively paywalled and actually builds on the existing content. Since everyone can have it by default the playerbase isn't weirdly broken up and segregated which is surprisingly rare. In an age of the games industry taking, this is a game that gives a lot back and I respect that.
Visually this game is highly cinematic. There's a large variety of planets each with their own weather effects lit in day and night, with vivid colour schemes and contrast. All of them make for wonderful backdrops for your destruction to rain down on and you'll regularly be recreating the cinematic moments from classic action films just by playing the game. There's a lot of film references and inspirations that are worn on its sleeve and all of it used fantastically, down to the hilarious satirical setting and voice lines peppered throughout. The music adds to this as it's highly atmospheric and while the title theme is the most memorable tune I appreciate the tense 80's synths that fill the space between bot attacks.
I've mentioned this idea before of 'generosity' as a design concept and HD2 encapsulates it perfectly. You have a ship that is bedecked with orbital weapons, heavy weapons to drop down to you, and a hangar loaded with attack ships to call in. You have your standard array of light and medium arms, grenades, and all of these things deploy in style. You start off where most games leave off and while you do have to unlock and upgrade a lot of this, you still feel like a one-man army from the get-go.
The next thing this game gets right is not only giving you a ton of stuff to play with, the vast majority of it has a reason to exist. The two types of enemy have very different units that require very different equipment to take on properly. Bugs come in huge numbers, low armour, and prefer melee while Bots have smaller numbers, heavy armour, and prefer ranged firepower. So while some gear is made obsolete by upgrades, there's still plenty of weapons and stratagems to experiment with along both tactical lines.
The enemies themselves are takes on familiar concepts, Bugs being 40k Tyranids by way of Starship Trooper bugs, and Bots being 80's Terminators by way of 40k Orcs. Even the human faction of helldivers have a 40k space marines by way of Destiny 2 guardians feel. While the comparisons might sound reductive, the focus here is on high quality DNA being used in ways we all wished the respective IP owners would use them. The bugs are a fun and simple introduction to the game's core mechanics and as you increase the difficulty new enemies are introduced that require you to make use of your weapon and movement options, coordinate with your team, and communicate with them.
The bots being so tactically different, heavily armoured, and coordinated make them quite a steep difficulty curve to adapt to as you'll need that late game gear to stand a chance, but once you get to grips with their fighting style and weak points it's every bit as satisfying to shoot down drop ships and bomb their heavily reinforced bunkers. Don't get me wrong, you'll still get curb stomped occasionally but you aren't penalised for lives lost. Quick reinforcements and those powerful stratagems to back you up mean it's easy to bounce back and it makes the victory feel all the more hard fought for.
Missions meanwhile offer something to do besides blasting waves of enemies. You'll have to make your way across the map to various way points, interact with terminals to play mini-games, and adjust the settings on radars, open pipes, and unlock ICBM silos. It's simple stuff but easy to keep in mind amdist the chaos of enemies baring down on you at the same time. That said there can be some tedious wait times for bars to fill, long walks from one side of the map to the other, and at later difficulties you'll want to avoid setting off encounters you don't need to. This can slow things down but it's never long before you're back to combat. Plus while the objectives are a fun 2nd layer of things to do, they can get repetitive at the 30hr mark - thankfully the simplicity leaves plenty of room for new tasks to be implemented down the line.
Speaking of expansion it's also worth addressing the Warbonds. Functionally they're a masterclass in non-abusive ways to implement battle passes. I genuinely never thought I'd see the day! Still part of me feels like for the way it works and what it is, they could have built this points > shop system in any number of ways besides the structure of a battle pass. I almost feel like it sanitises battle passes conceptually and I don't know how to feel about that as I'm quite against the abusive trends they're historically associated with. At the very least HD2 shows the rest of the industry that live service games aren't the problem just the predatory practices that accompany them.
In conclusion HD2 is beautifully presented, designed, put together, and most importantly fun to play. It has its flaws of course, going single player isn't nearly as strong of an experience, there's some bugs which show up from time to time (from visual issues to straight up crashing mid-game), but when it works it easily outshines those blemishes. The studio are rolling out patches with new weapons, vehicles, and balance adjustments regularly so I'm confident this will all get dealt with - not to mention that it's exciting to have a game releasing new content that isn't exclusively paywalled and actually builds on the existing content. Since everyone can have it by default the playerbase isn't weirdly broken up and segregated which is surprisingly rare. In an age of the games industry taking, this is a game that gives a lot back and I respect that.