helldivers 2 understands emergent gameplay's innate link to co-op humor and the art of the crunch so hard i almost passed away forever my first time playing an extreme difficulty mission with the pals. despite the week 2 addition of +400,000,000 new players and servers literally collapsing in on themselves -- resulting in most of my stats being mish-mashed, on hold, or just null entirely; i swear i've killed more than 0 automatons -- the game is in great condition and is probably the most rock solid $40 purchase i've made in the past year. once again, ignoring the servers melting; online play is incredibly smooth, connecting to friends is lightning-fast, and syncing has been flawless so far, considering that syncing issues are my usual co-op bugbear my jaw is below the floor. the game also performs super-duper nicely on my shitbox bottlenecked pc!! when it works, it works good.

small bugs front line crowds. medium bugs create a skirmish line of bile fire or defensive skin shields to waste your ammo. large bugs creep through the inevitable clumping crowds to send catastrophic attacks towards your squad. these patterns are not only simple but endlessly satisfying, and this is only the bug part of the game pre-hard difficulty. off-screen small bugs do not hit you when first approaching you, they rather spook you, then if you were too slow to react you receive a low damage attack. the medium bugs routinely find a way to catch you off guard with an attack that can either send you flying or leave you sandwiched. large enemies skip all prerequisites, spitting acidic bile or stampeding towards you, they posit themselves as immediate high priority threats simply by altering the pattern in which they initiate an attack towards you. i find this game design fascinating, and this is just a very small part of it. the automatons offer more challenge than the bugs, the smaller enemies barrage you with laser beams off the bat but like any quick-kill-good-crunch enemy in a game they miss 99% of the time. the medium enemies now catch you off guard from a far but with highly telegraphed attacks, strictly projectile it seems. the large robots are terrifying and wreck everything in their path as they send a combination of rockets, flames, and lasers towards you and immediately close-by helldivers. beyond this pattern rotation and pyramid of difficulty scaling the game offers even more enemies that forgo established patterns, creating these sweeping and epic encounters that somehow create a new and unseen event each time i face them. the bile titan is a perfect example, my first time fighting one it died in the middle of a evacuation zone creating this large speed-bump you had to climb over to access anything on the other side of this terrain, like i said earlier, that's pretty cool emergent gameplay! in another encounter on a higher difficulty it felt like i had been shooting at this titan with everything i had for a while now, 4 peoples efforts all combined into a stream of fire on this bile titan and its nest. it came down to the wire when it was chasing me on its last sliver of health, i cinematically hip-fired behind me into the sky where it was towering above me, as i shot my very last bullet in my gun and threw the mag to the side it screeched and slowly tumbled towards me like a dog wearing silly shoes for the first time, narrowly escaping its crushing weight by only a few feet, oh my god.

destruction is the skeleton key to this games philosophy. teammates that are redeploying onto the battlefield via bullet-shaped helldiving pods can instantly crush and kill almost any enemy it seems. teammates will die to 1 bullet from your gun on basically every difficulty. teammates will also die to any stratagems you deploy -- the games wundrian version of a cod kill streak but instead of shaking the lobby and giving you a calling card this game kills all of your teammates and you. if you thought battlefield ringed freedom with its skyscrapers collapsing this game is going to bring you twisted joy from its moment-to-moment 60 second cooldown team-killing mini nukes. a large part of this games marketing insists on the humor of helldivers 2 and the creepily real cgi cutscenes of that dudes family being eaten by bugs, i think this humor is surmounted by its in game content obviously. the carefully crafted gameplay antics feel so natural and player-based when i look at the opening intro it creates this weird blend of is this game going to progress into nailing its cool game design later on or this type of marketing and uh yknow day one battle pass is there to mention haaha...

okay anyways its a great game, the volumetrics are probably my favorite part lol. this recent trend of "indie game" with the funding of a full AAA title like Dave The Diver is strange to see and i dont entirely know to feel abt its consequences yet, but more stuff like this seems like a good sign? if u finished this go look at my twitter for screenshot dumps please this is the only AAA game i have a screenshot folder of if that says anything.(https://twitter.com/mad_mutilator/status/1760014592187769105?s=20)

Do not let amerikkkans use a boycott to be performative and take away from the genuine issue here. you can say fuck neil and nuremberg him once this is won. i urge all of you on this page to donate to the people of Gaza, leaving reviews on a game will do nothing in the face of this rampant genocidal evil.

https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donation-details/484

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