Another great time to start off the amazing 2 months of 2024, its always great when a new horde shooter gets released and its a perfect experience to play with friends. One thing this does say is this that playstation should push to have their games released more day 1 on both PS & PC.

Of course a PC release is going to have its problems when the game has been built to play on PS5, ive seen not stop reviews of people having performance issues or crashes. I had a point where i was crashing for about 5minutes but the problem fixed itself, and my pc is less powerful than people reviewing with 30series/40series (im owning 1660ti / 2700X) and my game is running smooth and perfectly fine at a good 60-70fps.

Allegedly kernel level anti cheat (same tier as Vanguard level anti cheat) is something to consider, though it doesn't seem to have any impact on the game. you probably don't need to care about it.

Can't be that bad of a bad purchase at £35 when other studios are dropping a game at £70 at less quality than what this game released at. Its been given a update on what is to expected from the game, roadmap, free updates, new mobs, weapons etc. I think the game will be a major hit or major miss for most people, largely depending on if your hardware agrees with the game or not. The gameplay itself is extremely fun and challenging depending on your difficulty, with quite a lot of replayability with friends.

I expect alot of the problems people are encountering right now will be fixed as soon as possible (at the time of this post there's already been a hotfix)

If you love horde shooters and wanted something bat-shit crazy to play, this would be the game to play. With amazing sound design, a variety of missions and weapons, hilarious moments to share with friends & already confirmed updates to add towards the game with developers watching how everyone's reception is, there's only a good track record to where the game could end up.

"A game for everyone is a game for no one."

To not lose yourself in the evolutionary process and to be true to your concept even after such substantial changes, it is not a small feat to accomplish.

Helldivers 2 competently achieves that, and even if some stuff is (rightfully so) "lost in translation" in the transition from a twin-stick shooter to a third person shooter, it stills lands as a remarkably confident exercise in game design.

The original Helldivers is pure commitment: every single choice in the moment-to-moment gameplay has a weight and a price to take in account for. Shooting requires standing still, reloading removes an entire magazine from your inventory, support takes time to be called in, friendly fire has to be taken in account, camera is shared between the four players, take too much damage and you're out, or on the ground, and so on. It's a constant knowledge check when it comes to enemies, weapon behavior, environments and mission objectives. So, how do you translate such a well-balanced 2D formula in a 3D game?

More commitment. More involvement. Simply put, "more".

Do you want to escape from the enemies? Unlike the original, stamina's so prominent it's almost always shown in your HUD. Almost depleted? Well, it takes time to recharge, and there's no cardio accelerator, or even all-terrain boots. Do you want to refill it, like, now? You can use a stim, but only if you're wounded. Isn't the stim also used for healing, though? Yeah, right.

Do you want to resupply? Unlike the original, the supply call-in is shared between all the players. It fills half of your resources. You have four charges. Are you empty, and in dare need of ammunition? Better tell your comrades.

This whole dance in between being proactive and reactive applies for, I kid you not, every single action in the game. Arrowhead Game Studios has flipped upside down the original game leaving no feature untouched. It's a "systemic" approach on every prop, element and feature, like how certain enemies interact with specific weapons, the physics, the (funny) rag-doll, the butter-smooth movement, and the crispy gun-play. There's literally nothing that gets in the way of fun and challenge, every single thing you see in your screen has a purpose, and the game-play's so unbelievably tight on both pad and mouse and keyboard.

It looks good. It plays good. It feels good. It's frustrating, it's fun, it's challenging, it's non-stop action, it's relentless. This thing can stand proud alongside the likes of Deep Rock Galactic as far as I'm concerned.

I went in with literally zero expectation and I was constantly blown away by how the game slowly and steadily reveals itself to you the deeper you dig in. The comedian tone is even more emphasized than the original, without feeling obnoxious. How did they manage that with what's basically Starship Troopers (derogatory) on steroids, it's beyond me.

If you want to suffer, go alone. If you want to have fun, go with randoms. But if you want a team-building and friendship-ending experience, bring your pals in. I swear, this thing has no right of being that much fun.

Must-play.

I'm not usually one to hop on trendy flavour of the month multiplayer games of my own volition, but I adored the first Helldivers and word-of-mouth for this game was positive, so once my IRLs took the plunge I happily saluted the sky and fell backwards into hell.

Helldivers 2 is simple: It's a third person shooter, I assume you've played one. Every now and then you do a series of fighting game inputs to summon a nice gun/big explosion/several explosions/your dead friends back to life/a nuke/etc and they're on cooldown until you do them again. You do all of this to kill lots of insects, or very angry robots, usually in service to an objective or three. The controls and movement all feel very fluid and snappy, there's no mechanical or physics-based resistance at play here.

Where Helldivers stands out is in the capacity for things to go wrong, and the potential for situations to break a team's resolve. If you advance slowly, only fire while standing, use your strategems on big swarms, and never split up? This game is easy. Very easy.
The game knows this, and its idea of 'challenge' is trying to hammer you against an anvil with different implements. Difficulty levels don't bloat the stats of enemies, but you'll suddenly experience enemies flanking you and firing from cover in ways that're meant to make you panic. It's telling that the Machine Gun you start with has a fire selector for those especially terrifying moments.

The highlights of this game aren't really the easy victories. Clearing harder difficulties without much bother is boring, honestly.

No, the highlights are the skin-of-your-teeth victories where you and your team get scarily into the role. Moments that are... Filmic. That's the only word I can use. This game gets very filmic when the action kicks in.

Advancing through wide open plains while a fog slowly sets in, obscuring your visibility and forcing you to blind fire into the mist at shapes that could be either your death or some background detritus. Eternally afraid to turn around because what once provided comfort via visibility is now an endless murky sea of potential ambush spots.

Summoning your 3 dead teammates back to life at the cost of your own, screaming "LIIIIIIIIIIIIVE" as you throw the beacon out of the fight, using your last reinforce and watching as someone picks up your grenade launcher and avenges you.

Walking out of a brutal fight in closed spaces, dashing to 'freedom', and seeing a sea of enemies descend upon you. Forcing your weapon off of burst fire and emptying your magazines into the swarm one by one, unsure if you're doing anything but agonizingly aware of just how finite your resources are.

Those mad dashes to extraction once enemy hordes appear, dodging your allies' artillery fire and explosions more than any enemy. Sprinting towards an ever-louder chorus of explosions, gunshots, shouts and screeches.

More than any game that actually tried to do 'war is hell'', Helldivers exemplifies it with missions that leave me needing a 15 minute break after they conclude regardless of victory or defeat. The sound design really adds to the effect; the explosions and gunshots here are on par with Killing Floor 2 or ARMA 3, but used to arguably more terrifying effect.

Progression moves at a smooth pace, within the few hours I played I'd already acquired a decent amount of stuff just from doing objectives and mowing things down. I'll admit to not liking the pseudo-battle pass format that much, but after my time with Helldivers 1 I do admittedly like having some say over what I unlock, and mercifully both Strategems and more specific ship/player upgrades are separate from it.

I think the best indicator of how much this game hooked me is that my "first quick session" went on for 4 straight hours with nobody taking a break besides the obvious snack/drink pickups. It's rare for both me and my regular crew to get hooked so easily.

10/10 would kill my best friend with rocket launcher backblast again. Please nerf rocket robots.

3D shooters are a genre long and particularly afflicted with 'just so' game design; Half-Life popularized a reload mechanic where you tap a button and wait to have your gun refilled from a pool, and this became a defacto standard for no particular reason over not having reloading, or reloading that actually has gun magazine management, or dozens of other one off systems meant to represent a games ethos. Halo introduced a two-weapon system that, along side a nuanced weapon selection forced you to always accept a trade off, games without nuanced weapon selections copied it wholesale, usually resulting in defacto one weapon system because you really need to carry the M16 at all times to get anything done. Halo Infinite in turn has a sprint button with so little effect that you need a stopwatch to tell if it makes you faster- because Halo doesn't benefit from a sprint mechanic but Shooters Have Sprint. Helldivers is perhaps the only studio published 3D shooter in half a decade if not more where there is no 'just so' game design, from meat and potato mechanics like your gun's recoil being semi-deterministic to help you avoid the regular concern of friendly fire, and your gun being loaded from a small pool of disposable magazines, to fun details like running out of spawns but completing the mission objective still constituting a victory.

I think what says the most about my time with this game was that I played almost the entirety of the first page's duelists as well as a solid chunk of the second page before I decided to soft-stop my run. I'm still gonna come back to it every once in a while to build more decks and try to 100% the card pool if I can, but for all intents and purposes I've completed the game to my original desire of finishing as many characters' stories as I had in 5.

Tag Force 6 is without a doubt the best of its subseries, and it's a total shame that it didn't get an official translation at all. The recent-ish fan translation is awesome and works well enough for the main content but is unfinished and it shows. It's still great, though, and I was glad to play through numerous characters' stories and see the alternate endings they had for 5D's in general. Getting to use Xyz monsters was really cool, too, and gave me the same feeling of devious joy that using Synchro monsters in Tag Force 3 had.

Despite my initial praise, though, there's still the obvious lack of a super high score on this entry. It's even the same score I initially gave 3 and 5. The reason for this is that, sadly, Tag Force never really evolved all that much. I do find that the formula for 4-6 ultimately works a bit better than 2-3's and 1's but it's hardly different enough to warrant a much more positive judgment. Furthermore, mechanically 5 and 6 are nearly identical, with me only preferring 6 because of its card pool as well as the ending of the story being handled much better than in the actual show.

Sadly I don't really have much else to say on this entry because of just how similar it is to 5, and how similar 5 is to 4... you get the idea. I wish Tag Force had become more than what it was and it saddens me to see that it never did. It's now too late to get any sort of reboot for it given the lack of YGO anime that exist now for the main game, and with Master Duel around there's no reason to make a competitor of sorts for it. I'm happy these were made, though. They're fun time-wasters and serve as helpful time capsules for some of the most memorable formats in Yu-Gi-Oh's history.

Out of this subseries I'd say the most worthwhile ones to play are still just 3, 5, and this one, but that's a lot more than I've been able to say for the other main subseries of World Tournament games. Who knows, though, as I finish up my runs of those maybe there's be a golden trio on that side as well. Looking back I kinda miss the times of having so much left of this subseries to play and so much hope for grand improvements, but I'm still pretty satisfied with where it ended up. Maybe I'll try the far-off seventh game if that ever gets a decent translation like this one did...