I would not forgive myself if I did not write a detailed review of the game Helldivers 2. For democracy, for prosperity, for Super-Earth! Picture this scene: Four soldiers are desperately running towards their ship on an alien planet, pursued by huge dagger claws. Machine gun fire booms, green goo spews, and the landing pad is swarming with monsters as the quartet squeeze through the landing hatch and their ship takes off at the last second. It might be Hollywood action, but in Helldivers 2 it's just the end of another mission.
Indeed, it's surprising how often the outings in Helldivers 2 end in screaming, bone-chilling heroics. And it never ceases to excite me over and over again, because the Hollywood ending is never guaranteed. Maybe you'll be tagged within a meter of completing your great escape. Maybe you'll get shot at by a teammate. It may be impossible to move the group, but somehow one of you surfaces and lives to tell the tale. Or maybe no one will survive at all (luckily, you will still receive rewards for completing tasks).
Starship bloopers
Let's start our review of the game Helldivers 2 with the epic. It's not just the ending of missions that leaves lasting memories. This four-player squad shooter (single-player is possible, but not much fun) combines every element with explosiveness, resulting in scenes that could truly be choreographed for a movie. And in a sense it was so. Helldivers 2 is a shameless mishmash of sci-fi action movie tropes, with a big chunk of Starship Troopers on proud display, a sprinkle of Aliens and the Terminator series on top. Every line of his code works to recreate the feeling of their iconic scenes—the panic, the bravado, the dark humor—through improvised chaos.
Building on the Starship Troopers script is a smart choice for the tone of the game as well. Like its predecessor, Helldivers 2 repeats Paul Verhoeven's 1997 satire at every turn: the inhabitants of Super-Earth fight for freedom and democracy, giving their lives to be torn to pieces by an endless war. True, the script here is little more than a pale imitation of its inspiration, but this gives the action a magnificent absurdity that gives rise to wild gambits and a frequently hilarious mood.
The appeal is that, despite the propaganda, you are not Master Chief's super-soldier, but a hapless nonentity who went into enemy territory to sacrifice himself for nebulous ideals. You'll be crushed, burned, impaled, and possibly blown up by your equally inept teammates, so every attack you make is a well-deserved victory, and every death is a tragicomic side effect of the situation. Plus, within seconds of your death, one of your squadmates will call for reinforcements, and before you know it, you'll be blasting back down to the ground from orbit in a bullet-shaped capsule to rejoin the fight. Hope they took care not to summon you next to a swarm of killer bugs or cyborgs.
One of the most striking concepts in Helldivers 2 is that support always comes from the sky, launched by your personal starship, which hangs like a satellite above your position. In many ways, this sequel is a remake of the first game with the addition of live service progression and a change in camera angle from top-down to over-the-shoulder, but this change is a real change in the game, both because it makes combat much more intimate and personal, and through your connection with the heavens, when drops falling from above shower the battlefield.
Not only do reinforcements arrive from above—with a loud boom that can shatter fragile scenery or bugs—but what the game calls stratagems means gear, heavy weapons, and a devastating fireworks display of airstrikes and orbital laser fire. Each fighter chooses four stratagems before landing, all of which have cooldown timers, and controlling them will determine whether he will be some kind of weirdo with a machine gun and a couple of grenades or a cackling fighter, posing a danger to insects, cars and people.
Air and orbital strikes are a quick way to destroy many enemies, but equally the surest way to deal with friends. You throw a metal ball that serves as an aiming point for the barrage, a comically inaccurate method for a precise strike. Then a red beam appears from the sky and you have a few seconds to clear the area before there is a boom, shaking and an amazing sight of smoke and flames. Thus, a red laser can be your savior or a harbinger of imminent death.
The same goes for automatic machine gun turrets, mine capsules and powerful hand-held ammunition. You literally can't live without them, but placing them can work against you, reducing your supply of reinforcements faster than the enemy could hope for. And even with an organized squad, mistakes can happen, simply because the skirmishes in Helldivers 2 heat up so surprisingly and stupidly quickly. One minute you're standing in tight formation, calmly scanning for distant threats (a very useful feature), and the next you're ducking behind a rock to evade an advancing bug, its buddies scurrying in all directions and your team scattered. Before the dust settles, someone will save an ally from certain death, someone will fall in a blaze of suicidal glory, and, of course, someone will order an airstrike and release their sights without first checking their position.
Helldivers 2 Combat Uniform
However, it's not just one element of Helldivers 2 that makes it sing. They are all intertwined together. There are a huge number of enemies here - frame rate drops are extremely rare - they press on like xenomorphs nesting in a reactor, but at the same time, the characteristics of each type force you to react differently, forcing you to run, stand still or dive into the mud, throw grenades or reach shotgun in a close encounter. You'll learn that the larger, deadlier creatures and androids, which start appearing around the fourth or fifth of the game's nine difficulty levels, have specific weaknesses. To target them, you often need to use the terrain to your advantage or team up with a friend: one of you lures the target, while the other strikes from the rear.
The mission designs, meanwhile, are interesting and varied even at this early stage. From destroying bug nests or bot factories to taking soil samples or preparing to launch an ICBM, objectives consist of multiple stages that send you between traversing large maps and holding positions while entering data into terminals, manually moving machinery, or waiting for processes to complete. Missions also offer a variety of sub-goals, tempting you to increase your rewards in XP and currency, with the caveat that enemy forces grow the longer you stay on the planet. Such decisions can put your efforts on the edge of the knife.
We drank a cup of LIBER-TEA and continue our review of Helldivers 2. The visual and sound accompaniment is also excellent. Each planet has a distinct personality - color, natural hiding places, dangers, environmental features - while the bugs are reliably disgusting and the bots are menacing, as the Terminator influence suggests. Sound is the star of the game, from perfect shots, reload clicks and explosions, to insects chirping and squeaking, to your team's perfectly timed shouts of "Eat this!" and “For Democracy!”, as well as a score that is equal parts jingoism and drama. It's almost embarrassing to turn on microphones, although it's certainly recommended.
As for the service structure of the game, it does not yet seem intrusive, and monetization is limited to additional armor, helmets and cloaks. The end game appears to involve the entire player base working together to liberate a spiral of planets around Earth—sorry, Super-Earths—with just a few available at a time. Each time you complete a mission, the completion goal on that planet increases by a ten-thousandth of a percent, which is perhaps the game's cleverest satire of showing you what your blood, sweat and tears are worth. When the counter reaches 100%, which happened only once in the first week after launch, the planet becomes inaccessible and new ones are opened. Presumably developer Arrowhead has his hand on the dial, making sure progress isn't too fast or slow.
However, after 20 hours of playing the game, the game started to feel a little boring. The amount of XP and currency required to level up and obtain more powerful strategies, weapons and armor pushes you to higher levels of difficulty that are difficult to tackle without a well-organized and equipped team. It can feel like a catch 22 where you need the best gear to take on their challenge, but until you get it, you'll have a hard time getting it.
However, there's no doubt that technical issues with Helldivers 2 are causing progress to be slower than it should be. Losing contact while running to a dropship after a 30-minute mission is frustrating, as is returning home to discover that you haven't been credited with the points you earned. At least Arrowhead is clearly paying attention to this, and the latest bug appears to have been fixed in the last couple of days. The biggest issue that remains at the time of writing is access to quick match, which can take several minutes of retries and failures despite there being plenty of games available. Apparently the large number of people playing Helldivers 2 is causing a problem by overloading the servers.
Of course, this doesn't matter so much if you have a team of friends willing to dive in with you, and despite the hiccups, these first 20 hours were mostly joyful. The prospect of unlocking more planets and more impressive toys to play with, as well as another hundred final pushes towards dropshipping, is far more enticing than the vast majority of live service offerings. And with this I will end our review of the amazing game Helldivers 2.
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