I want you to imagine, if you will, playing a game with your closest of work colleagues. The two of you are standing together against a seemingly endless sea of alien bugs – think of a mosquito that had a baby with a cockroach in Australia.
You’re both just barely hanging in there, but you are, and then your colleague shouts “Bomb”, and before you can even start to run, the grenade hits you square in the face before blowing you to bits.
Now, picture that same thing happening again and again and again. Maybe you die because your colleague decided to try and shoot through you. Maybe you’re dead because your colleague tested his flame thrower while standing directly behind you, or maybe you’re dead because your colleague, who you’ve forgiven for all these previous infractions, decided to re-spawn directly on top of you – breaking your neck.
It doesn’t matter what happened; all that matters is that Helldivers 2 is a ridiculous game filled with ridiculous colleagues doing ridiculous things, and that’s what makes it ridiculously fun and will have you coming back for more.
What I described above is essentially the Helldivers 2 experience in a nutshell, and if it sounds like the type of chaos you’re drawn to, then you won’t be disappointed, regardless of whether you’re going at it alone or with enemies… friends… I mean friends.
Helldivers 2 isn’t a game that wastes time either; from the moment you start and get thrown into the tutorial missions, you’ll be in the smack bang in the middle of the ridiculous action.
You’ll also soon realise that regardless of the game telling you you’re invincible, you are, in fact, very, very vincible and will be dying continuously throughout the game.
Thanks to varied missions, a giant collection of weapons, armour and abilities to unlock through playing and even some ongoing long-term campaigns, there is enough content to keep you playing even if your teammates’ laughs, swearing, and ridiculousness aren’t.
Another thing that Helldivers 2 does right is that no two missions ever feel precisely alike. Even if the goal is the same, there’s so much variety in the maps and terrain that the game always feels fresh and exciting – even after many missions.
And because of the way the matches are set up, with players having a timer, a core objective, side missions, and just having to manage themselves and their teammates, the chances of any mission playing out the same way is improbable and makes for an exciting experience all the way through.
Helldivers 2 also makes players constantly think about even the smallest of things. There is no auto reloading in the game, and if you reload early, you lose all the remaining bullets you had in your clip.
There are also constant little min-game esc directional inputs you’ll need to put in using your controller’s d-pad to activate many of the things you’ll need throughout the game, and if you’re hit or your thumb makes a mistake, you start over.
But it doesn’t end there. If you want to be accurate while shooting, you need to be standing still or lying prone, but that’s harder said than done when bugs are coming at you from every way, and your teammate is raining hell from above. Even damage comes with a cravat: hurt your legs, and sprinting is out of the question, and hurt arms struggle to shoot straight and reload at any kind of speed.
Helldivers 2 also has a whole plethora of items for players to earn and unlock. Yes, there is a paid battle pass with weapons and armour, but there is also a free battle pass and truthfully? It comes with even more cool stuff than the paid-for version.
Also, in a move I can’t help but love, playing through the free battle pass will give you almost enough Super Credits to pay for the paid battle bass, and the few Super Credits you end up short on can be found and picked up while playing through missions.
So essentially, just by playing the game, you’d be able to get everything your heart desires on both the free and paid-for tiers – without ever having to crack open your wallet. It’s also worth noting that the battle passes only include weapons, armour, emotes, capes, cosmetic emblems, and Boosters.
The game’s most powerful unlocks, Stratagems, can only be purchased with the in-game currency you earn by completing mission objectives. This is great because no matter if someone chooses to pay money or grind their way through the battle passes, the core thing that changes the way the game plays can only be unlocked by playing – for everyone.
If there was any downside to Helldivers 2, it’s that the game needs to be played with friends or foes if you want to get the maximum level of enjoyment out of it. Yes, you are 100% able to go at it alone, but nothing scales with the player count, so a mission that is hard for a complete party of four will feel even worse if you’re playing alone.
But then again… when you’re alone, you only need to watch out for the AI, not your colleague Cody, who seems to permanently have you in his sights. I’d also be remiss not to mention the numerous server issues the game currently faces.
In a nutshell, Helldivers 2 comes from a development house of only 100 people, and they never anticipated the game to take off the way it has. This means the servers the game launched with weren’t powerful enough to support the almost 1,000,000 concurrent players across PC and PlayStation, which is currently drawing.
However, since I’ve started playing the game for review, the server has been upgraded from supporting only 500 thousand players to 800 thousand. So faster than you can yell out “Democracy!” or Cody can yell out “Sorry!” the server issues will be fixed, leaving only good tidings in its wake.
