The first Helldivers was a game that understood the assignment. The team at Arrowhead Game Studios wanted to create a tense, action packed, co-op shooter experience and set it against the motif of Paul Verhoeven’s classic film adaptation of Starship Troopers. Arrowhead has had grand ambitions for Helldivers, but, as a small team, they also knew there were limits to what their studio could realistically do. To keep scope, scale, and budget under control, they opted to make the game a top down, twin-stick shooter. The result? One of the best co-op twin-stick shooters of all time, wearing its inspiration from Verhoeven’s masterpiece proudly on its sleeve.
That was 2015, a long time ago. Since then, the team at Arrowhead, flourishing under nine years of Managed Democracy, has found itself firmly planted as a seed in Sony’s Games as a Service garden. A seed that is set to be the first to bloom. During this period, Arrowhead has grown its staff, its skill set, and its budget. Now armed with the strength and the courage to be free from those past limitations, the team has delivered unto us Helldivers 2. Was it worth the wait? Is it a worthy successor? Would you like to know more? Of course you do.
What It Takes To Be A Diver
Like the first game, Helldivers 2 is a PvE Co-Op Extraction-style shooter that drops you into the ongoing conflict between Super Earth, the Terminid hive, and the heartless Automotons. Unlike the first game, this time around it’s in third person, putting you way closer to the action. You will take on the role of a new recruit of the Helldivers, heroic soldiers of Super Earth. Once you complete a “very thorough” boot camp, you are given command of your very own ship. You will bestow it with an epic sounding name and be well on your way to dispense Managed Democracy across the entire galaxy. Your ship will be the hub of your experience; it’s where you will be able to set up load outs and spend resources gathered on missions to enhance your combat prowess. Heading over to the galaxy map located within your ship, you will quickly realize that you are not fighting this war alone as several campaigns are taking place on multiple planets.
While Helldivers 2‘s brilliant macro narrative is apparent as soon as you view the game’s opening cut-scene, it is even more strongly reinforced here since you can see the results of the conflict play out in real time. This really makes you feel like an active participant in the game’s community. Er, I mean, soldier in defense of the glorious Super Earth. Being a service-based game, having that wider narrative being pushed by the players is a great hook. When I found myself joining fellow Helldivers on the game’s official subreddit to celebrate the liberation of the planet Heeth early on in my time with the game, with everyone in full RP, I knew the game’s world was doing something right.
Upon selecting a planet, you will be able to choose from a list of available campaigns, which are groups of individual missions. You can choose a campaign to start and wait for the lobby to fill naturally, invite friends, or jump in solo. You can also let liberty take the wheel and simply press one button to instantly join an ongoing mission in progress. If you want to be more selective about which squads you join into, though, the map is also littered with icons that represent other players who have sent out an SOS. This is a neat feature that makes it feel as if you are rejoining an everlasting battle for the galaxy each time you begin a play session.
Unfortunately, at launch, neither of these options worked very well. The game clearly has garnered far more interest and success than anyone at Arrowhead or Sony could have predicted and, in doing so, has set off a metaphorical Hellbomb on the servers. Thankfully, these issues seem to be beginning to slowly get ironed out as I’m seeing it less and less with each passing day. Joining friends directly also worked pretty well during my time with Helldivers, so the game was far from unplayable from a multiplier perspective.
After landing on a planet, you will very quickly, if not immediately, get introduced to the local residents who are not happy to see you. They will make their dissatisfaction of your arrival known by wasting no time in trying to kill you by any means necessary. This is a blessing in disguise, though, as this fast tracks you into the most engaging aspect of Helldivers 2: the combat.
Everybody Fights, Nobody Quits
The first Helldivers was no slouch when it came to its top down combat, but the change in perspective and the litany of graphical and technical improvements on display is a total game changer. It’s immediately impressive how visceral and fun the combat is. I imagine many-a-clip of this game will invade social media for quite some time. The changes made over the first game are a lot more than just a perspective change, though, as nearly every aspect seems to be meticulously designed to fit together. The developers really honed in on and nailed the small stuff here, and it has paid great dividends.
For instance, the game has a realistic ammo economy, where reloading after firing a few shots results in losing the entire rest of the magazine. It’s a pretty simple mechanic when taken at face value. In the context of Helldivers, though, this means you will spend a lot of time uneasily walking around with half-full magazines on a dangerous planet full of hordes of things trying to kill you.
When it comes to actually shooting your gun, it’s not as simple as point and shoot. There is a simple mini game played where the center cross hair shows where you are looking, but a floating circle shows where the bullets are actually going to go. Keeping calm and shooting from a stationary position is the key to shooting accurately. Accurate shooting will save you a ton of ammo, after all.
Again, on the surface, it’s a simple mechanic; just keep calm, and you will be precise. Unfortunately for you, it’s quite hard to stay calm when a gigantic swarm of murderous bugs are coming right for you. There are also no dodge rolls or nimble jumps to get out of a bad situation, so stay calm and stationary at your own risk. The tension this builds in every encounter is excellent and really makes you thankful to have a squad of teammates with you, especially when the difficulty ramps up.
Your teammates are more than just an extra gun in the fight, though. For example, when it comes time to bring out the big guns of the rocket launching variety, something like the Recoilless Rifle takes forever to reload alone. If you have a teammate nearby who is conveniently carrying the backpack full of rockets, suddenly the reload speed is nearly instant, allowing you to dish out democracy much more effectively.
A lot of the small puzzles that are part of the mission objectives are also more effectively tackled with a pair, such as having one person rotate a satellite dish while the other watches the monitor to let them know when it’s aligned properly. The composition of your team is another factor that makes a big impact on your mission effectiveness. Being limited to which load outs and equipment you can bring into a mission means you will want a variety of tools to take on the different tasks ahead. This is especially the case when it comes to Stratagems, which are each player’s active abilities that facilitate the reason we are all here: totally rad explosions.
When you are in combat, you are almost always outnumbered and outgunned. Stratagems are used to even the odds. They are essentially support drops from your ship that range from providing you with heavier firepower, to sentry turrets, airstrikes, and orbital lasers. There are around 50 different Stratagems at the game’s launch, and they are a major component to the build-crafting aspect of the game. One of the more interesting elements of Stratagems is how you cast them. Just like in the original Helldivers, they each have a directional button combination that you must input via the d-pad to arm them, and then they are essentially thrown like a grenade to set them off. These button combinations are easy on paper. But, in the heat of the moment, it’s very easy to make a costly mistake, especially when you consider the final major wrinkle to the combat sandbox: friendly fire is always on.
A Lot Of Dead Bugs
It’s honestly quite hard to put into words how this all comes together as well as it does. You have intentionally clunky aiming, movement, and Stratagem button combinations in situations where precision is key. You have the ability to quite spectacularly blow stuff up, but you can just as easily kill your teammates as you can the enemies. Everything feels like this ongoing tug of war competition of ideas that, on paper, totally conflict with each other. But, in practice, they are entirely complimentary. When everything comes together and you have fire and bug guts flying everywhere, the PS5 haptics going off in your hand, your teammates’ joyful screams in your ear, and Wilber Roget’s epic score hitting its crescendo…it’s a beautiful thing. The best part? Moments like that happened in nearly every mission I dropped in to.
Speaking about the game’s missions, I would say the mission variety is decent for launch, with a little over 10 different activities. They are able to feel a lot more variable when factoring the game’s several biomes, time of day, and different enemy types. By far the biggest impact on how your mission will feel, though, comes through choosing one of the game’s 9 different difficulty options. The difficulty curve starts at trivial, where missions are easily soloable, but it ratchets all the way up to “Helldive,” where every step you take could be your last. In addition to the main objectives, there are also a ton of POIs (Points of Interest) littered throughout each map. While they won’t get you to extraction any faster, they will make each mission you drop into more lucrative. There is a time limit on each mission, though, so tackling everything on the map takes some serious coordination, especially when the difficulty is cranked up.
Once the mission is complete, you will head back to your ship with a fresh batch of XP, upgrade materials, and war medals in hand that you will use to progress through the game’s fairly deep progression system. It allows you to further enhance your ability to liberate more planets and dispense managed democracy across the galaxy by taking on even harder challenges. It’s not a very complicated gameplay loop, but it doesn’t have to be. The core of this game is the white knuckle action combat, and it is absolutely worth the price of admission.
You Wanna Live Forever?
The progression systems are pretty straight forward but, at the same time, rewarding. While inside of your ship, you can access a terminal to spend materials gathered on missions in order to upgrade its capabilities. This will impact things such as the cool down timers on Stratagems or their effectiveness. The materials used to purchase these upgrades vary in rarity, with rarer materials only being found in higher difficulty missions. The cost of many of these upgrades is somewhat steep, so going off the beaten path during missions is pivotal.
The other means of progression happen at the Acquisitions Center, also accessed from your ship. This is where you will spend Medals, earned by completing missions and campaigns, to upgrade aspects of your individual soldier, including things like armor, weapons, and cosmetics.
Medals are also spent on Warbonds, which is essentially an in-universe name for a Battle Pass. The game comes with an entirely free Warbond filled with tons of available upgrades that make meaningful improvements to your combat prowess. There is also a paid Warbond which can be purchased for Super Credits, the game’s premium currency. Both Medals and Super Credits can actually be found on missions inside of loot caches that are commonly found while doing side activities; however, the amount of Super Credits that can be found at a time is quite small.
There have been some discussions taking place online about the economy in Helldivers 2 and whether or not it’s pay to win. To be upfront, the game does offer a way for you to spend real money on Super Credits in order to purchase guns and armor which do affect gameplay. While this will ultimately come down to your personal stance on how “Pay 2 Win” this may be, or whether or not this even matters in a PvE only game, I will say that, from my experience with the game, the items that can be purchased are far more of a form of “horizontal” progression, not “vertical.” In other words, they are not clearly better than the stuff you can unlock for free. They also can technically be earned in game by hunting down loot caches and, compared to other similar titles, are very reasonably priced if you do intend to swipe a little.
Overall, I loved my time with Helldivers 2, and I’m overjoyed to see the team at Arrowhead Game Studios see such enormous success. It’s also a great start for Sony’s investment into live service as, at the time of writing, Steam Charts is showing over 400,000 concurrent players. That’s a higher figure than every other game Sony has released on Steam, combined. The most exciting thing for me, though, is how well-positioned this game is to deliver as a GaaS title. The ongoing nature of the game’s central conflict meshes well with the ongoing nature of service games, and the team has already been adding small narrative reasons to tackle specific missions. This is beside the fact that the first game had a third faction which is missing here, and the bottom of the galaxy map is suspiciously empty, as if it’s reserved for something to come in the future. At only $40, this game is a steal and hopefully the first of many great multiplayer games coming from PlayStation in the future. For Liberty!
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