Helldivers 2 (2024)

Helldivers 2 is a rare exception for me. I am primarily a PC player, and competitive or cooperative shooters are usually something I would rather play with mouse and keyboard. After spending all day at a computer, however, the couch and a PlayStation became more appealing. Playing a shooter with a controller would normally not be my preference—but in this case, it worked.

It was also unusual because I played it cooperatively with colleagues, including my boss. That dynamic alone made the experience memorable. Despite being outside my usual comfort zone, I had a genuinely great time.

The game thrives on controlled chaos. The spectacle, the pacing, the constant pressure, and the tongue-in-cheek tone create a distinctive atmosphere. The satirical militarism and clear inspiration from Starship Troopers are impossible to miss, and it is impressive how effectively that tone was translated into interactive form. The ongoing updates and evolving battlefield situations kept it lively for quite some time.

After reaching around level 40, the repetition began to set in and the momentum faded somewhat. Still, as my only extended cooperative PvP-style experience on console, it was consistently entertaining. It proved that even outside my usual platform and input preferences, the right design and the right group can make all the difference.

I've played Helldivers 2 since launch, and the ups and downs of this game have been bizarre, frankly. During the first week of launch, the game was filled with glitches and crashes, but it was undeniable that the gameplay was a blast. Killing hordes of enemies as you desperately ran from objective to objective felt awesome.

As the updates continued to flow within the game, Arrowhead did well with adding interesting content and ideas to keep the replay value going. We got plenty of new battle passes, new enemies, new objectives, the Illuminate faction, and weapon upgrades. But along with that came a series of deeply unpopular changes. (Rants incoming)

Arrowhead repeatedly made what I can only called unforced errors in dealing with the community. They dialed up the smaller enemies and added in many more large, armored enemies to save on server costs (fewer units, less compute usage). They increased the durability of armored enemies to the point where it was nearly pointless trying to use small arms fire to kill them - and sometimes, did so without documenting the changes. They took many of the games weapons and made them cumbersome to use, making the general gunplay of the game clumsier. And, with every patch, the game's performance on its end-of-life engine continued to tank.

Some of the new content was also to blame. At the game's launch, some enemies like Bile Titans were scary, but killing them was plausible, and you could reasonably avoid getting fragged by them. But many of the new content's enemies were ridiculous to the point where people just avoided the new content, waiting for it to be patched. The Illuminate's Stingrays and Leviathans could often one shot kill you. The Hive Lord was unbelievably hard to kill with basically no reward in return, and it spawned on difficulties as low as 7. The hive's Dragon Roaches were stupidly tanky, could possibly one shot kill you, and respawned way too quickly for how strong they were.

As these updates continued, players grew frustrated with the game. Many of the playerbase, myself included, felt that Arrowhead didn't understand its own community. They repeated odd statements like, "A game for everyone is a game for no one" - not even realizing that they were missing the point entirely. Helldivers 2 at release wasn't for no one! They had a great audience that loved the game, and the idea that they needed to pivot to a more hardcore audience was, frankly, silly.

Making the game extremely challenging on difficulties 9 & 10 is totally fine, and honestly, the game should be brutal at that point! But it feels really cruddy to have been able to have cleared 9+ difficulty at launch, and then struggle to deal with difficulties 6/7 at this point now, especially when you go from being overwhelmed to being insta-killed by bullet sponging enemies.

My final verdict is that there's a 90/100 game within Helldivers 2, but Arrowhead frankly doesn't seem to want to make that game. They want to make a 60-70/100 game. The tin-foil hat in me wonders if the motive is to alienate players that aren't paying for DLC to save on server costs? It's honestly baffling to try to understand at times.

After a bunch of balancing patches, new content updates, and a PS5 Pro "patch" - I can safely say I love this game.

I bought it on my rather old PC at launch. It didn't perform well at all. Crashed, freezes, framedrops, ugh.

Last summer I decided to move from PC gaming to PS5, I got the PS5 Pro and haven't looked back.

And boy oh boy is Helldivers 2 an absolute blast with friends. When this game performs, it really slaps. A real gem of a game, that does what it advertises and delivers many memorable gaming moments.

I'm happy I gave this another shot.

Even though I've sunk 15 hours into Helldivers 2, I feel like I never gave it a fair enough shake. The intricacies, new updates, which guns do what, what the new event is and other minutia totally escape me. I relied totally on Eric, Mitch, Chris and Ryan to guide me through and thankfully this is the kind of game where I can take months off, come back and still have a blast.

This is the Starship Troopers game we always wanted. The graphics may not be the "best" out there, but I dare you to find me a game with more beautiful explosion effects. The dust, hazy vision and fire create some truly spectacular scenes. The action is frantic and chaotic and the real fun begins when shit hits the fan and you're all screaming at each other to get to various locations, shoot various things and laugh about it after. A terrific multiplayer experience with a great sense of humor.

Random things that would be cool to see in Helldivers 2:

• Stealth! A stealth warbond of silenced weapons, an outfit that makes it both harder to be detected and increases personal radar range, some kind of remote explosive, and a stratagem of stealth support of some kind, like a signal that makes you have Predator-esque invisibility for like 20 seconds.

• Eagle laser/plasma strafing run: no different than the normal strafing run other than using plasma and laser rounds, so less impact damage, but can possibly cause fire or electric damage to the targets and the immediate area.

• A circumferential perimeter orbital barrage. The walking barrage is awesome, and the 120 and 380 barrages are awesome too, but having an "oh shit" barrage that fires in a 360 on your point would be cool. The laser kind of does this, but I envision this as being sustained for longer and being only a single use. Something you can save for extraction if you need to, but it's also not OP, in that it won't save you, you'll still have to defend yourself like all hell.

• Solo missions: missions that are designed to be completed by one person, with a different extraction type, like a self-propelled escape pod you get into after configuring a console to take off. No extraction area defense, just gotta complete your objective and get out of there as fast as possible. No bunkers that require another person to open and minimal samples, so that it doesn't become more lucrative than group play. Just a medal and requisition bonus.

• Illumination orbital: night missions or forest missions are really cool, so it would be awesome if you could call in a flare to illuminate a certain area for a period of 10 seconds or so just so you can get a good idea of what you're seeing. I thought maybe just a radar orbital that scans all enemies within, say, 20 meters of where your orbital lands, but that 1) is probably too helpful and 2) gets away from the boots-on-the-ground feel they're going for with the game, where the tech is more grounded and not too advanced.

• Self-destruct/explosive drone stratagem: a remote piloted drone that detonates on command. Limited range from the pilot, single use per mission, to take out objectives or tough enemies without exposing oneself.

• A hand-held front-facing shield to accompany the use of the electric spear. I really like using this weapon in close quarters and find it a little easier to defend myself with than a pistol or secondary shotgun, but a shield to help reduce, if not negate entirely, the damage from being engaged by more than one enemy (the Voteless come to mind, it's easy to get surrounded by them).

• Multi-squad missions. 4 players per map is awesome but I wonder if the engine is robust enough to support even larger missions and maps that support or encourage two fireteams (4 players, 8 total) to complete, with some kind of dependent objective. Not quite a raid but just a mission that requires you to prime area A for objective B. Maybe completable with 4, but much easier with 8.

I fucking love this game.

Fun while lasted

I only had 1 friend to play this, and we had a lot of fun for a time. For a month maybe?

But as 2 you can't get too far in the difficulty (challenging was kinda the limit, where we could complete the mission while getting most stuff out of it, but it was often annoying and felt unfair).

Why not play with randoms?

Well for the most part cause matchmaking did not work. We could almost never join an active mission chosen by us, and when we did, only one of us actually joined it.

Game forces you to play with randoms to get better equipment, runes, more money etc. but can't provide the means to do it. Ridiculous. I understand why they don't want to scale the difficulty and give higer level resources on lower levels, but if they can't provide a system to play the game as intendent then I feel cheated.

I kept seeing YouTube shorts of goofy clips of Helldivers 2 that made the game look like some dumb fun, and everybody and their brother was talking about it. As a online multiplayer game I was worried it’d be another microtransaction nightmare, but the only paid credits are used for a very limited shop and you don’t have the issue of boring grinding.

The gameplay is the star here. I, like probably most people, didn’t play Helldivers 1. It was apparently a top-down isometric game, whereas Helldivers 2 plays like a traditional over the shoulder shooter. The shooting is smooth and responsive and you can switch between third and first person aim fairly quick. Most of your firefights are within 100 yards with how enemies attack you. The one downside to the shooting is a lot of the guns lack a real punch. That’s to be expected for your SMG or rapid-fire assault rifle, but I like to be the DMR guy on my squad and it’s underpowered. It can drop small enemies quickly, but it doesn’t fair any better than the basic starter assault rife against bigger, armored enemies. I feel like it should, because you are trading a much smaller ammo clip for increased damage output. I can understand there’s maybe some game balancing reasons why, but for this shooter game, the guns are the lowest point.

Another big aspect of the gameplay is your “stratagems”. These are special weapons and gear you can call in via a cheat code style entry system to customize your Helldiver. They range from calling in a heavy machine gun, to equipping a jet pack, to placing sentry turrets, to calling in a bombing run or a big, fuck-off, orbital laser. You can only bring a total of 4 stratagems a mission, so you can mix them up and no two Helldivers will be the same. Having to call in your support heavy weapons does make the beginning of a mission pretty tedious as you all wait around for your weapons to drop. The bombing run and turret stratagems can turn the tide of a fight.

Whether shooting your gun or calling in a nuke, you do have to be cognizant of where your teammates are because friendly fire is permanently on. Luckily, calling in a respawn is easy enough so most people don’t get bent out of shape about an accidental friendly fire incident. Teamwork is important to success, especially on higher difficulties. Enemies come in swarms that can overrun you quickly if you’re on your own. The amount of enemies that spawn, especially boss level enemies on higher difficulty maps does feel a bit unfair. Like they just mob you with enemies that don't got down easily with these piddly guns and it feels impossible to win get a breather to regroup and fight back effectively.

But the thing that sold me on this game is all of the gameplay comes together to make last stand, holdout moments happen naturally and often. There’s lots of moments, especially during exfil, where your squad has your back to the wall as you fight off waves of enemies. I remember one mission where me and a squadmate were set up on a platform with machine guns and were just unloading into an unrelenting wave of bugs. Or other times where I was hip firing my machine gun to keep the bugs back as the rest of the squad loaded into the dropship. My personal best moment was when I ran into an enemy encampment, Leroy Jenkins style, with a grenade in hand to blow up their base to stop the bots from swarming my team. I knew it was a one-way trip, but I was able to destroy the outpost before I fell.

This game feels like space Vietnam. You are in an ill-defined war against a ‘native’ population that attacks from the trees and ground with overwhelming force and you can call down napalm on their ass. The obvious inspiration of this game is Starship Troopers with a bit of Terminator mixed in. You are part of the Super Earth Army which is very much an authoritarian state that runs on ‘managed democracy’. It’s all very hoo-rah, blind patriotism, like Starship Trooper, and you are fighting your two main enemies: the bugs & the bots, because Super Earth demands it and they “threaten our freedom.” There’s little bits of world building in the background that key you into how dystopian this universe is. Each mission you complete you get a paltry fireworks display to note your success. If you wanted to get real deep into player psychology, there’s probably something here about using this world building to also drag players into that mindset of wanting to keep playing to ‘save the democracy’.

You select missions from a shared galaxy map. There’s certain sectors that are under bug control and others under bot control. Bugs are the easier enemies, while bots will kick your butt. You complete missions on a planet and each successful mission adds to the liberation percentage of that planet. So you may play several days on one planet, but once it’s liberated you move onto another world. I don’t know how much the percentage shifts back in the enemy’s favor or how that end of things work. I usually just joined already active matches vs starting new ones. The game does have some connectivity issues and I had to restart the game a few times before I could connect to a match. Luckily on my second or third day of playing I joined up with two guys who were pretty cool and I was able to play with them regularly.

The art design of this game is good enough. The bugs are generic alien bugs, but you can identify the different classes of bugs and the rank of them based on their size. In the lower difficulties, you’ll see smaller versions of bugs that have bigger/deadlier variants that show up in higher difficulties. The robots are a mix of terminators and Borderlands scrap bots. The Helldivers are dressed like they’d be the evil empire soldiers in any other space war story. Lots of black and helmets to hide faces. They do have flowy capes which I like. I was able to find a nice matching set of armor, helmet, & cape to give my Diver a cohesive look.

All in all, Helldivers 2 is exactly the dumb fun I expected it to be. If you want a fun space shooter where you can have those climatic last stands as your squad is surrounded, I can recommend this game. The connectivity issues can be a bit annoying, but the game is being actively worked on with new gear and patches being added regularly, I’m waiting for the vehicle update. It’s a fun, turn your brain off kinda game and it’s got an easy learning curve that doesn’t force you to grind on lower levels to unlock enough gear to make the game fun.

Speaking of Helldivers 2... It's so disheartening. I can't like it no matter how many times I can find positives in it. The game is fun, mind me, when it doesn't behave like a waterlogged piece of wood.

For every bug squished (ah ah ah), another one crops up:

• The exo-suit explodes if you shoot from the wrong angle.
• You can die and the game will tell you to 'use a stim' and won't let you be reinforced by other players, forcing you to relaunch the game.
• Friend lobbies are still botched, can't invite people from the in-game menu (0 Friends online, always even when they're right there in my lobby), can't join on people currently playing the game from the Steam friendlist if it's "friends only", they have to open it up to everyone and let you in, then close it again o you don't get the random dude that loudly chews and breathes through their mic.

Instead of reconsidering armor capabilities for Bile Titans, they decided to 'spawn less' but to make bug tunnel breaches, scouts and other more common bugs in higher difficulties much more plentiful which means for one Bug Tunnel Breach (that you cannot stop unless the animation begun for a frame, anything more and you're too late and even then, sometimes it happens anyway before the fart) you can get up to six/seven Bile Spewers, a dozen of Hunters and more of the tiny Recons that can fart and cause other Bug Tunnel Breaches.

They made the Breaker semi-useless by nerfing its armor penetration so now even shooting a Charger in the face is the most painful thing you can imagine since there is only two spots you can hit it from without wasting an orbital strike/a Spear shot/a Recoilless Shot on it and it's a. its ass (which means you have to play tag with it and hope a friend shoots the ass, which takes a while) and b. its face which is still armored and you have to use Anti-Material Sniper shots to take him out if you have time to take aim and fire. And there's multiple Chargers spawning per-Bug Tunnel Breaches because they're considered "not as challenging as Bile Titans).

How to turn a game from fun to a total rage-inducing anger fest.

Had my Leroy Jenkins moment.
My squad was getting our butts kicked by robots and we had to take out their bot factory. Usually we just call in an air strike, but our comms were jammed.

The robots were surrounding us, we were pinned down behind a rock, so I decided to make a move. I sprinted into the facility, robots all around shooting at me, threw two grenades through the factory windows, & as I died from laser fire, the factory blew up, saving my squad.

Gameplay: 9.5/10

Presentation: 9/10

Story: 9/10

Overall Score: 9.1/10

Gameplay= Mechanics, gameplay options (freedom), repetition, goals, difficulty

Story= plot, engagement, characters, world-building

Presentation= graphics, animation, environment/character design, Art direction, Script, music

This is by far one of the best multiplayer co-op games of the decade. From the great progression system which keeps things constantly fresh to the hectic strategic gameplay that can go terribly wrong in the best way possible with a single wrong button click. Entering into the combat boots of an expendable super-patriotic soldier has been such an amazing time that hasn't gotten old after almost a hundred hours of play. Describing this game in text will never do the experience justice. Just "dive" into the game and experience it for yourself.

What I can say about the game as a forewarning to players that may find it unappealing is that the game weighs heavily on skill. As the game progressively gets harder if you choose to play on ever-increasing difficulty. Death is expected and should in most cases be more silly than frustrating. If the idea of dying or losing in a game a lot is unappealing to you this may not be the game for you. If you enjoy learning and trying again and again to master games this is one that should interest you.

To any future divers or current ones. May your justice be swift and democracy prevail!

I have a very big love and hate relationship with this game. This game is extremely bugged. Everything the players tell you it will "100% work" has worked on them 2 out of 10 missions.

Everything above Tier 7 is a endeavor in anger, impatience and bugs after bugs (and not the enemy kind of bugs). Railgun, spears and orbital strikes aren't consistent in their damage: sometimes they will one-shot a Bile Titan, sometimes they will simply graze it despite landing on the same exact spot as the one-shot which would be a balanced experience if there weren't four - on average - Bile Titans spawning.

Every Bug Breach has at least 6 Yellow Bile Spewers, a dozen of smaller bugs that can call bug breaches and a myriad more of hunters, who are faster and attack at a higher rate than what you can shoot them/recharge them.

It's to the point where it's not challenging, it's just plain aggravating and unlikely that you would want to do the next tier of difficulty - which sucks since you need the epic samples that are found in extremely small quantities in the 7 to 9 difficulties.

Old review is down here just in case, but the game has become a bit (implementing an AFK kicker that ticks down to 15min, which is a bit too punishing on players that might not even be one-two day long AFKers) more stable to be able to be enjoyed. However, there's still issues plaguing the gameplay such as and not limited to:

• Getting stuck in a climbable rock only for you to not be able to climb it because the height has increased just a little bit.
• Some stratagems are amazing but they will hurt your squad more than your enemies.
• Automatons missions are still extremely bugged (the drop pods do not stop coming once triggered and will cause up to 5 hulks to spawn on your location on Challenging and higher difficulties).
• Sometimes difficulty increase just means more bugs spawning overtop of you, making is hard to handle them.

It's a fun game, it's just amazing for stress relief but I honestly wish they'd clean it up better.

Helldivers is a fun game. It reminds me fondly of Earth Defense Force 4 and its predecessors, mixed with Deep Rock Galactic. The gist is the same and it's fun.

But the game suffers from poor management, I suppose: in order to force their premium currency (Super Credit), they require you to always play online, which means that the glaring issue with their server load is extremely on the nose.

The premium currency isn't even the blight in this case (it's non intrusive and you can find it everywhere - even just playing or completing the free battle pass) but it's the mere fact that they implemented it when the currency in and of itself is so easy to get that is the plight of this game.

The game comes packed with an anti-cheat that needs you to connect to the game, added specifically to avoid players 'cheating' this currency in.

You pay $40 for a game you can only ever play whenever the majority of players is offline - doesn't matter where you live because the servers are the same for everyone (no discrimination between EU/NA/etc), rendering it effectively a beta/alpha testing of a game that can only be accessed at some hours of the day.

If you wait to enter the game (for which you have no feedback for, you just are asked to wait and retry), you will be forced in the first available free space in their packed servers, which means you will lag and become fully unresponsive during gameplay, rendering every mission a challenge between rage-quitting because you lagged in front of a bug while throwing an airstrike (causing the airstrike to hit you) and rage-quitting because you keep getting frozen in unlikely spaces while enemies hit you, all the while the server disconnects and reconnects aimlessly.

It's a 2 star review on the mere premise of not even being able to play the game I bought unless half of the USA is asleep.