Transcribed from the video:
Strap yourselves in, citizens! We’re deploying into the warzone that is Helldivers 2, the long-awaited sequel to the cult classic top-down shooter. Remember those glorious propaganda reels and the hilarious jabs at military bureaucracy? Buckle up, because they’re back, and cranked up to eleven. But this time we’re ditching the bird’s-eye view and strapping on our reinforced combat boots for a gloriously chaotic third-person experience. But does this shift in perspective bring freedom, or friendly fire frustration? Let’s lock and load and find out…
If you played the first Helldivers, you’ll be happy to know the tone of this game is right in line. The satirical jabs at blind patriotism, bureaucracy, and the glorification of war are back, but with a third-person twist. You’re still a proud Helldiver, fighting for “Super Earth” and its brand of, uh, “Managed Democracy.”
If you’re new to the series, it’s ok, you don’t have to have played the first one. But I do want to talk about it for a moment because it’s part of what’s special about this sequel. Helldivers came out in 2015 as a top-down shooter, and what really made it stand out was the focus on the gameplay mechanics. You could call in airstrikes, set up defensive turrets, and all kinds of stuff, but there was a twist: it wasn’t as easy as pushing a button. You’d have to follow on-screen prompts for specific sequences with the arrow keys, which is actually pretty challenging when you’re running around frantically.
It was a nice surprise of a game, but what’s really cool is that the developers were really able to fine-tune and perfect the balancing of the game. Cooldowns, enemy spawns, and the joys of cooperative play—it now feels like the entirety of Helldiver’s existence was just a beta test for what we have now: a fully-modern 3rd-person shooter, that also happens to have all the cool strategy and mayhem from the original.
Playing With Perspective
I can’t stress enough how much more immersive it is now in this 3rd person view. I’m actually a big fan of isometric games and twin-stick shooters, but being there with boots on the ground, so to speak, just makes the action feel more intense. You have to orient yourself with the objectives and landmarks, you don’t really know what’s around each corner, and there’s just something about getting four players moving as one working toward an objective, it’s just… it’s hands down a better experience.
And that’s without even mentioning that that the strategy and coordination with your teammates is still there. You can call in things to assist in battle, like an airstrike or a minefield, but you have to use the specific sequence to call it in, and you can’t really do that while you’re shooting or, as is often the case, while running away. That means if a teammate goes down and you’re being overrun, you’ll want to call in a reinforcement to get them back in action, but you can’t do that until you’re in a safe enough spot to take the time to call it in. It adds a layer of chaos to an already chaotic battlefield, but it’s nothing to the amount of chaos that comes from my favorite part of the game: calling in airstrikes.
Orbital strikes go boom. And good lord they go boom. It’s fun to watch and it’s almost like you can feel the ground shaking when you’re too close. It’s at this point I want to mention what may be the defining characteristic of this game for me: friendly fire. It’s been a long time since I’ve spent much time in a shooter with friendly fire, and it was pretty jarring at first to be fighting alongside your teammate, step forward, and then faceplant because you just stepped in front of their line of fire. It forces everyone to always be aware of firing angles, enemy location, and avoiding crossfire, which is just one more layer of strategy and chaos. But nowhere is friendly fire more important or relevant than when calling in those glorious air strikes. Because they make your teammates go boom too! When you mark a target, everyone can see it. But again, things get so frantic at times that you may not notice that giant red beacon right behind you. Or you might land it on the back of a large bug that happens to be heading straight for you and you can’t get out of the zone fast enough.
There’s also a giant hellbomb used for destroying objectives, but the damn thing has to be armed manually and then you only have a few seconds to get as far away as possible… and let’s just say I was sent flying, or sent others flying, pretty regularly and no one was mad about it because it’s the opening weekend and we’re all learning how to play at the same time. Now, there might not be as much good will a month from now, but at least so far this seems to be a very different vibe than other cooperative shooters, *cough* overwatch *cough, that tend to get a bit toxic at time.
Everything you call in is on a cooldown, whether it’s a special weapon or whatever. So you want to be smart about where you place a turret, for example, because it’ll be a few minutes before you can call in another. It’s a bit different with calling in a resupply of ammo, however, because that’s on a shared timer. So anyone can call it in, but there’s a limit to how often it can be used and if one teammate drops it in an isolated area, it kind of screws over everyone else. Ammo is limited, and your team’s ability to resupply efficiently has a lot to do with the success of the mission.
Armor and weapons are unlocked through playing the game, but I didn’t see any way to upgrade or alter them. Some weapons are better long range, mid range, or close quarters, but there’s such a variety of situations in each mission it really made the most sense to grab a mid-range assault rifle and stick with it. There’s light, medium, and heavy armor that have different stats for speed and health, but within each category the differences are all cosmetic. You can create different loadouts, but there’s not much room for creativity, and no reason to put much thought into it.
The core gameplay loop is almost identical to the first game: complete objectives, survive the enemy onslaught (and your trigger-happy teammates), and extract before the timer runs out. But the gameplay is tense, it’s hilarious, and it’s one tactical misstep away from a fiery demise. Compared to the first game, it’s more fluid and action-packed, but the strategic depth feels slightly diminished. Think less “chess with explosions” and more “dodge, shoot, and pray your teammate doesn’t accidentally nuke you.”
In terms of difficulty, there are several options—in fact there are nine of them. The higher the difficulty level, the better the rewards, the more you have to do in a mission, and the less time you have to do it. I didn’t go to deep into the higher difficulties in my limited time with it, which is probably why I always felt like there was plenty of time to work with.
What the game really needs, in my opinion, is a class system. This would be a perfect game for the classic tank, damage dealer, support dynamic, but that would definitely take away from the pick-up-and-playability of the game—which is one of its strongest features. There’s not much of a learning curve, even with the strategic elements involved, and I can see this game being fun even if you’re not that into shooters. I was never able to get into Destiny 2, no matter how hard I tried, because it just felt too dense. And let me tell you, that is not a problem here…
Satire & Explosions
Don’t expect an epic space opera here, or much world-building beyond the opening cutscene. The narrative is about as thick as a propaganda poster, but the real story lies in the game’s pointed jabs at societal issues. Expect hammy voiceovers and enough dark humor to make you question everything you usually see in games about war, heroism, and the glorification of violence. And colonialism. And forced democracy. It’s like Black Mirror, if Black Mirror had a silly cousin who took a vacation on a bug-infested planet and decided to blow things up. In the best way possible, of course.
It’s immersive when you’re on the battlefield, and the game is at its best when the shit hits the fan and your team has to use the tools at their disposal to find a way to persevere. But it’s not immersive in any way outside of that. There’s no attempt at establishing a character or a personal story. I don’t even know if I’m supposed to be playing the same person at all times, or if I’m controlling a new soldier in the same loadout each time I use a reinforcement.
And you know what? That’s probably one of the reasons this game has been successful out of the gate. It’s not making a half-hearted attempt at a story no one will end up caring about, and you don’t have to sit through cutscenes or look up wikis to figure out what’s going on. There are bugs and robots out there that need annihilated with an explosive dose of democracy on their heads. What else do you need to know, soldier? Get planetside, and don’t waste any time taking in the sights.
Graphics & Technicals
The graphics aren’t winning any beauty contests, but it gets the job done. The environments are varied and atmospheric, from bug-infested snowscapes to foggy jungles lit up by lasers, and the explosions are suitably spectacular. Don’t expect cutting-edge visuals, but the performance is smooth and I don’t recall experiencing in frame rate drops, or stuttering, or even pop-in in the distance.
But there’s one problem I did run into a lot: server bugs. I’m not talking about the bugs that are bursting open with freedom, I’m talking about connection failures. Now this is just an impressions video and it’s only based on the opening weekend of the game, so I don’t know how long it will take to get this ironed out, but so far playing on my PS5 I have had a pretty rough time with network errors. In the first four games I played, I only completed one without being booted early. The next morning, I wasn’t able to join any games at all until I turned off cross-play, and even then it was still less than 50/50 I could get into a game.
There were several times I would get a connection failure mid-mission, or worse, just as one was finishing up. Sometimes I earned the mission rewards, but usually I didn’t. In several hours of play, there was only time I was able to play two games in a row with the same group without a connection failure. In a game that relies so heavily on team chemistry, I don’t really plan to put much more time into it until these issues have been patched. It’s a real bummer, because I really enjoyed the time I did play, and I think they’re onto something really great, but spending 25 minutes in a mission only to dropped right as the extraction is about to happen, and lose all those mission rewards and time spent… it’s not fun, man. It made me set the controller down and think about the other things I didn’t like.
Democracy At A Cost
I did have a few gripes with the game. Most notably, the game felt like a real chore in solo play. When every enemy is focused solely on you, and there’s no one else to call in reinforcements, or extra orbital drops, it really feels like playing the game in hardcore mode, and I noped out pretty quickly. Having teammates is where it’s at for me, even bad ones. Sometimes my squamates would run in opposite directions, or some would be racing through the objectives to get straight to the extraction while others where exploring and trying to find every reward on the map, but even then the experience was miles ahead of playing solo. So if I had one wish for the game, it would be a slightly modified single player campaign, or even the ability to load up AI teammates would go a long way.
I mentioned earlier that I’d love to see a class system in the game, but I also realize that might limit the broad appeal it’s having at launch. And judging by the steam numbers, it’s definitely having a broad appeal.
But those are minor gripes and nothing that detracts much, if at all. On the more serious side, I have two concerns. One, is the long-term replayability. The game is a blast, and I can see myself dumping a lot of hours into it for a while, but I’m not sure how long it would before the same locations and operations would start to feel repetitive. It’s too early to tell after only play a few days, but more mission types and enemy variety might be needed. A game like Destiny, for example, has a world to explore, or I guess a whole solar system, and these missions branch off from that. In Helldivers 2, there’s just the missions. That’s it. You go back to your ship between missions and tinker around with your loadouts and cosmetics, but that’s the whole game. I mean hey, it worked for a cult following in Helldivers 1, I’m just not sure it’s enough for me.
The other serious concern I have is the server stability. The server disconnects are a huge problem, and enough to make me want to wait until things get patched up a bit. Based on what I see online, some people are having the same problems and some aren’t, so you’re mileage may vary. It does seem like the sort of thing that will get fixed, but there’s no way to know for sure at this point. Whatever the problem is, it seems to affect both Playstation and PC versions of the game. Wait, did you say PC?
Where To Play
PS5, Steam
This is the first time a game from a Playstation studio has been released on PC at the same time as its Playstation launch. Previous Playstation releases on PC have been a year or more after their initial release, and if this was a test then maybe Sony will start to see the value because it’s been a huge success on Steam. On the day of its release, it surpassed mega hit Palworld and hit around 156,000 concurrent players, which is by far the biggest splash a Playstation game has made on steam, doubling up on God of War’s previous Playstation record of roughly 74,000.
It’s also important to note that it’s not a full-priced game, launching at $40 in the US. So is it worth your money to enlist? Is it worth sacrificing your time for the glory of Super Earth?
Before I get to that, one thing that’s probably is worth your time is hitting those like and subscribe buttons. I do game reviews and commentary for busy gamers like me, so I try to keep things snappy so you can skip the fluff and get to the good stuff.
Final Thoughts
Assuming the server errors do get fixed, it’s still a mixed bag. If a challenging co-op shooter with a side of dark humor and explosions (lots and lots of explosions) sounds good, then this is your Super Earth-approved fix. But if you crave a deeper story or tire easily from repetitive missions, you might want to hold off on enlistment.
For me personally, I’d have to say this is as much fun as I’ve had in a co-op shooter since Destiny. Those are big words for me, and don’t get me wrong, this game has a fraction of the content in a game like that, so I’m not making a comparison. I’m just saying that playing the game is fun, intuitive, and you can feel like you’re making a difference and spreading Democracy across the stars in no time. I think it’s worth the price of admission, but I don’t expect to be playing it much 6 months or a year from now. Who knows? Maybe it’ll be a great comfort game to drop into from time to time in between other games.
That’s probably the best I can hope for, and I’m ok with that.
