Note: Since this review was published Arrowhead has updated the game to be a much easier and more casual game, even on the highest difficulty. My feelings expressed in this review are no longer accurate, as the game’s original vision has been torn asunder. You can read more about my feelings on that here.
Overview
Helldivers 2 is a team-focused co-op, third-person shooter about waging a galactic war against the enemies of Super Earth. Its moment-to-moment gameplay warps every match into a cinematic masterpiece unique to you and your squad. Every mission is filled with tense moments, epic climatic comebacks, and a ton of humor as you’re friend blows himself up because he held a grenade in his hands too long.
There is more to say about Helldivers 2 than I could ever hope to fit in a reasonably sized review. This sequel to a relatively niche game from a decade ago packs more heart and soul into its liberty-infused combat than any other game to release in years. While Helldivers 2 is far from perfect, many of its systems come exceedingly close to perfection in the ways that matter. The fun factor is the most dominant.
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!
Helldivers 2 also completely redeems the entire idea of a live service game, by building its entire system, the galactic war around both concepts. Being live, and a service. All without falling into the greed pit that sinks the potential of so many other games. The fact that Helldivers 2 costs half as much as your average AAA title is mind-boggling because it flat-out puts most of them to shame. And I’m not exaggerating.
I waited so long to make this review because my initial impressions painted a clear picture. That Helldivers 2 was going to be one of my favorite games of all time. I wanted to let the honeymoon period fade away and allow the cracks in its hull, room to breathe so I could see them. And boy, some of those cracks turned out to be gaping fissures.
However, after 300 hours of gameplay, and well after those initial fuzzy feelings wore off. It is indeed one of my favorite games of all time. I have rarely put 300 hours into a game and continued to return to it solely because it’s simply fun to play. Not without any type of psychological engineering to prey on addictive tendencies. Helldivers 2 is just that good, but that doesn’t mean it’s void of criticism.
Oh my no. I have plenty of criticism to spare. Arrowhead Studios clearly caged a beast they weren’t ready to control and are in a constant struggle to keep the monster from breaking its restraints and eating an orphanage full of children.
| Gideon’s Bias | Helldivers 2 Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: No | Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment |
| Hours Played: 300+ | Type: Full Game |
| Reviewed On: PlayStation 5 | Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5 |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Genre: Squad-based co-op third-person shooter |
| Mode Played: All | Price: $39.99 |
Beer & Pretzels Taken Seriously
The core gameplay in Helldivers 2 carries a lot of weight. There are no fancy cutscenes or heart-stringing storyline to make you forgive and forget its lesser parts. Instead, the sheer fun of its core gameplay loop holds the entire experience aloft, under straining muscles, a bulging neck vein, and a bucket of sweat. It’s a good thing Helldivers 2 never skipped leg day.
Every mission is a combination of white-knuckled action where you feel like you’re in a blockbuster film. Split up by often hilarious moments due to friendly fire, physics, and the fact so much of the game is simulated.
Diving backward to the ground while unloading a copious amount of gunfire into a swarm of bugs looks and feels amazing. Doubly so when you hear the click of your ammo running dry, only to be splattered in bug guts as a nearby teammate unloads a machine gun into your attackers, and rescues you.
The next moment a meteor takes out a teammate right in front of you, and everyone is cackling like a bunch of drunken hyenas. Helldivers 2 is equal parts hardcore and casual. It’s a deep and challenging game that rewards coordinated teamplay, simulates the physics of almost everything, and has a detailed ballistics system that borders on being a military sim. Heck, if you reload while there is still ammo in your clip or magazine, you lose the bullets that were left.
At the same time, it’s meant to be light-hearted enough that you can laugh when you’re friend accidentally calls a cluster bomb on your head. When you get clotheslined by the leg of a dying Bile Titan, or you occasionally allow an intrusive thought to take the wheel and punch a friend off a cliff. It’s funny instead of frustrating.
Anyway, I Started Blasting
The mixture of serious and chill vibes is only half of what makes Helldivers 2 great. The game simply feels good to play, with some of the best shooting mechanics I’ve ever seen.
Weapons feel good to use, even when they intentionally feel bad. What I mean is, that different guns have faster or slower handling and recoil. This is shown by an additional circle near your crosshair that shows where you’re gun is actually pointing in relation to where you intend to aim.
Standing still, crouching, and going prone greatly improve your accuracy, and Helldivers 2 is one of few games where I have actually felt that impact, because of how the game relays that feedback back to me. It takes a little getting used to but feels great and makes total sense after an hour or two.
Different Enemies react differently to being struck by different weapons. The hard-hitting slugger, for example, can straight up stagger and blowback smaller enemies, while it deflects off the armor of heavier ones. Giant alien bugs splatter in satisfying ways, limbs come off of robots and bugs alike. You are given constant force feedback with your actions. From the animations and physics to the sound design, every aspect of the game feeds its gameplay loop directly into your senses.
Everything feels heavy and physical, and the physics is simulated regarding most things. Blast the head off of a charging armored bug and its dead corpse can still slam into you. Deflected shots can strike new targets, and friendly fire applies to both you and the enemy.
The missions themselves take place on procedurally generated maps that all come out feeling organic, and on a variety of planets that each have their own biomes and hazards. Hot deserts, frozen tundras, dense jungles, and more.
Every mission in Helldivers 2 has a variety of primary objectives, secondary objectives, and POIs. Most objectives require you and your team to actively do things. For example to activate an ICBM. You have to activate the terminal with button prompts, input a code, manually pull up the locks, and then activate it. All while covering each other from approaching enemies.
POIs often have loot but the secondary objectives really help sell me on the mission structure. Most of them have an impact on your current mission. For example, if you activate an Artillery Emplacement you gain access to it using the shells you loaded into it. If an area is covered in bug spores that reduce your visibility, finding and destroying its source will clear the air.
The emergent nature of the game means the mission structure never gets repetitive, because no two missions truly play out the same way. They all end with you’re team holding out until an extraction ship arrives, and one particular thing I enjoy is that surviving is optional. If you lose all of your team’s lives but have completed the mission, it’s still a success whether or not you extract. You just earn a bit less XP and you only keep samples that you extract with.
A Liberating Arsenal
As you play, you earn Medals, requisition, super credits, and samples. All of which can be used to further your arsenal. Standard weapons include a variety of rifles, shotguns, and lasers, however, stratagems are one of Helldiver’s defining features. You can take four into a mission and they really impact your playstyle and team role. While a few of them have finite uses, most are simply on a cooldown and are meant to be used liberally.
Calling in stratagems requires you to input a code, and they take time to activate. Some of them take the form of special gear for you to carry around and use, such as machine guns, rocket launchers, laser cannons, and ammo packs. Others are emplacements like turrets and forcefields. Finally, you have orbital and airstrikes allowing you to rain devastation wherever you throw them.
Weapons and stratagems tend to be side grades in Helldivers 2, where they are better and worse for different situations which helps emphasize team play. A clusterbomb strike can clear out smaller enemies for example, but is less effective against heavy armor and buildings. A Railcannon strike, however, devastates a single heavy unit and nothing else.
The strategic use of your stratagems is a core component to the game and just like the weapons, they feel great to use. Watching a whole swarm of bugs splatter in a massive explosion of airstrikes feels fantastic. As does stepping behind the controls of a heavy machine gun emplacement to mow down the approaching horde.
The progression is pretty well-paced, as every new piece of ordinance you unlock is exciting. You can also unlock new armor, capes, helmets, emotes, and more. That said once you have unlocked everything, it is a bit of a bummer not to have anything to spend your resources on. But new additions are being added to the game all the time, and at a very pleasant pace.
Squad Goals
As the perfect counterweight to its light-hearted nature, comes the more hardcore side of the game. Missions can have 9 difficulties, and the latter ones are no joke. To succeed, you have to work together, and Helldivers 2 is very, very team-focused. You are meant to stick together as a squad, cover each other, and help coordinate your load-outs to cover any weaknesses the team may have.
The game tends to throw a variety of light, medium, and heavily armored enemies at you. Each of these requires different weapons or stratagems to contend with. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, individual enemy types within those categories can be stronger or weaker against certain weapons. Lacking a counter to any of them can hurt.
You have almost no accuracy when on the move, and reloading at a bad time can be a death sentence. So you really need the covering fire of a teammate. When the heavy armor shows up, players with weapons dedicated to clearing out the horde have to keep the anti-armor-oriented players safe so they can focus on bringing down the big ones.
Some weapons even feature assisted reloading, where one player carries an ammo backpack for another player and helps them reload the weapon.
Friendly fire is a constant consideration when throwing down airstrikes and using explosive weaponry. Staying aware of your teammates and sticking relatively close to them is crucial to playing well.
While many games tend to claim they are about teamwork, few actually are. In Helldivers 2, you truly feel the impacts of working together, and the pain of not doing so. It means the game isn’t for everyone. To get the most out of the game, you have to WANT to work with others and it makes Helldivers 2 much more fulfilling than other squad-based games.
The best way to play Helldivers 2 is with a premade group of friends. If you don’t have that, it’s worth seeking out some new ones online. That said, playing with randoms in matchmaking can be fun, but it’s rolling the dice.
The structure of Helldivers 2 does its absolute best to not just incentivize working with your fellow players, but force the matter in order to succeed. Yet, a good portion of the community took that as a personal challenge to give the concept a middle finger. I’ll touch more on that later.
With the right people on your team, however, Helldivers 2 offers an incredibly fun, emergent, and cinematic squad-based fantasy that is unmatched anywhere else.
Enemies of Super Earth
There are currently two enemy factions in Helldivers 2 with a third one pretty much confirmed to be on the way. The alien bugs known as the Terminids and the ruthless Automatons. Playing against each faction feels so different that the skills you gain fighting against one are rarely transferrable when you fight the other.
The Termnids are mostly melee-focused and try to swarm you. They function almost like an ancient army and use similar tactics. They form a front line with soldiers and armored Hive Guards led by their Brood Commanders who can summon even more soldiers.
Meanwhile, the Terminid skirmishers known as Hunters flank you, and pick off isolated Helldivers. Bile Spitters function as artillery, and the heavily armored chargers try to disorganize you by charging like calvary. If a Stalker nest is present on the map, they come at you like assassins, and usually at the worst time. Bile Titans are the siege engines that will crush you if not dealt with quickly.
In contrast to the Termnids, fighting the automatons is like taking on an army of T-600s. Suddenly, you have to take cover under a barrage of laser fire and deal with weapon emplacements like cannon towers. It’s an entirely different experience, and both factions have a ton of nuance and depth to them. A depth that will change over time due to the live service nature of Helldivers 2.
War, War Always Changes
Helldivers 2 is a live service game, and one that takes that concept seriously by building itself around the idea. Let me get the microtransactions out of the way first. There is a rotating stock of armor you can buy with super credits, and there is a monthly war bond that can be unlocked with super credits. Warbonds have new weapons and other goodies in them, however even using super credits, you still have to earn medals to spend in the war bond itself.
Super credits can be bought with real money, you also earn them in-game, and at a pretty fast rate. It’s a very, very generous system, at least compared to every other game that has microtransactions. And like it or not, a live service game requires ongoing funding to, you know, be a live service game. The thing that matters, is what do you get in return? This is where Helldivers 2 nails it.
The entire game is focused on a huge galactic war. The entire player base contributes to this war as they liberate and defend planets. This means the available planets and maps shift over time. However, it’s much more than just set dressing.
The community is given major orders, that are essentially storybeats and our successes and failures influence things to a degree. This idea is tied together with content updates to the game, outside of the monthly warbonds.
For example. Our first major order when the game was released was to take the barrier planets so a Terminid Control System could be constructed. A month later, we had to actually activate the TCS system after it was constructed which featured a whole new mission type.
At one point, we had to defend a planet where the factories responsible for producing mechs were located. Once we took the planet, we instantly gained access to mechs, an entirely new stratagem. Not long ago, new flying Terminids started appearing, but so rarely that the community thought it was a hoax. Just over a week ago, they became much more common, and an official notice that the Terminids were mutating was posted in the game.
The very day I wrote this review, we had an order to take on the Automatons, and two new stratagems were dropped to help the war effort against them. You have to understand, the only thing the player base knew about ahead of time, was the war bond. Everything else was either hinted at in the game or shadow-dropped.
Within a month and a half since release, we have received a new war bond with new weapons. Planetary hazards such as Meteor storms, new mission types, a new enemy type, mechs, and two new stratagems. It’s incredibly exciting to take a peek at the game every day to see what is going on because at any moment something might change, maybe we get new weapons, or maybe a terrifying new enemy has appeared, who knows!
Tying the live service element to the war effort is brilliant. Now, it’s not like they would have scrapped the mechs if we failed to defend the planet that makes them, but they almost certainly would have been delayed until we took it back. Why? We had no idea they were going to release the moment we took the planet in the first place, only that they were coming “soon”.
In Helldivers 2, the live service element is an absolute boon, that almost single-handedly salvages the concept that has been sullied by so many other games.
Community Woes
This might seem like an odd thing to bring up in a review, but since the game is so squad-focused, it’s relevant.
As I mentioned before, Helldivers 2 makes a strong attempt to promote teamwork. But they underestimated the tenacity of the average gamer to be an absolute shithead. You have occasional jerks that troll you or kick you, but honestly, that’s not even the worst of it. It’s people with main character syndrome. Right now, you are going to encounter the following behavior quite commonly in matchmaking.
First is the lone wolves. These people break off from the team to play solo under the guise of completing objectives and gaining loot for the team. The problem is, the reason they are doing it online instead of just playing solo is they need a team to exploit. There is currently a way to exploit the spawn system so that while the other three players are getting swarmed, the lone wolf encounters very little resistance.
However, the game is built from the ground up for the team to stay together, and the threat scales with the number of players. So while lone wolf does their thing, the other three players are getting hammered by enemy groups meant for four players while they are deprived of a quarter of their firepower and four stratagems slots the game assumes they have. Now, this is mostly on Arrowhead for not catching the exploit, and I’m sure it will be addressed, but the plague of lone wolves makes matchmaking even more of a nightmare.
Secondly are the players I call horses. I call them that, because, well. You can lead a horse to water, but, you can’t make them drink. These are the players that spend the entire game running from every enemy in the game. Which is one of the worst things you can do, I even made a whole strategy guide about the topic. The short version is, not clearing out the enemies that attack you tends to lead into a death spiral as the horde grows.
In a game where you have a small stamina bar, and where moving makes you as accurate as an anxiety-ridden chihuahua peeing on a cactus during an earthquake. I have no idea how Horses got the idea that the game is about running and gunning. You need to be crouched or even prone to be accurate with moat weapons, enemies do not lose aggro easily, and many are designed to pick you off as you flee. You even have an entire category of stratagems focused on sentry turrets.
Horses will argue this point with you and insist that running is the better strategy, but well, that’s just Horse Shit. Coincidentally, these Horses never seem to cover their teammates who are also running. Lone Wolves and Horses seem to have a lot of crossover, so maybe I should call them Lone Horses?
The game was a blast to play with randoms when the game was first released, and any ignorance came from not knowing how to play the game. But now it’s coming from the masses themselves, so matchmaking is very painful. I once again have to advise finding dedicated players to team up with.
The Crushing Weight of Ambition
Helldivers 2 has issues, a lot of them, and some of these issues would have killed other games. It’s a testament to just how damn fun Helldivers 2 is that players look past them. The first two weeks after release, the servers were a catastrophic mess. They are still weird at times, even now.
To get my entire squad together, we often have to play musical chairs. One person gets stuck in a loading screen, and another person has to leave to let them in, and then rejoin. Crashes and freezes happen too often, and you’re going to encounter a lot of bugs, not just the alien kind. Heck, for the first month, armor values didn’t even work right!
A recent patch fixed some issues, but introduced new crashes that happened when players used arc weapons, that issue was then patched a week later.
Arrowhead patches the game every week, but new issues pop up every time they do. The thing is. That’s likely to continue through the game’s entire life cycle and is something we just have to accept.
The game is too large for the team. Given the unprecedented success that Helldivers 2 had, they will likely expand the team, but they will never be able to facilitate a testing environment large enough to catch these issues. The sandbox nature of the game has so many interactions within its many, many systems that it’s just not realistic. That’s reality, and be that as it may, it’s still difficult to swallow.
However, Helldivers 2 has issues well beyond its technical woes. Half of its mechanics are obscured to the extent that most players won’t even realize them.
The depth of the ballistic system, for example, and how exactly the enemy spawns and alert systems work. Or the fact that most weapon statistics are entirely hidden, making the stat panel we do have almost useless. You quite literally have to go by the “feel” of a weapon to judge it, as not everything lines up with what you’re shown.
Game Balance will be an ongoing and everchanging thing, but some aspects have needed desperate attention for a while. For example, a planet’s defense missions all feature a special evac mission. For the automatons, the mission is entirely broken. It’s scaled incorrectly relative to other missions with the same difficulty.
That became very obvious when we got the same mission type with the Terminids, and it was much more reasonable. This means when the automatons attack a planet, no one wants to defend it because the mission is awful to play.
A couple of weapons and stratagems are borderline unusable, and the aforementioned spawn exploit that lone wolves employ is a big issue that needs to be addressed soon.
There are just so many issues, big and small that plague the game. While they will be fixed over time, new issues will arise. It puts Helldivers 2 in such a weird paradoxical position because it’s honestly one of the greatest games to ever be released. But it’s simply too much of a beast for Arrowhead’s small team to handle. At the same time, a larger team would have never made a game like this, not with the same heart and soul that permeate its every fiber.
This isn’t the type of game you get from mainstream big-name developers. It’s the type of game you get when people who love video games, make one.
Verdict
Helldivers 2 is by far the most fun I’ve had with friends in a video game. It rewards teamwork more than most games I’ve played while maintaining a powerful balance of incredibly epic moments and gut-busting comedy.
It’s also one of the most frustrating, partially due to the bugs and crashings and partially due to the portion of the player base that takes pride in playing the game as wrong as possible. I know, I know, I said the forbidden thing, but too bad. You can, in fact, play games wrong, especially multiplayer teamwork-focused games where your actions affect other people.
In the end, any frustration and annoyance I feel ends up fleeting in the face of the pure joy of unleashing a hail of bullets into a horde of alien bugs alongside my fellow Helldivers as explosive ordinance falls all around us.
Helldivers 2 is my forever game, one that I will play for years, and where I look forward to each day, because who knows what new additions the ongoing galactic war effort will bring? Today a mech? Tomorrow a new weapon? Who knows, and that’s the beauty of it!
I’m giving Helldivers 2 my Golden Shield award.
