Helldiver 2: Review
Helldivers 2 developed by Arrowhead Game Studios and published by Sony, was released on February 8th 2024, on PlayStation and Microsoft Windows and made a huge splash in the gaming community. This third person shooter is a sequel to the original Helldivers, set in the 22nd century humanity has pushed itself deep into the universe and has established civilizations on hundreds of planets in our galaxy using advanced science and an arsenal of massive ships but with this expansion came the discovery of new threats to the “Democratic and Patriotic” way of life. The discovery of three sentient species sparks an all out war determined by players.
You start your experience of Helldivers not by making a character but rather by naming your ship after this, You load into your ship as a soldier in the standard Super Earth Helldiver armor; this sets a certain tone for the experience you will have in this game. This game is all about war, and with war comes death, a lot of death. Don’t get attached to your characters because, most likely, they will die within five minutes of landing on your first planet.
One thing I love about this game is that it makes the player understand that when you die and respawn, you are a new person; every death in the battle is counted, and as you play, you can see how many people from Super Earth are giving their lives for the war cause.
If you want to survive on the ground for more than a few minutes, you’re going to need to call in some Stratagems, orbital care packages, or weapons that can be called in from the player’s ship that can massively change the course of the battle. These can either be a massive orbital laser that targets enemies on the ground, a massive 500 kg bomb that will devastate an enemy group or base, or weapons you can carry like quasar cannons or railguns. Utilizing these Stratagems can massively help limit the amount you die in the field.
I chose the word limit because until you have a bunch of hours played, you will still die. Another thing I loved about this game is the extreme number of enemies that your squad of four will have to deal with. In the higher difficulty mission, there will literally be hundreds of enemies using hoard tactics or massive gun lines to mow your squad down. This will either result in a heroic near-cinematic death or another body on the front line.
Push through these enemy lines and complete different mission objectives located across the planet ranging from evacuating civilians, to launching nuclear ICBMs to decimate the enemy, ranging on your difficulty setting also determines how many samples are on the planet, random objects recovered from the enemy you can use to upgrade your ship and strategies, but once collecting these samples you have to be careful because death will end up dropping the sample potentially miles away from where you will respawn.
After completing and extracting from these missions your team can see the percentage of the planet you liberated, this feature apply to every player fighting on that planet making each effort of the war solely community focused, if one planet is under attack and everyone is focused on a separate one that planet will fall into enemy hands, and quite often the game will have the player base make hard decision about where to defend and what is most valuable to the war cause.
Another thing about this game is graphics; each individual shot of this game is a cinematic experience, Arrowhead did an amazing job with the graphics in this game that can truly make you feel like you are right there on the front line about to give your life for Super Earth.
One thing I will say when after playing this game for a while it does start to feel a bit routine, There can only be so many mission varieties or enemy types or planets to explore, around the mid game I could feel myself getting a bit less interested when playing on my own, less focused on the fighting but rather simply trying to find samples to upgrade my ship, but even this search started to grow repetitive. I think this game would benefit from changing around the later stages of the game to allow the players some new missions that you can’t necessarily find in lower difficulties or new parts of the ship you can add because you are a higher level.
When examining the game helldivers that is so focused on player base, one of the big negatives of this game is a decision made above the jurisdiction of Arrowhead. Sony, the owner of PlayStation, made a decision requiring all Helldivers users to create a PlayStation account before being able to play the game. This decision was made a few months after the launch on both PlayStation and Windows. PlayStation users were relatively unaffected, while Windows users in countries that restrict their citizens from making PlayStation accounts were no longer allowed to play the game after they had already paid for it and played it for months.
This decision wreaked havoc on the ratings and reputation of the games at the time. initially, upon release, this game was slated to be the next big thing. It had a large, diverse fanbase and a unique story with a completely player-driven game direction, but after this, the game faded off. Arrowhead has worked tirelessly since trying new things to draw players back, and it has somewhat worked. The player base has slowly returned but is nothing near how it was when the game was in the early months of being live.
Helldivers 2 I believe is a great game, if you want to experience alien warfare this game will leave you satisfied and playing for hours. I think anyone who enjoys squad based games and is looking for something new to try with their friends Helldivers would be an amazing choice.