From mindlessly mowing down pesky bugs one minute to sprinting in terror as a nuke about to drop another minute, that essentially summarizes the Helldivers 2 experience. 

Rather than keeping the original game’s top-down view, Arrowhead Game Studios boldly changed the perspective into an over-the-shoulder third-person shooter, putting you closer to the harsh reality of war, albeit against fictional overgrown alien bugs and Terminator-like evil robots. Helldivers 2 is just a pure silly fun multiplayer cooperative shooter while being equally intense all around.

The game puts you in the boots of the titular Helldivers army, lowly expendables on duty to fight in the name of freedom for Super Earth. Wearing its satirical inspiration of absurd space democracy akin to Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers proudly, Helldivers 2 holds no hand and death is a common occurrence as you are thrown in the thick of frenetic warzones with enemies swarming in from every direction. 

With a shift to a third-person perspective, you also lose the wide-viewing vision of the original game’s top-down view, making information scouting on where alien hordes are coming tougher. However, this decision paid off greatly as the third-person view greatly immerses you in the heat of the hectic battlefield. 

Gun Blasting Galore

Despite all the propaganda and its heroic and patriotic soundtrack that gets you pumped up, you are just a lowly grunt, stuck in an endless onslaught as barbed alien bugs swarm in to crush, impale, and tear you to shreds. Selling this is the punchy gunplay as machine guns pierce through the incoming bugs, tearing off their limbs while bazookas blast them into an explosion of greenish yucky goo, satisfying as hell.

Unlike other shooters where bullets hit where your crosshair snaps, the guns in Helldivers 2 have a level of realism with varying degrees of sway as you move around. This incentivizes you to consider your moment-to-moment decision on whether you should stand still for more precision or run around in panic as razor-tooth bugs come diving down from yards away.

Lots of Air Strikes 

What ascends the fun of the mayhem in Helldivers 2 further is the Stratagems, supports which you can call from your personal spacecraft from above the sky. The option varies, ranging from high-powered artillery weapons like bazookas and defensive sentry turrets to everyone’s favorite devastating array of different aerial bombardments. Managing these Stratagems is crucial as they allow you to be either an agent of destruction or some quick alien meal.

Each squad member can bring in their own four different Stratagems, with a lot of options to unlock as you progress through the game, allowing for a lot of different tactics. Yes, you can send in omega-level orbital strikes to obliterate swathes of aliens and machines at your fingertips. But this is brilliantly balanced by cooldown restrictions and needing to stand still to input a series of directional inputs in the style like old-school cheat codes – essentially forces you to be tactical on how you use your Stratagems. 

Stop Orbital Striking Us

friendly fire has a lingering presence in the game – any stray bullet from a teammate can send you to the afterlife, so is every single Stratagem available at your team’s disposal. Even your own sentry turret can be a traitor as you walk into the crossfire and have your head caved in. Seeing a giant red glowing beacon on the ground means it is time to stay clear before a display of fireworks from an air strike vaporizes you from existence. 

But dare I say that these deaths made Helldiver 2 fun, especially with the ridiculousness of it all. The constant jingoistic yapping as your soldier screams “For freedom!” before getting shot up into the stratosphere by an explosion with a doll-like ragdoll physics make Helldivers 2 a non-stop slapstick comedy. When an accidental friendly fire occurs, instead of being infuriated with my ally, it would leave me wheezing with laughter instead. You are nothing but a disposable grunt as you are quickly replaced by another in a falling drop pod called in by your ally after death, playing into the space patriotism satire even more. 

Silly with Friends

If it is not clear by now, Helldivers 2 is meant to be experienced with your buddies – loud Discord voice call session’s screams and all. Sure, you can dive into a mission solo, but the game is clearly not balanced for single players as enemies are not going to pity you and reduce their numbers. There is nothing more fun than having banters with friends as they got caught in a falling nuke you summoned despite screaming for them to run. As friendly fire and limited supplies are a big part of Helldivers 2, communication obviously made the experience a lot more enjoyable.

Helldivers 2 is indeed a very community-driven game and Arrowhead Game Studios even introduced a liberation system for the missions, where any successful mission cleared counts towards the percentage of a planet being liberated – encouraging players to work together for LIBERATION! 

Alien Planets 

Of course, it matters not if the gameplay is solid but missions get stale quickly. Thankfully, Helldivers 2 has an amazing assortment of missions and objective variety that enhances replayability. Sure, it can all boil down to the same enemy encounter, whether murderous robots or creepy crawling bugs, but the different biome and environment topology do make each mission fresh. Aside from the usual main objectives, which are already quite varied, each mission also has optional sub-objectives scattered throughout the map. 

Speaking of environment, they also play a part in how you approach missions with different hazards to consider, such as cold tundra affecting the duration of equipment overheating, foggy marshlands with harsh visibility, or disgusting bug-infested areas with exploding acidic landmines. After long hours of play, no mission feels the same and they are at the sweet length, not a slog but also not overly short. With stupidly fun gameplay and diverse objectives, it just leaves me wanting to hop in for another mission one after another.  

Warbond 

If you are unaware; yes, Helldivers 2 is a live-service game. Even so, progression feels fair and rewarding, and the game is not stingy with any unlocks. After only a few hours of game time, you can already nab yourself new Stratagems, weapons, cool swags, silly emotes, and many more. 

Apart from Stratagems and spaceship upgrades, most unlock are done through the battle pass system called Warbond. As you complete missions, you gain in-game currency that you could be using on the Warbond to unlock a specific reward of your choice in a tier. Once a set amount of rewards is claimed in a tier, then the next set of rewards will be made available to claim. 

What is great is that every currency can be earned by simply playing the game, even Super Credits, the game’s supposed premium currency. In other words, you can unlock the Premium Battle Pass or even paid cosmetic items without spending a single dime. That said, there are weapons with different functionality locked behind the Premium Warbond, which is quite a bummer. 

Technical Issues

Despite all the high praises, Helldivers 2 is clearly not perfect and is marred by technical issues at launch especially when it comes to optimization for PC play. For the first few hours, I had the game crash on me very regularly with a few times even needing to force restart my computer. After looking at community feedback, it turns out that the game has compatibility issues with AMD graphics cards, which I managed to circumvent with some tweaks and had no crashes for days now. 

Connectivity and matchmaking issues also plagued the game as players were reportedly not able to join matches. There was also a hilarious bug that happened in one of my play sessions where I somehow lost access to my primary and secondary firearms, causing me to not be able to contribute to blasting down incoming marching Automatons. Thankfully I was able to still use Stratagems, so I chose to be an explosive maniac who calls in aerial bombardment every so often. While it made for a funny moment for me, it can certainly be frustrating for other players. 

Of course, Helldivers 2 has been receiving regular updates, and the developers are very vocal about the state of the game. So hopefully, the developers can swiftly iron out the technical troubles. 

For Freedom! 

In a landscape flooded with overly serious shooters, Helldivers 2 carved out its own place with a ludicrous tone and its daring embrace towards active friendly fire and chaos. 

From the patriotic and catchy soundtrack that gets you motivated as you blast down into a planet for missions to how often it climaxes into all-out chaos as you defend your life while waiting for extraction. Helldivers 2 is just ridiculously fun, offering satisfying gunplay, varied strategy options with Stratagems of absolute destructions, diverse randomized missions with high replayability, and a smartly designed progression system that gets you wanting more. 

Sure, there are still technical issues that require fixes and thankfully, it looks like Arrowhead Game Studios is hard at work for it. If you have buddies to team up with for some sweet democratic action as you mow down waves of enemies, and bombard planets with no remorse, while avoiding getting caught up in the crossfire – Helldivers 2 is just straight-up fun and it certainly has the potential to catch your attention for a very long time. 

Helldivers 2 was reviewed on PC via Steam. The game is now available on PlayStation 5 and PC.

HELLDIVERS 2

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Developer: Arrowhead Game Studios

Release Date: 2024-02-08

PlayStation 5, Steam

The Galaxy’s Last Line of Offence. Enlist in the Helldivers and join the fight for freedom across a hostile galaxy in a fast, frantic, and ferocious third-person shooter.