Folks, we really need to talk about Helldivers 2. You know, the game that came pretty much out of nowhere in February and has since spread like wildfire just by extremely positive word of mouth? No? Never heard of it? Then you’re in the same boat as I was just a couple of weeks ago.
One day a colleague of mine asked me if I’d already bought the new Helldivers game. I had not; in fact I hadn’t even been aware of its existence up to that point. She told me that it’s a four player co-op third person shooter, that it’s a lot of fun and that it supports crossplay (which is important for her because she’s on Playstation).
That same evening I watched a couple of gameplay videos and was sold immediately. I fired up Steam, shelled out forty bucks and started spreading liberty and democracy across the galaxy right away.
What’s democracy got to do with this? I hear you ask. Well, the game’s story and tone are pretty much a carbon copy of Starship Troopers, as is the action, only that we don’t just fight against bugs, but also against a faction of killer robots.
Choosing this type of humor and satire was a stroke of genius, because the gameplay itself is just as absurd, exaggerated and hilarious. Together this creates an environment that’s really easy to immerse oneself in, despite the outlandish premise.
What it is above all else, though, is a crapton of fun! It’s actually hard to describe with mere words how awesome this game feels while playing – case in point, I’ve started this parapraph over from scratch like five times now, and still don’t quite know where to even begin.
So here’s what I’m going to do: I won’t even try to describe the actual gameplay to you, instead I’ll embed a very entertaining video made by a great content creator at the end of the post, so you can go and see for yourself.
What I will tell you about is all the things Arrowhead Game Studios have done an outstanding job with other than the ‘blasting bugs to bits’ part, because that stuff is almost as important, but is, tragically, often forgotten (or ignored on behalf of maximizing profits) in this day and age.
Helldivers 2 has one pretty unique feature that many so called “live service” games only wish they had, which is…well…actual live service!
The galactic war against the Automatons and the Terminids is always ongoing, shifting and changing. This is mainly thanks to one individual going by the name of Joel, who, for all intents and purposes, is what we used to call a GM back in the olden days of MMORPGs.
About every other day the players get new orders, telling us which planets need to be liberated or defended. Succeeding means we all get a reward, but more importantly, the enemy gets pushed back. If we fail, however, the opposing forces gain ground and slowly but surely advance towards Super Earth, our beloved home.
Rumor has it that Joel sometimes gets up at night to check up on things, and if players are progressing too quickly he intervenes on the enemy’s behalf, for example by starting an offensive on a previously liberated planet, thus temporarily cutting off our supplies to the front lines.
More than that, he’s allegedly entered actual games, sometimes to drop more enemies onto players’ heads, other times to help them by spawning powerful equipment that’s not even officially released yet (!).
Last Sunday something unexpected happened – we actually managed to wipe the Automatons off the map completely, and now…we really don’t know what will happen next. I mean, of course they’ll make a return eventually, but for now we can only fight the Terminids as the bots are deemed eradicated [Edit: aaaand they’re back!].
Speaking of delivering or withholding content depending on the success of our war efforts, when the devs had finished a new and shiny piece of equipment a while back they didn’t just release it in a patch – instead we got an order to liberate the planet the stuff was being built on. The way the order was phrased suggested that failing would not only have resulted in us not getting the mechs (!) quite yet, most likely the Automatons would actually have taken the factories and used our own tech against us for a while.
This is “live service” done right, please more of that!
While we’re already talking about stuff many competitors fuck up royally these days, let’s have a look at the game’s monetization, shall we? As I’ve argued before, this isn’t just something that makes us spend (more) money on a game. It’s supposed to do exactly that, sure, but more often than not it also affects the gameplay itself in negative ways, which obviously sucks big time.
First of all, the 40$ box price is more than fair. As far as I’m concerned this absolutely is a AAA game (maybe even Quadruple-A, but let’s better not go there…), despite it not being marketed as such. Sure, it has “only” one high quality rendered cutscene and no story to speak of, but as we’ve established earlier, we, the players, shape the story here anyway.
There is also a shop and a premium currency, but a) the stuff is cheap, b) as of yet I’ve not seen anything in there that I would have wanted or needed, and c) Super Credits can actually be earned by playing the game!
Last but not least, there are a couple of pages containing equipment and cosmetics to progress through. They are comparable to the much-hated (at least by me) battle passes other games have, but there’s one huge distinction: they don’t have an expiration date! At the time of this writing there are one free and two premium Warbonds, as they are called, and none of these will ever go away. The currency to actually unlock stuff in them is earned by playing (and can’t be bought with real money), opening up the premium Warbonds would cost 10$ per if you didn’t have enough Super Credits by playing already.
All told you can get the full experience for 40 bucks here and will never have to spend another dime. If you absolutely want to spend more you can, but not all that much, really, and you won’t have any kind of advantage while playing the game if you do, either. Thumbs up!
Finally I’d like to highlight the enormous love and attention to detail that this game was made with. It seems that the devs were absolutely determined to make it feel as epic as humanly possible, and everything they could have done to achieve that – well, they have done it.
Ever since Starfield came out, and probably long before that, a lot has been talked about how boring and immersion-breaking loading screens can be. In Helldivers 2 you hardly even notice that they’re there, because you always get to see in-engine cutscenes of what’s happening, like your ship entering and exiting warp like seen above, or your squad’s drop pods being shot down towards the planet – always with the actual current location in the background of course.
The ammo for some support-weapons is so large and heavy that you need to carry it on your back. Reloading takes a lot of time due to this. So how about your squadmate carrying the backpack and reloading for you while you keep bombarding the enemy with artillery shells non-stop? How awesome is that, and why don’t other games have it?
Speaking of ammo, if you eject a half empty clip the remaining bullets don’t magically appear in your reserves, they’re just gone. Which means that you’ll break the habit of reloading whenever you have a second to spare pretty quickly. I don’t think they did this because “realism”, it just makes the action more tense and, well, epic to run empty in the perfectly wrong moment all the time.
This is what you’ll look like after battling a couple hundred bugs – completely covered in goo, but extremely satisfied with yourself! Then you just carry on with your business as if nothing’s happened, still looking like this. Showers are for wimps, not for helldivers!
Oh, and one more thing: if you manage to finish the main objective the battle is won and you’ll get your XP and medals – whether you make it out alive or not! Talk about being expendable.
There’s plenty more, but for now I’ll leave you with the aforementioned video. It’s really worth watching, I promise it’s entertaining even if you have never played the game (yet!). A big shoutout to Kelski for making it. See you on the battlefield, helldivers!
Mailvaltar 
its an amazing game, I was a day 1 player and it just keeps getting better.
While you don’t have to spend money in it, it is one of those games that I do spend because the devs deserve it. I do the same with DeepRock Galactic too.
FOR DEMOCRACY!
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@Isey – aww, so you were there during the fall of Malevelon Creek I assume? Good for you, I only started playing after that unfortunately.
Yeah, I upgraded to the Super Citizen edition just to support them a bit more.
FOR LIBERTY!!
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