Helldivers 2 review

Games can be compared to an amusement park, whose main task is to give emotions and entertain people. And Arrowhead Studio understands this perfectly well, because it has given players an attraction that they want to return to again and again. And the gg editorial team, having received Helldivers 2 for review, went to check how this attraction works. Sometimes it's crazy, sometimes it makes you laugh, sometimes it makes you tense because of the number of enemies on the screen, but it's the range of emotions that we love games for. The only problem with this attraction is that the game's servers are sometimes very unstable, but we want to believe that this problem will be fixed as soon as possible.

Synopsis.

Helldivers II is a PvE shooter for up to four people. We play as elite soldiers fighting against alien invaders to preserve peace, freedom and democracy in the world. Players have access to firearms, turrets, space artillery, drones, air raids, and other gadgets that we want to test on creatures that do not share our democratic views.

5 reasons to buy Helldivers 2:

1. You are looking for an exciting co-operative shooter with friends
2. Crossplay between PC and PlayStation 5
3. The game costs $40, not $70, like most new high-profile releases
4. Thanks to unpredictable situations, the game is able to give unforgettable emotions
5. The goal of your life is to defend democracy

2 reasons not to buy Helldivers 2:

1. You have no one to play with
2. Problem with servers on release

Fast forward:

• What we learned after our Helldivers 2 review
• The plot: For freedom. For peace. For democracy.
• Gameplay: a cosmic dose of emotions
• Houston, we have a problem: the technical side of the game
• Five things you need to know about Helldivers 2

What we learned after reviewing Helldivers 2

For the past three years, I've been playing only story-driven games, and it's almost impossible to get me into multiplayer or service games. However, sometimes in life you want to try something new, and at one point I came across the trailers for Helldivers 2, which managed to get me interested. I was so curious that I even included this project in the list of the Where will my family look for me? The most anticipated PlayStation 4/5 games in 2024

I got so many emotions from Helldivers 2 that I plan to return to the game (yes, this is coming from a person who hardly ever plays anything but story-based games). I really liked the concept of a PvE shooter, when a team of people fights against bots. What could be more exciting than four of you getting together, landing on a planet to destroy bug nests, throwing artillery and bombs at everything before entering the position, and then shouting "for democracy" and running to clear the remains with firearms? In general, a lot of things, but it's also very interesting.

The game gives you emotions, mostly positive emotions (because I laughed so hard), and in our turbulent times, sometimes you want to put aside all your worries for at least an hour and have a good time with your friends. And the developers managed to cope with this task. So if your company has long wanted to try a new co-op shooter that will give you a lot of emotions, and at the same time also supports crossplay, I would recommend looking at Helldivers 2.

The plot: For freedom. For peace. For democracy.

Of course, you shouldn't expect a single-player game-level plot. Still, the strongest points of a good service game are the gameplay and atmosphere, but it is still worth understanding what is happening in the world of Helldivers 2.

We are citizens of Super-Earth and stand for peace and democracy. However, not everyone in the galaxy supports this idea (just like in real life). Deadly bugs and robots are trying to take over everything in the world, but the Hell Troopers, who are considered the elite of Super-Earth, will teach the invaders the basics of democracy.

The missions are not connected in terms of plot, but the general idea remains the same: to liberate all planets for the sake of democracy. And it was the active mention of democracy in the promotional materials that did the game good. A joke has formed around the plot that encourages you to return to Helldivers 2. You don't invite your friends to play Helldivers 2, you invite them to show the nasty bugs democracy together. And I can't count the number of times my team has thrown bombs at a certain part of the map shouting "for democracy". It's hard to say how quickly this joke will get boring, but so far it's working very well, because it pulls out the narrative component of the game. And Arrowhead has shown by its example that sometimes one well-played joke is enough to get players interested in the game.

Gameplay: a cosmic dose of emotions

Each time you arrive on a ship, you and your friends choose a planet, difficulty level, and mission. There are several types of missions, for example, launching a rocket, clearing beetle eggs, defeating a giant beetle, killing 150 enemies in 10 minutes, and others.

Came to give democracy

Let's imagine that you have chosen a mission with a rocket launch. After that, all players get into special capsules and choose 4 tools to fight with until the end of the mission. Then the team captain recognises the landing site, and you have arrived on the planet to give it democracy.

First of all, you need to understand what goals you want to achieve in the first place, because we have access to a certain area of the planet where there is little activity. For example, it can be clearing out enemy nests so that fewer enemies appear or completing additional tasks. The latter usually only give you resources, which we'll talk about later, and some of them can help you a lot in your progression. For example, if you find and charge an artillery unit, you can call it 5 times. And believe me, when all possible enemies are coming at you, you will regret not activating it.

In addition, there are also various points of interest scattered on the planet that will give you resources, ammunition, and simply make the planet more alive. Because when you find the grave of a fallen earthling with a note and a weapon, you realise that this world lives its own separate life.

Before completing the main task, you decide to clean up the bug nests. Everything is marked on the map, so you don't have to look for anything yourself. And as soon as things start to smell like action, the most interesting part of Helldivers 2 begins. Why run straight into a crowd of enemies is not wise. We call for an air strike and artillery launches on the nests. We watch the epic explosions, and then fly to the position and finish off the remains with firearms and don't forget to clean up the nests with grenades.

I'd like to mention the use of the arsenal, because this process is done in the form of a mini-game. It wouldn't be very interesting if you had to press 1-2 buttons, would it? So the developers thought so and turned it into a separate ritual.

If you hold down L1 on the gamepad, the Stratagem menu opens, where you can activate our tools. For example, one of the airstrikes is performed with the combination "up, right, down, down, right" (WASD keys are used on the keyboard). After that, a beacon appears in your hands, which you need to throw where you want to strike. But remember that some of these things have a range, and it will be very unpleasant if you or your friend are within this radius, because then you will most likely have to use the combination "up, down, right, left, up" to call up a capsule that will bring the player back to life. But there is a nuance here, because only 20 capsules are available without recharging, and after that you will have to wait two minutes for a new one to appear.

It's also important to keep an eye on the timer, as you usually have 40 minutes to complete a mission, and sometimes it may happen that you have to abandon some tasks to complete the main one.

After completing the main task, you can leave the planet. To do this, you need to run to a specific point on the map, call a ship, and hold out for 2 minutes while you are attacked by enemies. And when one person enters the ship alone, it flies away in 15 seconds. And you better make sure everyone is with you, because once I left the planet alone.

How do you become an even better paratrooper?

After each mission, you return to the ship and get resources that you found on the planet or received for completing certain tasks. And these resources are spent on the ship to improve your paratrooper. You can unlock new items to take with you on missions. For example, you can buy a jetpack, a turret, a new air strike, or an auxiliary weapon. As for the latter, we carry two firearms with us: a rifle and a pistol, but you can also call up a third additional weapon through the Stratagem menu: a machine gun, sniper rifle, bazooka, or another. Just keep in mind that when you die, you lose these weapons and items that have been activated, such as a jetpack, but they can be picked up at the place where the character died.

At first, you can't buy many new things because you need the appropriate level and amount of resources, but over time, the choice becomes wider, and the authors do not require you to fight for dozens of hours to open a new turret.

At the same time, the game has a combat pass, where you can buy new armour, grenades, and firearms for medals that are also given for completing missions. At this point, let's talk about donation, because it is an important aspect of service games. In Helldivers 2, you can feel like a king without spending a penny.

Real money buys only one currency, which can be spent only in a special menu where you can buy different armour. I liked the words of one of the game's developers that the right to monetise has to be earned. And this method of creating a service game is very attractive. I enter Helldivers 2 and know that the pay-to-win scheme does not work here. I may not spend a single dollar for the 100 hours I've spent, but I will have strong armour, weapons, and tools. You don't feel like they're trying to get money out of you, and I would like to praise Arrowhead and PlayStation for this approach.

What would you like to see in the future?

I would like to see ground transport in the game. It doesn't have to be a space tank, but sometimes it takes a long time to get from point A to point B. But a jeep for 4 people or a bike for each of them would be nice. I understand that we still need to develop adequate transport management mechanics for this, but such a solution would add even more action to the game. Imagine the four of you getting into a jeep, seeing a robot base, flying out of the jeep, the robots being shocked by your impudence, throwing grenades and drones at everything, getting back into the jeep and driving to the next target.

Also, for even more diversity in the future, it is worth adding a 3rd race and adding new planets and events from time to time to keep players engaged. Because the formula that exists now, in theory, can keep the audience around for many years. The main thing is to make as few bad decisions as possible and listen to the community, because I sincerely want Helldivers 2 to not fade away three months after release.

How does it all work together?

You fly to a planet with your friends. You summon a jetpack and a machine gun for yourself, two drones and bazookas for the other two, and a sniper rifle and a bag of supplies to give everyone ammo, grenades, and syringes to restore their health.

On the map, you see a robot base close to you. You call in two air raids, but it turns out that the base is also home to the largest robots, which have a lot of health. You shoot with everything you have, throw artillery at them, someone is already dead, you quickly revive them, try to find your way around in this chaos, and then you hear one of your friends shouting: "I hit them, they're dead," and you can take a minute to catch your breath to recover.

On the way to the main mission, you find an additional artillery unit, charge it, get 5 charges and valuable resources for pumping, and run on. You complete the main mission and want to go to the evacuation zone, but you get ambushed by robots and start firing back with everything you have. Someone has blown someone up, one is laughing, the other is screaming, you keep shooting, you have no more ammo. You leave the area on a jetpack, call for a new portion of ammunition from the sky, but realise it's time to run. You miraculously reach the evacuation zone, scatter turrets and minefields, send in artillery volleys, and withstand this onslaught, but you all find yourself back on the ship with a new portion of resources, adrenaline, emotions and memories. You take a break for 5 minutes and then go on again.

A few final tips

Try to gather in four. There's nothing to do alone in the game, and playing with random people is also completely different. Two or three people can also be fun, but believe me, you will get the most emotions when there are four of you. Also, forget about the easy difficulty level. Play at least on medium, because it is from this level that the madness and chaos during missions increases significantly, and this is what you should come to Helldivers 2 for.

P.S One more tip. Please don't shoot at the red barrels that your companion is carrying.

Houston, we have a problem: the technical side of the game

Now it's time to give the game a bit of a hard time. On the PlayStation 5, the game consistently runs at 60 fps, but a few times it just crashed, and my friends had the same story. At the same time, there are sometimes visual bugs, but you pay less attention to this problem because there is one more critical one - the servers.

I still can't play with random people. Every time I get a message saying that I can't connect to the game. Although when you create a group of friends, everything works fine. But I wish that was the biggest problem. On the first weekend after the release, the servers fell down like monuments to Lenin in Ukraine in 2014. The game reported a server error in the main menu. For some, it helped to press "repeat" 30 times. In my case, I had to dance with a tambourine. I distributed the Internet to the console via my phone, entered the game, and reconnected to the home Internet. But even this was not a guarantee that you would go play now. Sometimes it would show me that all my friends were offline, or after a mission, you would be given 0 resources, which is not very cool. Probably, the authors themselves did not expect such a rush and the servers went down. On weekdays, this is almost non-existent, but I think in a couple of days everything will be fixed.

Visuals.

You shouldn't expect super realistic graphics using all the modern technologies, but I have a few theories as to why they did it this way. The first is the budget. The game does not position itself as AAA, because its price is $40, not $70, so the level of graphics is appropriate. Second, the game needs to maintain 60 fps even when 4 people are calling artillery and planes on an army of robots. There are a lot of explosions at this point, so we had to find a compromise between graphics and optimisation, because let's not forget about PC gamers, where not everyone has the latest generation graphics card, and you want to play with your friends at a stable frame rate. So given these factors, we don't want to be picky about the graphics in this game. In general, in service games, this is not the first aspect we pay attention to.

But the overall visuals in Helldivers 2 are nice. Most planets have different objects, vegetation, and beautiful landscapes, so you can take some beautiful screenshots. The destruction of objects and all the explosions are especially beautifully implemented - these aspects are a separate treat for the eyes.

Audio.

I have to admit that I paid the least attention to the sounds, because when you play with your friends, you hear their screams and laughter, not the way the game sounds. So I had to play a few games by myself to have at least some knowledge of the sounds in Helldivers 2. All the weapons, explosions, and enemies sound good, and that's enough. You, like me, will hardly pay attention to those sounds anyway. In conclusion, I'd like to mention the game's main song. It's beautifully written, and it's been stuck in my head for days now, although I have a feeling I'm not the only one.

Five things you need to know about Helldivers 2

• Helldivers 2 is a PvE shooter for 3 to four people
• We play as elite soldiers fighting against alien invaders to preserve democracy
• The game has many interesting tools and situations that will not let you get bored
• There are problems with servers at the release that need to be fixed quickly
• Helldivers 2 does not force you to donate, which is a big plus for a service game

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