Helldivers 2 Review: "A Refreshingly Fun Power Fantasy" (2024)

Helldivers 2 excels in a wildly entertaining duality, frequently swinging between incredible power fantasy and chaotic hilarity. Arrowhead Game Studios' third-person co-op shooter, playable with up to four people online, comes nearly a decade after the first Helldivers, a top-down shooter which was released in 2015. While the original garnered a small, dedicated player base, Helldivers 2 is already off to a blistering start, having so many concurrent players in its first weekend that the game's maximum server capacity was hit. It only takes a handful of missions to see the innate brilliance of Helldivers 2, and a couple dozen hours have revealed a satisfying depth in its gameplay synergies, but the game's longevity remains to be seen, despite genuinely fascinating use of its always-online, live-service nature.

In Helldivers 2, players are tasked with spreading Super Earth's managed democracy – a satirical front for an authoritarian, highly militaristic regime wishing to control the galaxy. To bring liberty to distant planets, players, as elite soldiers known as Helldivers, are lowered into orbital drop pods and fired onto the planets that are currently the Galactic War's front lines. Missions vary based on objectives, enemies, difficulty, and time limit, but they all have one thing in common: leveraging an incredible amount of firepower. There's a visceral gratification to firing a hundred-some bullets into a swarm of encroaching alien bugs, or calling in a rolling bombardment from orbit on a fortress controlled by deadly robots.

Helldivers 2

Helldivers 2 is a refreshingly fun power fantasy.

Pros

• Gameplay is immensely satisfying
• Price of entry is extremely appealing
• Coop functionality and design is excellent

Cons

• Minor concerns over longevity of current gameplay offerings

Striking Fear Into The Hearts Of Your Enemies (& Your Friends)

Two things become almost immediately apparent when playing Helldivers 2: shooting a lot of bullets at a lot of enemies feels really, really good, and the game's own wanton disregard for the safety of the Helldivers makes it a practical slapstick comedy. Friendly fire is a cornerstone of Helldivers 2, and defending a position by raining lead down on a platoon of space bugs can instantly turn from incredibly badass to hysterical as soon as a teammate accidentally steps into the line of fire, their head explodes, and their body ragdolls down a slope.

Crushing teammates with supplies from orbit, wiping the whole squad with an ill-thrown orbital strike, zapping a friend to death with a shoulder-fired laser cannon, bouncing a grenade off of an enemy into your own face – there are endless ways for a mission to go sideways, but they're all good for at least a chuckle. Enjoying the chaos doesn't diminish the moments where everything goes right, however, and Helldivers 2 really sings when a squad is firing on all cylinders. The game's lower difficulties can more or less be stumbled through once you get your bearings, but careless engagements will doom tougher missions.

Only primary objectives need to be completed in order to extract and complete a mission, but each has secondary objectives, enemy strongholds, and various other points of interest. Completing all or most of these is where time spent is truly rewarded, and clearing an entire map with minimal casualties feeds a sort of violent ego. In the course of 40 minutes, a squad may conduct a geological survey, bring an artillery cannon online, destroy a handful of enemy encampments, and stop illegal broadcasts spreading unpatriotic lies about the righteousness of Super Earth, all while deftly dispatching a thousand enemies.

Of course, it wouldn't be so satisfying if Helldivers 2's gunplay wasn't so well integrated into its larger gameplay loop. The tutorial and a couple loading screen tips emphasize the importance of movement's effects on accuracy; walking while shooting results in a secondary reticle, which shows where bullets are likely to travel relative to the centered crosshair, bouncing wildly. In higher difficulties, positioning becomes extremely important, and simply maneuvering around the map is an interesting game of leveraging the odds in the squad's favor.

For instance, a decently sized hive of Terminids – the giant bug enemies – might have close to 10 so-called Bug Holes that need to be closed via explosion, both to stem the flow of enemies onto the map and to complete that side objective for XP and Requisition rewards (more on Requisition later). Simply running in and opening fire, chucking grenades down the Bug Holes whenever possible, is liable to overwhelm the squad; Terminids will pour out of the nest, and nearby patrols might be attracted by the noise, in turn summoning more enemy combatants.

A coordinated squad might take up position on a nearby ridge, place a sentry turret, and call in an orbital strike to try and close the Bug Holes. Especially large nests aren't liable to be destroyed so easily, but calling in a napalm strike might slow the enemy's advance thereafter, and with four players firing in tandem alongside any placed sentries, it's only a matter of time until there's an opening to close the last remaining Holes. With a squad all carrying different weapons, and wielding a variety of Stratagems to call in from orbit, the possible team synergies are numerous.

Synchronized firing to drop a patrol before it can summon reinforcements, calling a cluster bomb in on your own heels to snuff out a group of foes giving chase, and diving into the extraction ship as the landing pad is overrun are only a few examples of how Helldivers 2 gameplay results in organically cool moments. It's an entire game built around the feeling of mowing down the Flood in Halo, or using the Hammer of Dawn to turn Locusts into red paste in Gears of War. And it's made all the better by your character screaming, "Get some!" as dozens of shell casings rattle out of your machine gun, the rounds tearing limbs off of the horde down range.

A Live-Service Game On A Galactic Scale

Live-service games, aka games-as-a-service, have rightfully accrued a negative connotation in the last half decade or so. Helldivers 2 isn't entirely devoid of live-service pitfalls, but it employs a more than generous monetization model, and it cleverly uses its connected players for an intriguing meta-game. When Helldivers 2 launched, there were four possible planets to fight on, two infested with Terminids and two under Automaton control. Terminid space is encroaching further into the game's Galactic Map, at the very center of which cheekily lies Super Earth.

This effectively set up the game's first main scenario, with players being offered a substantial Requisition reward for pushing the bugs out of those two planets, liberating the sector they're a part of. At the time of writing, one of two has been liberated, and two more Terminid-controlled planets in the adjacent sector have become available for missions. The potential of this approach is incredibly exciting. Conceivably, the invisible hand of the developers nudges the Galactic War at large when necessary, with players left feeling as though they're contributing to a massive, ongoing, collaborative effort.

Spending Helldivers 2's first weekend seeing a planet's liberation percentage slowly rising before finally hitting 100% solidified the idea that the game has the potential to last. New planets seem likely to be introduced regularly, the Automatons will probably advance closer toward Super Earth while the Helldivers are busy fighting the Terminids, and based on the original game having three enemy factions, it feels as though new foes will be brought to Helldivers 2 as well.

Refreshingly, Helldivers 2 doesn't feel like it's always online to sap money from your wallet, but because the game's core mechanics are built entirely around a constantly evolving conflict involving hundreds of thousands of players. Missions are scaled in difficulty from one to nine, and even though that doesn't have an effect on Galactic War contribution (a solo player on Easy difficulty can contribute just as much as a veteran squad on Helldive difficulty), they do dish out scaled rewards. Delving into said rewards reveals the one doubt about Helldivers 2's ability to hold a significant player base.

Helldivers 2's one live-service bane is the inclusion of multiple currencies; players can accrue XP, Requisition, Warbond Medals, three different varieties of Samples, and Super Credits. XP increases player level, which in turn unlocks new Strategems and Ship Modules, purchased with Requisition and different combinations of Samples respectively. Medals are spent in Warbonds (essentially battle passes) to unlock everything from new weapons to cosmetic items and emotes. Super Credits are the game's premium currency, used to buy the premium Warbond or the daily rotating cosmetic store items.

They stop being confusing after a few hours of playtime, but it's the sort of manufactured drudgery that slows time between missions to a crawl as every squad member scrolls through menus trying to figure out if they have enough of the right currency to buy what it is they want. The saving grace of the whole system, however, is that Super Credits can be found in-game and in the free Warbond. Thorough players are likely to find enough Super Credits to buy the premium Warbond without spending more real-world money than the $40 used to purchase Helldivers 2 itself.

A Perpetual & Potentially Repetitive War For Democracy

It's impossible to know the future of Helldivers 2, so much of what follows should be prefaced by saying, for the price of entry and the sheer delight of its gameplay, Helldivers 2 has already delivered far more than expected. The live-service arena is turbulent, however, and the nature of the game itself may result in an experience that eventually becomes stagnant. For now, weapons and armors in the premium Warbond are negligible – their stats don't outclass any available for free, and singular items don't typically have much bearing on success. If this were to ever change, however, it could conceivably introduce a steady power creep available only to those willing to pay a regular fee for Warbonds.

Much more pressing, however, is the lasting appeal of the gameplay itself. With just two enemy factions, there isn't much reprieve when the bog-standard missions become repetitive, despite their ingrained variety. In the game's infancy, swapping to the other front has been enough to shake it up, and getting to fight on a couple new planets was downright exciting, but it's not hard to see that the sheen might wear off. Luckily, a look through the Helldivers 2 PlayStation trophies and Steam achievements reveals an as yet unused type of mission revolving around planet defense. To hazard a guess, these may crop up if those democracy-hating tin cans manage to push further toward Super Earth while our veritable heroes are busy squashing the insect menace on the other side of the galaxy.

Another facet in Helldivers 2's favor is that much of the Galactic Map is so far unused. A third enemy faction seems to be in the cards, and the possibilities for new planets are practically endless. Live-service juggernauts like Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone attempt to tie their seasonal content together with an ongoing narrative, but it ends up being little more than set dressing. Helldivers 2 feels like a living, collaborative effort, unfolding via the thousandths of a percentage point per successful mission toward a planet's liberation.

Helldivers 2 is a refreshingly fun power fantasy, where mastery through teamwork breeds satisfaction. Diving out of a charging bug's way and firing into its exposed back or blowing up a machine dropship before it can deploy its forces feels incredible. The game's tone is finely tuned so that getting caught in a friendly airstrike and seeing your own character's limbs go flying isn't frustrating, it's a hilariously minor setback. All told, the modestly priced, always online game takes a measured approach to its monetization while being built entirely to bolster its main gameplay loop, making Helldivers 2 a shining example against $70 live-service titles that nickel-and-dime their players.

Helldivers 2

Helldivers II is the follow-up to the 2015 multiplayer top-down single-player/co-op shooter from Arrowhead Game Studios. The sequel, which has shifted gears to a third-person shooter format, drops players into the boots of elite super-soldiers who fight to protect Super Earth from invading alien forces while taking the fight to those who threaten the "democracy of Super Earth."

Shooter

Franchise

Helldivers

Platform(s)

PC , PS5

Released

February 8, 2024

Developer(s)

Arrowhead Game Studios

Publisher(s)

Sony

ESRB

M For Mature 17+ Due To Blood and Gore, Intense Violence

Prequel(s)

Helldivers 2

4.5

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