Helldivers 2 review

Super Earth needs your heart, soul and limbs to carry out its missions across various sectors of the galaxy. Bits and pieces of the lore are fed to you via propaganda audio notes and dialogues. At the time of writing, there are two enemy factions called the Automatons and Terminids. Automatons are meatless Arnold Schwarzenegger-esque robots from Terminator with an affinity for shooting at sight. Think Terminator movies and you're close. Terminids are car-sized bugs that don't like you.

This is a live service game, so enemies, weapons and world-building will progress with time. There's a legit game master in the dev team that monitors and manages the game experience for all players. Meteor showers and lava eruptions were added early to make life hell and recently after eradicating enemies in a sector granted stratagems to call on a fully weaponised mech suit. Surprises and updates will keep coming this way.

What's a stratagem you ask? You can call down aid from the spaceships. These depend on what you select in your loadout and are picked before the spaceship plummets you to the mission area at the start. You can call in orbital strikes and carpet bomb a massive area or call for machine guns and turrets to deliver democracy with your hands. There's enough incentive to play more till you unlock more weapons and better stratagems. Nearly everything in the game can be unlocked by playing and grinding. So the game is clear of sneaky paid tabs to lure you into coughing up some extra dough for progression and more content.

Shooting in Helldivers 2 feels satisfying and crisp. Enemies keep coming at you in hordes and most of the time you will be shooting while completing mission objectives. A mission objective varies from a full-blown assault on enemies to reducing their numbers or pinging towers for codes, seismic activities, research work, and even rescuing scientists. The mission variety will not change the essence of the game, which is to shoot everything that is not human. However, the higher-difficulty missions breathe new life into the mundanity of chopping down hordes. Enemies get bigger and more vicious, while the mission objectives increase. It’s truly in the late-stage difficulty that Helldivers 2 pushes you frantically across the map scampering for resources, ammo and sweaty stratagem management.

Calling down an eagle strike or reviving another player depends on how quickly and correctly you input the sequence of directional input for the specific stratagems. I often found myself being chased by hordes of enemies while three of the four folks in my team were cheering on from my 5-second relief window to input a Reinforce stratagem code and bring them back into the fight. There’s never a dull moment here and when the going gets tough, there are various stratagems to bomb enemies that are as destructive as they’re cinematic. Think of Oppenheimer’s nuke and you’re close.

The game can look stunning at times, especially during the moonlit nights when the rays cast shadows through the fog. Sometimes, it’s entertaining, with silly ragdoll effects that remind you about the propaganda-fuelled bullet fest that is best enjoyed with a friend.

A month into Helldivers 2 and we’re confident that this is something that you can pick up and play with your buddies in a matter of minutes. The enjoyment comes from the stress of keeping the hordes at bay while carpet-bombing enemies and frantically reviving teammates. 

There’s a bit of a server issue on the PS5 but most of the things have been ironed out now. The developers have a road map for this game to support and add content regularly and currently; there are new enemy types, vhicles and more weapons planned to come.

If you’re looking for the next live service game to drop in with your buddies, Helldivers 2 is full of fun, frantic and funny moments.