Review: Helldivers 2 [PC]

April 07, 2024

Helldivers 2 is one of those game that:

Let’s get more specific, and I’ll try to keep the rants to a minimum. But before we begin, I have an unambiguous recommendation: Don’t buy Helldivers 2 on PC. It comes packaged with nProtect, a rootkit which performs some anti-cheat functionality (badly, from what I’ve read). It is not safe to install Helldivers 2 on your computer, and I was foolish to do so without checking up on that first. (It’s fine, I was planning to reformat soon anyway, I guess.)

How do I score Helldivers 2, according to my rubric?

A note: I don’t think a simple -1 Technical Point for issues like draconian DRM or bundled malware is appropriate anymore. Such egregious offenses exist outside of my rating scale entirely; they are fundamental barriers to enjoyment.

Alright, that brings me explaining my scores. If it matters, this game scores a total of 8/18, less than 50%. Surprising for a game I’ve played so much of, but less so when I consider how much I’ve complained about it. That’s the power of a strong foundation in gameplay!

Aesthetics: 2/3

This game really is gorgeous where it counts: the explosions, the windswept vistas, and the cool armor. If it had a little more unique style, perhaps more variety in the enemies, it could have scored a 3.

One of my favorite features of the game is its procedurally generated environments. They look really good, and the open-map nature of missions means that you actually have to factor the geography into your gameplay. I find that very rewarding and enjoyable; in particular, it feels great when you get a rare chance to hunker down on a high hilltop with clear views for hundreds of meters while bugs rush hopelessly up the slopes. Those moments feel exciting because often you’re at the mercy of narrow canyons or jagged rocks which make stratagem placement really difficult.

Honestly? I hate needing to farm low-level missions (more on that later), but traversing the beautiful and varied landscapes is fun on its own. I’ll also reserve a small callout for the music, which ultimately I’ve disabled (to listen to my own), and is a bit generic, but fits really well with the gameplay and adds that chef’s kiss of patriotism and heroics.

Creativity: 1/3

Character customization is extremely weak in Helldivers 2. That’s fine, it really doesn’t need to be more, but I’m just saying that’s what it is. Options are limited and constrained by gameplay (for instance, I have no interest in anything except light armor which grants +50% throwing distance; playing any other way just feels bad, so I currently have 1 viable suit of armor). The only reason I actually give a point here is because of the ship naming system. Selecting from two very long, separate lists, you choose a name for your personal Super Destroyer in the format of SES [noun1] of [noun2]. It can be fun seeing other peoples’ interesting choices, and I enjoy grinning to myself and feeling just a bit clever when I invite random players aboard the SES Pride of Selfless Service.

Design: 1/3

Whew, this is a tough one. I also have to mindful not to cannibalize talking points better served under Progression, because those are some of the worst design choices, and there’s some overlap. To keep this brief, I just don’t understand what the developers actually wanted out of the majority of the systems in this game. As I said above, I only ever use 1 set of armor. Is that my choice? Yes, but it’s literally the only one that feels like I’m playing the game correctly.

There are also some very questionable choices around enemy spawning; I won’t go into detail but they’ve been extremely deflating at times to my enjoyment of the game, making it feel like tactical and strategic choices are meaningless.

Balance in stratagems and guns is really bad, and what’s worse, all of the important information about how they work is hidden from the player. On purpose! The devs say we should experiment, I say I don’t trust them that it’s worth experimenting. I have tried a few guns other than the handful I bring to every mission, and they all feel weak or marginally useful. Whereas the automatic shotgun, for example, just does every other gun’s job better. There are two machine gun turret stratagems, and one is just a weaker version of the other. Give us a reason to experiment! I don’t believe the devs saying that all the guns are viable.

(NB: There are balance changes happening, and this could already be out of date, but I won’t know because they lost my trust.)

Oh, yeah, and I can’t let this one go. There are valuable loot “crates” on every single map which can’t be opened by a solo player. That’s just not acceptable.

Gameplay: 2

A handful of tweaks could bump this to a 3. When you find a loadout you enjoy, missions are really fun. Many of the guns feel weighty, and the reloading system is actually quite fun (seriously, it is a breath of fresh air to have to actually make intelligent choices about discarding non-empty clips). A lot of the stratagems are insanely fun to use. Weirdly though, one thing holding them back is that the angle of incidence for orbital strikes changes as you get close to the map… because if you look up, your ship is for some reason hovering lower than an aircraft over the battlefield. Isn’t it supposed to be… in orbit? This means that your orbital strikes can often come at really shallow angles and get blocked by terrain, all in the name of extremely ill-understood physics.

Progression: 1

This game has 3 progression systems spread across four (4) currencies (actually 5, if you count experience). Let me be clear: that is ridiculous. Balancing multiple different currencies already sounds difficult… so of course, you make one of them purchaseable for real money. That’s a hard pass for me. I’ll drop extra cash on Deep Rock Galactic’s cosmetics every single time, because I got the game for $20 originally and it just keeps giving. There is no way I am spending even a dollar to speed up my progression on a brand new $60 game. If the progression gets too slow (and I’ll give you one guess on whether it does), I’ll drop the game before I cave and reward that kind of manipulation. (I’m not even going to call it greed. Maybe $60 isn’t sustainable for their team. But it is unquestionably manipulative, no matter what they say about “no FOMO”.)

Even looking at how unlocks work, they’re pretty messy:

Actually, all of these currencies have a limited number of items purchaseable and can become completely useless after a point, at which time I suppose you’d just wait for the next big content update for more to buy. Overall, the systems are bad, they force you to make suboptimal choices and sink resources into upgrades you don’t want, they require counterintuitive grinding, and they manipulate you into spending money.

Technical: 1

Alright, if I’d rated this game at launch it would get a 0 here; there were tons of crashes happening causing players to lose all their progress from missions. There were server errors causing players to not get rewards from successfully completed missions. The game is nearly unplayable on a hard disk drive due to loading times.

The crashes and the server instability have gotten better, so they get a point back. In fact, I could see this game reaching a 2 with some hard work from the development team. Regarding the servers being overloaded and having login queues: I can’t fault them for that. It could have been technical issues, but it’s just as likely they were completely surprised by the popularity of the game at launch, getting a lot of players like me who’d never heard of the first Helldivers. They addressed it about as quickly as one could expect and they’re far from alone in having capacity problems.

Conclusion

Overall, I think there’s a lot of fun to be had in Helldivers 2, and also I cannot recommend it in good faith. Even ignoring the malware, the live-service nature of the game combined with the bungled progression systems and the poor balance mean that Helldivers 2 just has more FOMO than staying power, and that’s not a good reason to play a game.


tags: review game-review gaming