Helldivers 2 Review | PCMag

What drives a person to war? Is it a sense of duty? A call to action? Or is it the threat of horrible, mutant bugs and sentient robots? In Helldivers 2, the answer is all of the above. The $39.99 game (available on PlayStation 5 and PC) is an over-the-top multiplayer shooter that’s one part Earth Defense Force and one part Starship Troopers, with a dash of Monster Hunter Rise sprinkled on top. Helldivers 2 is one of the most enjoyable cooperative titles thanks to its wonderfully chaotic and rewarding gameplay loop, though its always-online requirement and some bugs sully the experience a bit.

(Credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment)

I’m Doing My Part!

Helldivers 2 isn’t heavy on story, but that’s to its benefit. Infused with propaganda that would be fascist brainwashing if it wasn’t satire, the game tasks you with controlling a soldier shot from space into hostile territory. Emerging from your bullet-shaped pod, you must liberate the local fauna by spreading freedom using rockets, lasers, bullets, and grenades.

In that regard, Helldivers 2 is similar to the 2015 original twin-stick shooter, but it also has significant changes. The biggest is a shift to a third-person perspective. The camera shift is much to the game’s favor, as those Starship Troopers comparisons become all the more succinct when you’re covered in blood and guts as you call in another orbital strike.

Unlike Earth Defense Force, Helldivers 2 isn’t about shooting up the locals for fun—you have a job to do. Each mission has a main objective, but the procedurally generated planets are filled with optional objectives that’ll lead to additional experience points, weapon caches, materials, and in-game currency, all of which serve the purpose of improving your Helldivers gear. You can complete your objective as fast as possible, but you’ll want to survey the environment to make your mission even more worthwhile.

Upon returning to your ship, you apply the rewards to new armor and weapons for your character, ship improvements, and unlocking additional armaments (called stratagems) that the Helldivers call down during their missions. In many ways, Helldivers’s gameplay is more Monster Hunter than Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (another recently released shooter).

There’s rarely a moment’s rest between the waves of killer bugs and robots, but the game finds ways to be pleasantly hands-on with objects in the environment. For example, a mission objective could be as simple as pressing a button to launch a nuke.

(Credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment)

This bleeds into the beat-by-beat gameplay. Certain guns require more than one player to shoot, and reloads are manual actions. Calling down reinforcements, airstrikes, and supplies requires you to enter a button command. It felt like entering a cheat code or a fighting game input. This adds extra intensity (and sometimes frustration) to firefights, because you must enter the inputs during the heat of battle. The missions always conclude with a heated standoff at an extraction point, which puts your skills to the test.

All of these moments tie together to form many exciting, movie-like set pieces featuring daring rescues, embarrassing deaths, and intense gunfights against massive opponents. In the same way that Early Access hit Lethal Company evokes visions of your favorite horror films, Helldivers 2 evokes the same rush as your favorite war movies, backed by a triumphant soundtrack.

(Credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Supplies for the Effort

Helldivers 2 features two battle passes for getting gear: one that’s free, and one that costs $10. The premium pass unlocks slightly better gear and cosmetics. If you don’t want to spend real money, you can earn a premium currency through normal play and unlock the premium pass that way.

The are negligible differences between armor levels. Light, medium, and heavy armor have roughly the same base stats, with the only difference being their passive stat bumps. Guns, on the other hand, have finer differences. Ship upgrades, the most time-consuming of the grind, offer passive stratagem bonuses that significantly impact play. Before each drop, you can choose which stratagems to bring into battle, as well as a booster that’ll affect the whole team. Meanwhile, helmets and capes exist for purely cosmetic purposes.

You might be disappointed with the lack of individual upgrades for the guns and armor. That said, you also might grow to appreciate this simplified spin on the process. It’s a far cry from Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’s needlessly complicated live service machinations.

You must tackle the game’s higher difficulties to earn the materials you need to improve your ship and research better stratagems. As a result, you’ll need a full party of four players (the game lacks bots). Playing with fewer Helldivers made the easier difficulties a challenge.

(Credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Make Friends or Die Trying

Helldivers 2 is an online multiplayer game. It leverages the connectivity with a constantly updating warfront called the Galactic War. Each completed objective adds to a planet’s liberation. After you’ve freed a certain amount, you unlock a new planet and earn bonuses for doing so.

This works to the game’s favor and detriment. The plus side is that your contributions are tangible, which gives you a sense of satisfaction during the late-game grind. However, the downside is that you must always have an internet connection to play. Likewise, if the servers are down, you’re locked out until they’re back up.

The reliance on the community’s overall progress means you’ll visit the same planets until there’s a new one to explore. Although the planets are procedurally generated, the missions are not.

Live service games, regardless of their quality, come with an expiration date. It’s hard to say if it’s worth putting time and money into a game that could vanish at any moment. The original Helldivers enjoyed a healthy player base for the better part of nine years; hopefully, this game will last at least that long.

(Credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Performance

Helldrivers 2 lush environments and character models look good—most of the time. Although the Helldivers and enemies have cool designs, some of the NPCs aboard your ship have mannequin-like appearances. Likewise, some lighting and fire effects suffer a low-res quality. You can play Helldivers 2 in Quality Mode, but the performance to visuals trade-off isn’t worth it. In fact, there may be some upscaling at work, as the graphics get blurry in some instances.

On the upside, the game maintained a mostly stable frame rate during hectic moments, buckling just once under the mania that is the hardest difficulty.

PlayStation has ported a large portion of its first-party games to PC, including God of War and Marvel’s Spider-Man, but Helldivers 2 is unique because it’s the first PlayStation-published title to release alongside its PC counterpart (available via Steam).

The minimum specs are reasonable if you don’t mind playing with Low settings. You need a gaming PC with at least an AMD Radeon RX 470 or Nvidia GeForce 1050 Ti GPU; an AMD Ryzen 5 1500X or Intel Core i7-4790K CPU; 8 GB of DDR4 RAM; and 100GB of HDD space. The recommended settings are a bit higher, requiring an AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT or Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 GPU; AMD Ryzen 7 3700X or Intel Core i7-9700k CPU; 16GB of RAM; and a 100GB SSD. With that, you’ll comfortably net a full HD (1080p) resolution.

(Credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment)

In testing, Helldrivers 2 performed well across platforms, but the game is not without bugs—and we’re not talking about the ones you shoot. In one instance, our extraction ship glitched out and wouldn’t leave, stranding us on the planet’s surface until we ran out the clock.

Server issues are also abundant. The matchmaking barely worked in the first few days of the game’s release; it suffered constant disconnects. Sometimes resources wouldn’t properly update, or items wouldn’t unlock without forcing a restart. This isn’t uncommon for multiplayer games that have a huge player base at launch.

Although Helldrivers 2’s opening days were rough, the game has received several updates that remedied some problems (matchmaking is better than before, but not flawless). We look forward to additional updates, as Helldrivers 2 has the potential to be a Game of the Year candidate.

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War is hell, but it’s also a hell of a lot of fun—at least when it’s in video game form. Helldivers 2 has the charm of older, B-tier titles like Earth Defense Force 2077, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, and Lost Planet 2. The team-based shooter is scrappy and unabashedly goofy, and a $39.99 price makes its flaws easier to digest. Helldivers 2 is one of the biggest surprises of the year thus far, and an easy recommendation for anyone looking for a cooperative multiplayer game.

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