Helldivers is an over the top top-down online coop twin-stick shooter. You are a helldiver, an elite soldier whose job it is to land on alien planets and bring them managed democracy™ by shooting everything in sight.
The game is very standard mechanically in some regards – you walk around, you shoot stuff, enemies come at you from all directions – but it has some very clever conceits. There are alien patrols which call in additional enemies, so if you blast them, you can prevent more enemies from spawning. It has a pretty good variety of enemies, with several dozen variants. And the fact that friendly fire is always on means that you actually have to pay attention to where you’re shooting and positioning yourself to have clear firing lines around your allies.
But most importantly, it has strategems. Strategems are something where you kneel down and punch in a directional code to call in some sort of assistance. There are four equippable stratagem slots for over fifty different strategems, earned by completing missions, plus a stratagem for calling in support and a stratagem for reviving your fallen teammates. These seem kind of lackluster when you first learn about them, but when you actually have to use them in combat, it can get pretty intense – you need to key in these codes correctly, and while you’re doing it, you can’t shoot or move. But some of these are powerful combat abilities which can really turn the tide of battle, and reviving your allies while desperately trying to fight off enemies can be a very intense experience. There are also strategems you can use to call in defensive turrets, equippable weapons, healing items, ammunition, or even mechs and tanks and APCs that change how the game is played.
The game is very chaotic, and your limited strategems mean you need to choose wisely, because the strategems are really powerful and can turn the tide of battle when used well.
The actual objectives are mostly pretty simple – you wander through areas, blasting stuff, and then go to various places, mostly to punch in a directional sequence while your teammates protect you, but other times having to protect some objective or blow up some objects with a called in mini-nuke that you can activate after it lands. However, these can lead to very intense situations at higher difficulties, as the enemies can be relentless and you have to hold them off long enough to secure the objective. Sometimes you are driven off the objective and have to come back to restart it, while other times you manage to hold your ground and walk off triumphantly.
The result is a game that’s a great deal of fun to play.
The only real problem with this game is that it has a high degree of repetition – the game only has so much content, and at any given time, due to the game’s global war, you can only access some of it, as different factions are only available at different times. There’s a global metagame, where everyone’s actions contribute to beating the aliens, and once you do, they’re gone until the players defeat all the alien factions and bring an end to the war, resetting everything. This means that the repetition can feel even worse at times. This is mitigated somewhat by higher difficulty levels bringing in new and different enemies, which helps create new and different encounters, but there’s a point at which it wears thin.
Overall, the game is quite fun to play for a while, but it is one of those games that you aren’t going to want to play forever despite being an “endless” game. Loading it up every once in a while to blast some aliens is alright, but if you sit there and play it too long, it will wear on you.
2.5