For Democracy!
Helldivers is one of the more unique games I have had the pleasure of playing in the PS4 era. At it's core it's a top down multiplayer shooter with heavy references to the political satire adverts from the original film adaption of Starship Troopers. Sounds pretty crazy but that's only the start, this is a bizarre game where you have to rely on the community as much as your own skill to complete it and playing well with others is vital as killing yourself or your squad mates is as easy as the aggressive aliens you're fighting.
The goal of the game is to fend off three rather different, though equally aggressive races from progressing towards earth in a giant galactic war. Each player starts the game on the bridge of their own starship which is essentially a hub with each station acting as a menu for something from changing your characters clothing, weapons and skills to bios of characters and enemies. From here you can choose to either go out on missions on your own or join a squad of players (up to four) to try and take down harder missions together.
Each race has a good variety of units to fight from smaller easy to kill aliens that sound off alarms to huge armour plated killing machines that render pretty standard weapon load outs useless. You have the Bugs which are extremely similar to the bugs from the afore mentioned Starship Troopers movie, very organic, largely close range and quite often burrow underground. The Cyborgs, which are almost steampunk, tend to be heavily armoured, use a lot of guns and can also deploy tanks to the battlefield. Lastly there are the Illuminate which are the "apple" of the alien world, super slick, white armour, advanced technology with cloaking and lasers.
These races are fought in a tri-front war with each front being measured by points gained through successful missions completed added to a bar on each front. Every person playing this game commits to the war effort, this is all online, measuring how well humanity are doing. Push an alien race back far enough collectively and you can take on their homeworld and wipe them out for good (if the community beats all three races it all starts over again). Working together on the right front is key to victory for the community, but working together in missions is just as important as harder missions gain more points but are near impossible to play through without a team backing you up, this game can be hard.
Once on a selected planet for the mission there are a number of objectives for your team to complete across the map, defending missile silos, killing certain targets, saving survivors of a ship crash etc. The harder the level the more missions there are, completing them all gives you extra points towards the community victory as a whole. At the end of every mission your squad has to activate a beacon to call in a dropship to come and pick you up. This causes every alien to home in on your location causing a bit of a last stand situation with every mission you face, it's tense and pretty action heavy. I haven't begun to explain how crazy those can be, as I believe Winston Churchill once said "Friendly Fire, Isn't." Every shot you can take can kill your own squad so accuracy and positioning of your squad are super important as an accidental team kill can be the difference between success and failure.
If you do die or kill someone by accident though you can bring them back using stratagems. These are epic, before every battle each player can equip up to four of these plus the default revive stratagem. Despite the names, these are actually drop pods launched from your orbiting starship providing weapons, additional ammo, jetpacks, assault mechs, vehicles, mines, bombing raids, distraction beacons etc. as well as bringing dead players back to the battlefield.
These can kill you.
The pods slam into the ground from space, if you stand underneath one you will die, though explode would be more accurate. Sometimes reviving someone else will kill you, throwing a stratagem in the wrong place may blow up someone's tank, killing them, you or even your whole squad if truly unlucky. (There are options to kick trolls who are doing it on purpose though in like 70 hours of playing I rarely encountered that) Precision, timing, knowing when to run and what stratagems to take to compliment your squad and alien type are key. Some missions with groups of people we would get wiped out yet five minutes later with a new squad on one of the hardest settings we're running through like experienced commandos.
The presentation is pretty decent, the visuals aren't amazing though they certainly do the job effectively with pretty good looking enemies and weapon effects with decent music and voice acting. There are a variety of planet types, desert, swamp, volcano, snow etc. that effect the game slightly (slow to move through water and snow without vehicles and jet packs) but they all feel kind of empty, barren except for the odd rock, mountain or crevice. I feel the planets could have been more interesting to travel around.
The game has one big flaw though, repetition. It has provided some of the best, not to mention, tense moments in any co-op I've played in years where you struggle through rooting for the last member of your team alive to revive you, surrounded by aliens, low on ammo but the mission objectives are really quite boring and get old pretty quickly on the bland maps your pretty cool looking squad traverse. It's a pretty big flaw in an otherwise unique experience with fantastic gameplay but I really wouldn't let it put you off and urge you to give Helldivers a try while the community is still active.
Recommended.
+ Stratagems are a really cool mechanic.
+ The community victory and absolute need to work as a team are great design choices.
+ Large option of weapons, upgrades, vehicles and strategies to try.
- Planets and missions get pretty repetitive.
Helldivers is one of the more unique games I have had the pleasure of playing in the PS4 era. At it's core it's a top down multiplayer shooter with heavy references to the political satire adverts from the original film adaption of Starship Troopers. Sounds pretty crazy but that's only the start, this is a bizarre game where you have to rely on the community as much as your own skill to complete it and playing well with others is vital as killing yourself or your squad mates is as easy as the aggressive aliens you're fighting.
The goal of the game is to fend off three rather different, though equally aggressive races from progressing towards earth in a giant galactic war. Each player starts the game on the bridge of their own starship which is essentially a hub with each station acting as a menu for something from changing your characters clothing, weapons and skills to bios of characters and enemies. From here you can choose to either go out on missions on your own or join a squad of players (up to four) to try and take down harder missions together.
Each race has a good variety of units to fight from smaller easy to kill aliens that sound off alarms to huge armour plated killing machines that render pretty standard weapon load outs useless. You have the Bugs which are extremely similar to the bugs from the afore mentioned Starship Troopers movie, very organic, largely close range and quite often burrow underground. The Cyborgs, which are almost steampunk, tend to be heavily armoured, use a lot of guns and can also deploy tanks to the battlefield. Lastly there are the Illuminate which are the "apple" of the alien world, super slick, white armour, advanced technology with cloaking and lasers.
These races are fought in a tri-front war with each front being measured by points gained through successful missions completed added to a bar on each front. Every person playing this game commits to the war effort, this is all online, measuring how well humanity are doing. Push an alien race back far enough collectively and you can take on their homeworld and wipe them out for good (if the community beats all three races it all starts over again). Working together on the right front is key to victory for the community, but working together in missions is just as important as harder missions gain more points but are near impossible to play through without a team backing you up, this game can be hard.
Once on a selected planet for the mission there are a number of objectives for your team to complete across the map, defending missile silos, killing certain targets, saving survivors of a ship crash etc. The harder the level the more missions there are, completing them all gives you extra points towards the community victory as a whole. At the end of every mission your squad has to activate a beacon to call in a dropship to come and pick you up. This causes every alien to home in on your location causing a bit of a last stand situation with every mission you face, it's tense and pretty action heavy. I haven't begun to explain how crazy those can be, as I believe Winston Churchill once said "Friendly Fire, Isn't." Every shot you can take can kill your own squad so accuracy and positioning of your squad are super important as an accidental team kill can be the difference between success and failure.
If you do die or kill someone by accident though you can bring them back using stratagems. These are epic, before every battle each player can equip up to four of these plus the default revive stratagem. Despite the names, these are actually drop pods launched from your orbiting starship providing weapons, additional ammo, jetpacks, assault mechs, vehicles, mines, bombing raids, distraction beacons etc. as well as bringing dead players back to the battlefield.
These can kill you.
The pods slam into the ground from space, if you stand underneath one you will die, though explode would be more accurate. Sometimes reviving someone else will kill you, throwing a stratagem in the wrong place may blow up someone's tank, killing them, you or even your whole squad if truly unlucky. (There are options to kick trolls who are doing it on purpose though in like 70 hours of playing I rarely encountered that) Precision, timing, knowing when to run and what stratagems to take to compliment your squad and alien type are key. Some missions with groups of people we would get wiped out yet five minutes later with a new squad on one of the hardest settings we're running through like experienced commandos.
The presentation is pretty decent, the visuals aren't amazing though they certainly do the job effectively with pretty good looking enemies and weapon effects with decent music and voice acting. There are a variety of planet types, desert, swamp, volcano, snow etc. that effect the game slightly (slow to move through water and snow without vehicles and jet packs) but they all feel kind of empty, barren except for the odd rock, mountain or crevice. I feel the planets could have been more interesting to travel around.
The game has one big flaw though, repetition. It has provided some of the best, not to mention, tense moments in any co-op I've played in years where you struggle through rooting for the last member of your team alive to revive you, surrounded by aliens, low on ammo but the mission objectives are really quite boring and get old pretty quickly on the bland maps your pretty cool looking squad traverse. It's a pretty big flaw in an otherwise unique experience with fantastic gameplay but I really wouldn't let it put you off and urge you to give Helldivers a try while the community is still active.
Recommended.
+ Stratagems are a really cool mechanic.
+ The community victory and absolute need to work as a team are great design choices.
+ Large option of weapons, upgrades, vehicles and strategies to try.
- Planets and missions get pretty repetitive.