I shelved this game multiple times due to my obsession with completing every side mission and earning five stars everywhere, which made me lose interest after a few hours. This time I played only the main missions and the story hooked me, all the weird, unusual characters I was bonding with time, great memorable music, and beautiful graphics. The online aspect of this game is genius and so simple at the same time. With a great story and excellent mechanics, this game truly shines when you focus on the main narrative and forget about 100%ing everything.

PART 1: OK, MAYBE I HATE COMPETITIVE TEAM GAMES

Before I start this review, I want to use this Part to yap for a bit, so if you are not interested in it, just skip to Part 2! Where I’ll actually start talking about my actual experience with the game.

Around 4 years ago, when I quit playing League of Legends I kept seeking another competitive team game that would tick the same boxes for me, but every game I would try one out I would either end up disliking them or not taking them seriously enough to actually consider them my “main game”. Which would result in me dropping them, and moving on to the next shiny thing, but what they all had in common is that I disliked playing with other people, League left this mental scar on me where now I think every random player I meet online is one mistake away, whether it's from me or them, from flaming the fuck out of me. This happened with Paladins, Apex, Overwatch, Dead by Daylight, Hell, it even happened to me in the Versus mode of Left 4 Dead 2, where stakes couldn't possibly be lower.

Eventually, I started gaslighting myself into thinking that all Multiplayer games fucking sucked now, and the constant tryhard mindset was to blame for it. Of course, there are clear exceptions, like Splatoon or competitive games where it's just 1vs1 where I can blame either myself for my mistakes or my opponent for doing something I didn’t know how to play around.

During the same time I stopped playing League, I was getting deep into Final Fantasy XIV, while I have plenty of things to say about it, I’ll save them for whenever I review it in the future. The point is that when I started participating in endgame content, which is for the most part, PVE Focused, I found myself having that same fun I was looking for in multiplayer games that I had been seeking for a long time. The joy of sharing a clear with your team and cheering and being way more patient with each other, went far beyond than just being relieved of having ended a stressful match that was barely won.

This is something I also noticed while playing Souls games, Left 4 Dead 2 co-op campaigns, Phasmophobia or Lethal Company with my friends, and when I recently got into Helldivers 2, I was completely aware of this epiphany by now. Multiplayer games don’t actually suck, competitive team ones do, and it's now a new age for me, where I will use this realization to get into games I’ve never thought were for me, hell, maybe I’ll actually try getting into Monster Hunter despite my initial reluctance towards those series.

Now, let’s have a nice cup of Liber-tea over Helldivers 2.

PART 2: DEMOCRACY MANIFEST

When Helldivers 2 gameplay was first revealed I remember two key things about it, one of my friends was excited about it because it was a wild glow up from its predecessor, and it had this footage where the people playing it had one of those cringey scripted voice chat interactions. But for some reason I cannot find it on YouTube, I swear it happened at The Game Awards, but I’m starting to think it's my own case of Mandela Effect.

However, things started changing once the game actually dropped, and it seemed like its growth in popularity happened overnight. The next thing I learn, the game is having so many people trying to play it that the servers cannot keep up. This is something unprecedented, and it actually prompted me to take a look, what was going on over there that had everyone so fired up? And so I started checking out some streams, it’s a 4 player co-op third-person shooter where you can fight either Bugs or Robots. On the surface, I thought it was nothing special, then I caught a glimpse of the players using the in game Stratagems and throwing them around, making things blow up and causing as much collateral damage as possible, my interest was starting to get piqued, who doesn't like to cause a big explosion? But the biggest thing to accompany all of it, was the Galactic War system with its Major Orders, where every couple of days every player in the game is tasked with working towards a common goal to be rewarded with currencies and sometimes new purchasable weapons. Apparently, this is led by a guy called Joel over at Arrowhead that acts like a real-time DM and sends out the orders depending on what the players were doing.

But what really, REALLY convinced me that I had to buy the game, was the Malevelon Creek arc, where the community tragically lost control of this particular planet to Automatons, it was a massacre, tons of brave Helldivers and Super Citizens were slaughtered in the process, but the playerbase wouldn't stand by it, and vengeance was sworn on that day. It wasn’t until the Major Order to take it back was given where the players valiantly fought in the name of DEMOCRACY to bring it back to our side, and it was done at a speed that neither devs nor players could have even predicted.

This is something I had to take part of, there was one issue, however. At the time I was busy playing other games, so despite buying it, it wasn’t until recent weeks that I started playing it a lot more, it is one of my biggest regrets to not have been part of this when player counts still soared over 500k every day, but it still warms my heart to log in and see over 100k still playing actively. One of my most common fears with live service games is that at any moment where failure starts to be shown, it's only a matter of time when the publisher says it's time to turn the lights off, and all that time invested gets flushed down the toilet (RIP Knockout City and Rumbleverse, I still think about you two now and then), but Helldivers 2 seems like its here to stay, and I’m happy to be a part of it, to be spreading justice and freedom for as much as I can. To hopefully one day participate in a Major Order as iconic as The Battle for Malevelon Creek

If there's something I had to complain about the game is how some types of enemies are extremely obnoxious to fight against (I fucking despise Chargers and Hulks), and that Arrowhead has a weird philosophy when it comes to weapon balancing, I don't consider myself an expert in game design, but at the end of the day, this is still a PvE game, one that can become really fucking tough at times, if anything I think everything should be busted, so there’s no meta to be enforced by whatever toxic players might be out there and everyone can play their own way.

To wrap things up, on top of my brief rant about Competitive Team Games, there’s another type of game I dislike a lot nowadays and that’s not a controversial opinion, we are all tired of Live Services, games that don’t respect their customers and that think we all have unlimited time, games where just playing them isn’t enough. Gone are the 7th gen days when games would drop with a weirdly, yet charmingly designed Multiplayer mode whose servers barely worked in favor of rotating shops and time-limited Season Passes that unlock only fluff most of the time. Make no mistake, Helldivers 2 also has some of these tropes, but it appears that this time it remembered it still has a box price, so what would be the point of time gating battle passes and having absurdly expensive cosmetics? None, get all of that shit by playing, go out there, kill some bugs and bots, get that rising feeling of power when your Helldiver starts maniacally laughing because you kept firing for a full mag. Drink of the cup of Liber-tea.

I have never seen another Undertale fanwork that so intimately understands what made the original work so well. This could easily have been a low-effort nostalgia-trip, but the sheer dedication to making this project a worthy successor to Undertale's cannot be overstated. Everything from the sprite quality to the music to the boss mechanics go so above and beyond what was required of them, to the point where I would almost believe this was a Toby Fox creation if I knew nothing about it beforehand.

Undertale Yellow spends a lot more time with its characters than the original, tending to have them stick around even after finishing their area rather than just disappearing into the background. You really are given so much more time to understand their personalities, and characters like Martlett and North Star are just as full of life and charm as any of the characters in the original game. This game is so overflowing with charm and personality that it barely even knows where to put it all.

The game also looks gorgeous, with more detailed backgrounds and far more sprite animation than the original had. Importantly, though, it doesn't look too good. A problem I have with a lot of undertale fanworks is that they don't understand that Undertale kind of needs to have a low-budget, homemade charm to it to maintain its atmosphere. All the dumb sprite inconsistencies in the original game are so near and dear to my heart, and Undertale Yellow captures that same aesthetic while still being noticeably easier on the eyes.

One thing I have to give this game immense credit for is using almost zero established characters or map layouts from Undertale. It would have been so easy for Clover to bump into the same cast of characters that Frisk ran into back in 2015, but the developer shows a shocking level of restraint in how they approach this established world. Focusing on new parts of the Underground makes it feel so much more like a real place, and the worldbuilding is such a natural extension of everything we already know about the place. While it does bear the Undertale name and world, it focuses so much of itself on new, original content, that it feels almost entirely new.

I don't want to get into heavy spoilers here, but I also appreciate that this game isn't going for the same sense of spectacle that the later encounters in Undertale do. It's a much more personal story, which makes sense considering breaking the Barrier is never in question at this point in time. While I do find the endings slightly less impactful because of this, they're aiming for such a different kind of emotional response that they mostly succeed in.

This review might be long and rambly, but I just finished the game and had so many thoughts I had to put down. I adore Undertale Yellow. It means so much to me that a group of fans were able to so distinctly understand what made Undertale great and use that to make something almost completely new within its world. I cannot recommend it more as both a companion piece to the original, and a fantastic indie RPG in its own right.

This is like a wet fart as a game. If I wasn't playing the legendary edition I wonder how much of this game I would've loathed more. There's so much to unpack story-wise, that I don't think BioWare thought about certain parameters actually being met come the finale. There are two literal walking plot devices in the party and the main one that you waited three games for is regulated to a background character after their introduction.

The overabundance of "hey let's chill at the bar" character interactions was annoying especially with what's at stake currently in the galaxy. Hanging out and getting to know my party members was the highlight of the second game, but in this game, they didn't even have some background catching up to talk about. They become just one-liners until you see them somewhere else. And for a game that pushed so much one-on-one time with these characters, It felt forced at this rate. Certain characters didn't get a proper ending to their built-up arcs over the years.

Story aside, while once again the gunplay and moment-to-moment gameplay are improved, something is adversely affected by it. This time it's a compound of a bunch of small things. While guns have better modification and distinct use cases, the weight system is a really neat feature to stop the class-based limitations, and the combo systems with powers make for more engaging firefights, not being able to just put your gun away is weird. Planet scanning is annoying with the Reapers chasing you for hitting scan one time. Side quests being regulated to scans and random pickups and eavesdropping made them boring to do.

I guess that's the best way to put it. This game is boring, not because the story wasn't engaging or the gameplay was, but because after trekking through 2 games of build-up, I expected more. My disappointment just compounded when there wasn't a "man that was all worth it" moment. I slogged through unbearable gauntlets of firefights only to end off with a lackluster finale, and I'm not talking about the ending, but the entire third game.

Disappointing on every front. In a weird way it's the inverse of WoD, which was an expansion people wanted to play but quite literally couldn't. BfA technically had so much content but ultimately created an experience that had you wanting to engage with none of it.

BfA really highlighted the unwieldiness of balancing external power systems with consistent content releases. Remember, Legion was only able to somewhat accomplish both by killing WoD in its tracks and siphoning its development time.

Tearing through 3 to 4 expansions worth of storylines and the resulting whiplash and unsatisfactory story beats also works against the game, but at the end of the day the miserable gameplay experience is what really drags it down.