Do you miss the days of going to your friend’s house on a friday night, ordering a pizza, cracking open a mountain dew and having a blast gaming with them all night? Thats the feeling Helldivers 2 gives you from the moment you boot it up and watch the satirical Starship Troopers-esque propaganda opening, asking you to enlist with the Helldivers to spread democracy across the galaxy and squash the alien bug threat!

There is so much to love about this game: it’s frenetic chaos, gorgeous graphics and stellar animations, tight and rewarding gunplay, but most of all it’s just PURE FUN! The basic gameplay loop is this: you load up a mission from your base a la Warhammer: Vermintide or Deep Rock Galactic, launch the mission solo (not recommended), with 3 friends or matchmade, and you have a designated amount of time to complete the mission. Objectives range from defending against the swarms of alien bugs to launching a nuke at a nest to thin their numbers. Throughout the mission you will find numerous points of interest, from bug nests that reward you with money and xp for destroying, to hidden supply caches that can give you anything from ammo to premium currency.

Where this game really shines though is in the small details. Stuff like crouching or going prone makes firing your weapon more accurate than standing and running, to your entire character model being covered in dust, blood and guts as you kill more and more enemies. The devs clearly put a lot of time and effort into making the game immersive while also being fun to play, and they nailed it.

But the best thing about this game is the stratagem system. Before launching a mission you have the opportunity to select up to 4 stratagems: these include things such as an orbital precision strike launched directly from your ship in space, an assortment of special weapons like grenade launchers or flamethrowers, defensive turrets and airstrikes. These are on a relatively short cooldown which is locked to the individual, so it is encouraged to use as many stratagems as possible since your teammates will be doing the same. And on top of that, the friendly fire in this game is more comical than it is frustrating; you’ll be in the midst of fighting a giant crusher type bug, being thrown around as your gun fails to puncture it’s thick armoured skin, and the next thing you hear is “orbital strike incoming!” as you realize your teammate has just called in an orbital strike on your position to kill the bug and also you. But thankfully theres 20 revives per mission, which recharge when you run out, effectively taking away the frustration of being killed by your friends and making it a funny moment instead of a pain point.

The enemy variety at launch feels great, not to mention there’s an entire second faction of terminator-like robots that you can fight if you’re sick of killing giant bugs, and presumably more factions on the way. And one of my favourite aspects of the game is the liberation front: a community focused objective that drives the entire community to one like minded goal of liberating specific areas of the galactic map, rewarding the entire community with currency to buy more stratagems if they can liberate the required planets by the end of the week. It really adds to the immersive feel of a galactic war, and unites the playerbase into one goal: spread democracy across the galaxy!

IO Interactive do not know how to structure or pace a story across 3 games and I did not care about WoA's overarching narrative up until this point, but somehow the final missions of the trilogy actually managed to get me properly emotional over 47 and Diana's dynamic, and, by extension, the series's events as a whole. It's crazy how having these two extremely likable characters be the only real anchors throughout an otherwise pretty tame conspiracy thriller plot allows 3 to pull this trick and retroactively make me care about the story of Hitman (2016). The interactions between Diana and 47 were always my favorite bits of characterization in the previous games, and even in Blood Money I found their whole thing charming, but there's something about how tangible it feels here that got me. I think going through K-8 with a paraprofessional who was payed by the school district to make sure I didn't bite people just makes me predisposed to having their deal resonate with me- her helping a man who's Literally Neurodivergent distinguish between right and wrong and him being thankful enough for it to put his life at risk... such a fun concept and the execution of it in the last real mission put a smile on my face.
It's WoA so obviously the level design is fucking phenomenal and the core gameplay's still extremely engaging if you're into this kind of routing-based stealth. Camera's a weird addition and feels kind of clunky to use, and I wish the ICA facility in China had been... better? I liked the level itself but after all the goofy sci-fi shit I was dying for them to just let me infiltrate an underground supervillain facility; was very sad to find out it was one of the more underwhelming areas in the game. Anyway though- I love WoA! All games with this kind of budget should have the decency to be good