Games worth discovering

Helldivers 2 won’t stop you from blowing up your friends - and that’s why it’s brilliant

1K View2024-02-16

There’s nothing quite like the feeling you get from perfectly tossing an orbital strike beacon under a giant armored alien insect and watching a massive laser beam blast it apart from the high atmosphere. The beam always causes a good amount of devastation, usually wiping out anything unfortunate enough to be in the general area. But a direct hit on a boss bug is special: before it even knows you’re there, it’s being detonated by a white-hot pillar of energy, sending shards of carapace and loops of green goo high into the night sky.

Helldivers 2 serves moments like this up one after another, and I’m absolutely hooked. Coming from the studio that created the goofy co-op wizarding game Magicka years ago, it’s no surprise that Helldivers 2 thrives on high chaos and low seriousness. The silliness of it, though, might distract players from realizing just how smart it is. Helldivers 2 is a brilliant piece of game design, from its tightly-timed missions to its thoughtful approach to monetization.

If you’re not familiar with Helldivers 2, here’s the basic rundown: As a member of the titular Helldivers, you park your massive space battlecruiser over a planet where humanity is waging war, either against giant Starship Troopers-style bugs or Doctor Who-style robot men. You and your team select a mission, pick a landing zone, then ready up with whatever weapons and support “stratagems” you want to have available.

Once everyone’s ready, you’re shot like bullets down to the surface, where you run around shooting aliens, completing mission objectives, and blowing stuff up with close air support strafing runs, bombing attacks, and the massive space laser I mentioned at the beginning.

When your team has completed the main mission objectives, you can head to the extraction point and call for a pickup. It takes a few minutes for the Pelican shuttle to arrive, so you and your pals have to fight off waves of enemies while you wait. Once the shuttle arrives and everyone climbs aboard, it’s back to your ship to review your spoils, grab some upgrades, and prepare for the next sortie.

It’s not a complicated premise, and on paper, it’s far from unique. Teaming up with some buddies and shooting aliens together is a classic video game activity, it’s the basis for classics like Destiny and Borderlands. Somehow though, Helldivers 2 has found a way to make this feel fresh and interesting, and I think that boils down to a few key design principles.

One of the first things that stands out in Helldivers 2 is that it doesn’t want to waste your time. There are no long walks between vendors or computer terminals on the bridge of your ship. Maps themselves are never so huge that it takes a long time to run from one side to the other, and there are always little points of interest to check out on your way to the next objective. Helldivers 2 keeps things moving at a brisk pace, so there’s always the momentum to ready up for another mission.

Something I’ve come to appreciate about Helldivers 2 is how it keeps me immersed in the world by demanding my full attention for what might otherwise be mundane tasks. Instead of simply pressing an interact button when I want to activate a terminal, for example, I need to tap in a specific sequence on my D-pad. I have to do this to call in orbital strikes, place defensive turrets, and even bring a fallen teammate back to the battlefield. Every time I reload, I have to do it manually. When the pressure’s ramping up and we’re being swarmed by chittering bugs or menaced by a platoon of lethal robots, performing these simple actions can be intensely challenging, but they add an amazing drama to each encounter.

Another key element of Helldivers 2 is its embrace of chaos. This manifests itself in a bunch of fun ways: friendly fire is always on, and you get access to some impressively heavy ordnance as you work your way through the unlockable battleship upgrade tree. It didn’t take me long before I experienced first-hand how powerful those orbital bombardments and cluster bomb strikes were—there’s even a Steam achievement for being thrown more than 25 meters from an explosion shockwave. Almost seventy percent of Helldivers 2 players have it already.

More importantly, though, Helldivers 2 takes a couple lessons from battle royale games in giving players a lot of control over the way each mission plays out. There’s no set path through any deployment; instead, the squad leader picks an insertion point on the map, and the team can go about completing objectives and side missions in whatever order they determine is best. Maps are packed with enemy encampments and loot caches to find, and most mission types give you plenty of time to poke around and explore.

These factors all help keep Helldivers 2 a fun experience, but I think the most important thing the game does is to refuse to take itself all that seriously. This easily could have been a much more stern and “serious” game, but instead, Helldivers 2 commits to the absurdity of Verhoeven’s vision of Starship Troopers. No matter what’s going on, I’ll always see my heroic spaceman cap fluttering in the breeze, and I know there’s a dedicated belly flop button to help get me out of a jam—or at least crack my teammates up when I land on a mine and go flying.

That lighthearted attitude has been key, I think, in making all my multiplayer interactions in Helldivers 2 positive so far. Nobody’s getting cursed out on the mic, everyone has been happy to help first-timers learn the ropes or call for a respawn when a teammate wanders into an automated turret’s line of fire.

I know 2024 is still young, but Helldivers 2 is the most fun I’ve had with a game this year so far. I’m pretty sure it’ll be on my shortlist in December when we’re tallying up the stand-out games from 2024, mainly because all I can think about right now is playing more Helldivers 2.