Diving into HellDivers 2: First Look
Yo, is Helldivers 2 any good? And is it worth getting? Three tiers for democracy! So, I finally got a chance to check out Helldivers 2. This game’s been on my radar for a minute now, partly because of how much attention the CEO got when he told players to hold off on buying the game in light of its server issues and some of the dev drama that unfolded on Reddit. I don’t know why I found these comments refreshing, but there was a level of honesty there that I had to respect.
Obviously, seeing clips and how much players are enjoying the game also contributed a tad bit to me wanting to try it. But more recently, one of my older, more mature boomer buddies told me he picked up the game with a PS5 because he heard it was fun, so I grabbed it in solidarity so I could connect and play with him. Also, the game’s not hella expensive. It’s currently half the price of most normal triple-A releases, so it didn’t feel like I was going to regret buying this one, and so here we are.
As for first impressions, this is based on about 10 hours of playing. I’ve just hit level 9 in the game, and the gameplay is finally starting to make sense to me enough to where I get the gist of what to do. But I won’t lie, the first time I booted it up, I was a bit flustered to what I needed to click on or where to go because the whole menu system is just tied to your ship controls. I didn’t really understand what half the things in the menus even meant, but maybe that’s true for any new game you pick up for the first time, where you spend a good chunk of your first little while learning to navigate around and understand all the menus, power-ups, and weapon trees.
The tutorial helped some, and I even went through it again when I decided I’d rather play this game with keyboard and mouse since I just hate using a controller. Something about shooters on a controller just feels off. I just generally don’t like using a controller for shooters, even if it was designed for console. I did notice though that strategems are trickier on keyboard unless you rebind your strategem keys.
Now, obviously, this game isn’t going to be for everyone. I find it’s a fun game to play on stream since I don’t have to commit and focus entirely for extended lengths of time on the game itself. The game’s casual as hell, and that’s part of what might turn some people off. You’re essentially just killing swarms of AI bots, and I know that’s just not for everyone. If you enjoy playing zombies in CoD or Firefight in Halo or are a big fan of Overwatch 2’s PvE mode, then you’ll definitely like this.
The live service aspect of this game is interesting since they kind of lay out missions and areas that they want players to somewhat actively engage in and push some kind of subplot that I have no idea about yet or at least haven’t committed to learning. Look, end of the day, it doesn’t even matter. There’s like four game types that I’ve encountered so far. You either go around killing the bugs, it’s easy enough, you just drop in and fight off the swarms. Um, you have fetch quests where you got to go grab a hard drive, upload it, and escape. Escort missions where you kind of take over a little area and you just help people get from point A to point B which is often times within that like base itself, and it’s all fun in games until you accidentally slaughter a bunch of the people you’re supposed to be escorting. There’s like big kill bosses fights where I’ve only kind of played this once and I dropped in mid-game and they kind of already killed the boss, but I think you’re just basically hunting some massive bosses to fight.
Now, when you play with randoms, you’re kind of at their mercy to bring you back, but so far I haven’t encountered any big issues with that. You’re also at their mercy and pray that they don’t just keep throwing killstreaks on you. Obviously, this isn’t a battle royale where your teammates may just get by bringing you back. It’s in everyone’s best interest to excel as a squad. Everyone gets more points, and also, you know, you’re an extra gun, and having an extra gun counts for something. You get like a set number of team revives and it’s just entering that Konami Code to bring them back each time, so it’s not that hard.
Speaking of which, the strategem codes are probably the most annoying part of the game, but I got to respect it. I just suck at them. Like I’ll be entering a code and mess up on the last digit almost every single time. There’s like nothing like being swarmed by bugs and trying to enter the proper code for an airstrike while also doing a redeploy code, all about messing it up on the final digit or whatever and getting killed. But like it makes sense, you kind of need these to be somewhat challenging. Also, I’m not sure why, but doing these on a keyboard is harder than a controller, or it was until I realized you could remap and rebind the strategem keys themselves. Because before I was doing like this mental translation of up, down, left, right, uh, WASD, you know, and then I was like, hold on, if I can map them to my arrow keys, now it’s pretty intuitive, which is cool cuz now, like on controller, you can do them while moving around so you’re not at the mercy of like standing still entering this code in while you know a giant Rhino is chasing you.
The game gives you something to kind of grind for as you get better gear and unlocks the more you play. So obviously a level 50 player has more tools at their disposal, but when you’re hopping on for the first time and not having real shields, it’s kind of annoying, but I guess without it being like that, you’d have less incentive to grind for anything. I guess I also hate that about CoD where you know when you first start playing you got to grind out all the gun attachments, and I think that’s what I really like about Apex and Fortnite where it’s all just RNG. You find what you find, and you loot. Maybe it would be more fair if all this stuff was just like loot you found on the ground and stuff, but I guess ranking up ought to have its perks also, otherwise you’re just ranking for cosmetics, and they do give you added ways to level up by exploring maps and looking for samples and all that. Again, a lot of this is could just be being stuck in an existing mind state from playing games like Apex and Warzone.
All in all though, I think this game is a pretty fun party game and something that benefits from playing with friends who are all on mics, just bantering and clowning with each other. I think I’ll keep this game in my current rotation to at least grind up to level 50 or something. I know they just extended it to level 150, but I don’t know if I have that in me, but uh, we’ll see, we’ll give it a try. Games last what, 30 minutes at a time, and it does feel like a bit of a drudge sometimes in some of the missions where you just feel like you’re hiking across and then back and forth, especially if you’re solo queuing with no mics or personalities on your team and then it’s just like you know watching the sandstorm blow by. I feel like this game will offer me some fun moments while, you know, being able to shut down my brain for a few hours a night and just pulling the trigger on some robot or alien scum. I’m not sure if this is a wind-down the night type of game or let’s get the night started and start off by playing some Helldivers, but after about three games, I’m usually wanting to switch up anyways.
Let me know if you’re playing this game what you think of it or comment an emoji below, you know, for engagement. Also, if you’ve made it this far, likes on these videos are super appreciated since it helps the algorithm. No, I’m not a complete loser, but till the next one, peace.
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