Helldivers 2 - Coercive Spread of Liberty and Freedom

-Brought to you by the Super Earth Ministry of Truth

“Are you ready to make the most important decision in your life? Prove to yourself that you have the strength and the courage to be free. Become a Hero, become a legend. Join… the Helldivers.”

After being astounded by an awe-inspiring recruitment video, you are sent to a short tutorial where you learn how to shoot, how to call in a friend, and how to kill bugs. At the same time, General Brasch gives you praise for even the tiniest of accomplishments. After completing the tutorial he compliments you by saying: “Those unthinking bugs never stood a chance against a super genius mind such as yourself. You’re literally invincible!”. You feel great about yourself, the war, and feel as if there is nothing that can stand in your way. You receive a “hero’s” cape and are sent to your Destroyer ship, where you embark on your first mission. Filled with patriotic pride, you dive with a hellpod to an unfamiliar planet and before you realize, you’re in the middle of hellish war, bombarded with hordes of enemies while trying to survive and figure out how everything works, and it’s magnificent.

Helldivers 2 is a direct sequel for the studio’s Helldivers game, which was published in 2015. The production for Helldivers 2 started in 2016. An interesting fact about the game is that it uses the same engine, Stingray, as its predecessor. Despite the popular belief, Helldivers 2 is not a triple A game, even though it certainly looks like one. The game was developed by a smaller development team, compared to triple A game studios who employ hundreds or even thousands of personnel.

The story of the game is a satirical and funny take on managed democracy and military fiction. In Helldivers 2, you play as an elite soldier of Super Earth, a Helldiver, whose sole mission is to defend and liberate planets from either Automatons or Terminids. The story is set a century after the events of the first game. It is discovered that, upon death, the bugs produce a valuable resource, E-710, that is used for FTL (Faster Than Light) travel. Farms for E-710 are established in colonized worlds, but containment is eventually broken, causing chaos around the galaxy. Simultaneously, a new threat emerges, the Automatons, whose main intent is to destroy humanity. The story progresses via timed main objectives, Major Orders, that are shared with the whole playerbase. The game also has environmental storytelling, where the story expands by finding logs, notes and messages during missions. The lore of the game is pretty simple, but the story and the shared goals allows the players to roleplay within and outside of the game, which creates narratives that expand the lore even further.

Two Helldiver soldiers fighting against hordes of big bug/Terminid enemies in a rocky valley environment.

Did someone call for an exterminator?

On the surface, Helldiver 2 has a quite simple game loop: you load into a mission with up to four players and complete varying missions and optional side missions while surviving hordes of enemies. What makes the gameplay interesting is that the missions never play out the same way even if they have the same objectives. The enemies are different and killing them requires different tactics, the environments change, enemy spawn locations change, collectibles vary and side missions are different. The player has quite limited arsenal in the beginning but can access new weapons, armor and stratagems (such as support weapons, airstrikes, orbital artillery) relatively fast, which allows the player to try out different tactics and gameplay. The game has had a few bugs (the technical kind) throughout its existence but most of them have been found hilarious by the players and have been fixed quickly or have been left as a feature. Like most of co-operative games, Helldivers 2 is much more fun with friends as well. You can also play solo, and if you don’t have any friends, worry not, because the game is also really fun with random people, though not completely free from toxicity (but which online games are).

Helldivers 2 does not have mind-blowing graphics compared to other contemporary games. The game graphically offers a very relatable sci-fi world with diverse planets, enemies, weapons and skins. What is unique however, is the aesthetics of the Helldivers, the varying design of the enemies and how the game can create and allow players to have a very cinematic experience of total war with all of its epics and horrors.