Helldivers 2 Review – Next Generation Star Trek

Do you feel like there aren’t enough cooperative games in the gaming scene where you can easily shoot and relax with friends? Well, perhaps Helldivers 2 is just for you. You can read what it focuses on, what it excels at, and what its main shortcoming is currently in our review.

• Platform: PC (review), PS5
• Publication date: February 8, 2024
• Manufacturer: Arrowhead Game Studios
• Genre: Collaboration
• Czech localization: No
• Multiplayer: yes (online)
• Download data: 70 GB
• Price: 40 EUR / 980 CZK (Steam)

Helldivers 2’s story will make you a champion of democracy

Quite often on the gaming scene you can find a work that is somewhat reminiscent of a famous series. In the case of Helldivers 2, it is obvious which way the wind is blowing, and the creators do not hold back in this regard. The plot will make you a member of a special unit called Helldivers, whose mission is to spread peace and democracy throughout the universe. And who is stopping its representatives in this godly endeavor? Nothing more than eaten bugs whose thirst for human flesh leads them to commit suicide.

The encounter with the primitive race of alien bugs here is brutal. In most cases, you will find yourself in the depths of a drop pod on colonized planets, the settlement of which has turned into a brutal massacre. Your goals are different. One time you will have to activate a mining station, another time you will have to obtain data or destroy enemy nests before the bugs begin to spread and cover the entire world with their bodies. We pass the range of beetle enemies. Among them you can find weak creatures with zero stamina, as well as silent killers and monsters whose armor allows them to survive most of the damage.

Just when you think you know all your enemies, another threat will “appear” on the scene. In addition to beetles, humanity also encounters intelligent robots in Helldivers 2, the ranks of which are noticeably less wide than those of insects, but their combat effectiveness and abilities, on the contrary, pose a real threat. Compared to insects, they rely not on quantity, but on quality and heavy fire from laser rifles. Each faction pushes you from different sides in the galactic war. Therefore, in order to keep your enemies away from the common people, you will have to go to different customized worlds and eliminate the troublemakers in them.

What we will talk about, the concept is not particularly complex. Here, Prim is played by working with the wide variety of weapons you can get your hands on. So initially you have a really limited range, but as you progress through the battlefields you unlock new items through war medals. In each category you will find a certain number of items. As soon as you spend enough metals awarded for “courage” in it, the next level will open for you, where there are already untouchable toys that you can invest in their purchase. The idea here isn’t that bad. Thanks to him, the player always moves forward.

In addition to medals, you also work with a battleship, which you upgrade and thus gain access to new forms of support from space. This way you can get support weapons, different raid options, or even a volley of orbital cannons that can turn stronger bugs into meatballs. Personally, however, I liked the automatic turrets that covered my back more than once in stages, when I needed to stop shooting for a while and start reloading, which you definitely can’t do here after every shot.

The main reason you don’t want to change the magazine after a few shots is because the rest of it will never be stored, you’ll just throw it away, wasting ammo that could have been fired at any time. – real enemies. You can never have enough ammo, luckily you can sometimes quickly press certain buttons, reminiscent of good old fashioned cheating, to request support from a ship which will provide you with vital ammo.

It must be said that the difficulty in Helldivers 2 steadily increased, so a couple of times my squad was unable to escape the world. Yes, right. Death took my entire team more than once, but fortunately he had enough work to do and fulfilled his duty to society. But I haven’t always been the victim of mistakes. Shooting at one’s own ranks is a common factor here that drinks human blood. On the one hand, we can say that killing a friend is somewhat consistent with the flavor of the Star Trek series. But when you’re playing with people throwing grenades at your feet or deliberately calling orbital attacks on your positions, it’s not much fun. I probably wouldn’t be angry if there was an option to turn off friendly fire.

This would be useful, at least when you are playing with random players, where you can expect a lot of strange behavior. However, dying due to friends’ mistakes is not, in my opinion, the main problem of Helldivers 2. A much more serious flaw is the technical side, which is starting to become an issue for PC players more than it should be in Sony games. According to the minimum requirements, Helldivers 2 can be run on a relatively weak machine (CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K / AMD Ryzen 5 1500X, Memory: 8 GB RAM, GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti / AMD Radeon RX 470)

However, the reality is that on the presented machine the player would only get an unplayable mess. For normal operation, you need a much more powerful desktop computer, and even on it at the moment everything is not working perfectly. Personally, I had problems with frame drops and the game itself on a set with an AMD Ryzen 7 7700X, GTX 1080 Ti and 32 GB of RAM, and this is a configuration that significantly exceeds the requirements of the creators. However, this was still not enough for a smooth game. I also encountered a lot of different errors, which in my opinion are as much a failure as optimization. Therefore, I do not exclude that when playing Helldivers 2 on PC you will not encounter any “bugs” or frame drops. However, I personally cannot give up on this, since I have met several players in the area with similar difficulties.

The battle for the fate of the universe was not without losses in Helldivers 2

Having completed a few dozen jumps, I must admit that while I wasn’t expecting much from Helldivers 2, it turned out to be quite an enjoyable experience that I enjoyed thanks to the fact that it’s thematically very close to the iconic Star Infantry. . Like the legendary series, this work also spews out hordes of aggressive bugs of different sizes and types at you, in addition to which you will also have to deal with very angry automatons, which, on the other hand, bring back memories of the Terminator with their treatment.

Mowing down enemies here is really fun, although completing the quests themselves is definitely not a walk in the park. Absolutely not. Luckily, you have a fairly interesting variety of weapons and abilities at your disposal that you won’t get tired of playing. Having companions with whom you already have some gaming experience is vital to the overall experience. They will help you get the most out of the game. Without them, you may encounter different types of teammates, and these encounters are not always pleasant. The main drawback, at least in my opinion, was the technical side, which in the days when I play Helldivers 2 is not in perfect condition. However, as is often the case with games, time solves any problem more than once, so let’s hope that the creators will be able to debug their creation and provide it with a steady dose of content, the future it deserves.