Helldivers 2 Review – The Next Generation Star Trek

Do you feel like the gaming scene lacks co-op games that let you shoot and chill with friends? Well, Helldivers 2 might be just the game for you. Read on to find out what it focuses on, what it excels at, and what its biggest weakness is right now in our review.

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

Helldivers 2’s Story Will Make You a Fighter for Democracy

Quite often on the gaming scene you can come across a work that is somewhat reminiscent of a famous TV 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? None other than eaten bugs, whose thirst for human flesh leads them to suicide.

The encounters with the primitive alien bug race are brutal. Most of the time, you’ll find yourself in the bowels of a drop pod on colonized planets whose settlement has turned into a brutal massacre. Your goals are different. One time, you’ll have to activate a mining station, another time, you’ll have to retrieve data or destroy enemy nests before the bugs start spreading and covering the entire world with their bodies. The range of bug enemies is passable. 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 “appears” on the scene. In addition to the bugs, humanity also faces intelligent robots in Helldivers 2, whose ranks are much smaller than those of the 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 of the factions pushes you from different directions of the galactic war. Therefore, in order to keep enemies away from the common people, you will have to go to different tuned worlds and eliminate troublemakers there.

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

In addition to medals, you also work with a battleship that you upgrade to gain access to new forms of support from space. This can include weapon support, raid options, or maybe even a salvo from orbital cannons that can turn tougher bugs into meatballs. However, I personally enjoyed having automated turrets watching my back during stages where I had to stop shooting and reload for a while, which is something you definitely can’t do after every shot.

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

It must be said that the difficulty in Helldivers 2 steadily increased, so my squad failed to exit the world a couple of times. Yes, that’s 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 wasn’t always the victim of mistakes. Friendly fire is a common factor here, sucking the blood out of a person. On one hand, you could say that killing a friend is somewhat in keeping with the flavor of the Star Trek series. But when you’re playing with people throwing grenades at your feet or deliberately calling in orbital attacks on your positions, it’s not very fun. I probably wouldn’t be mad if there was an option to turn off friendly fire.

This would be useful, at least when playing with random players, where you can expect a lot of strange actions. However, dying due to friends’ mistakes is not the main problem of Helldivers 2 in my opinion. A much more serious drawback is the technical side, which is starting to become a problem 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 get only an unplayable mess. For normal work, you need a much more powerful desktop computer, and even on it, everything is not working perfectly at the moment. 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 many different bugs, which, in my opinion, are the same failure as the 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 is not without casualties in Helldivers 2

Having made several dozen jumps, I must admit that although I did not expect much from Helldivers 2, it turned out to be quite an enjoyable experience, which I also liked due to the fact that it is thematically very close to the cult Star. Infantry. Like the legendary film series, this work also spews 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 processing.

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