Helldivers 2 is one of the best video games you'll ever play

New PlayStation 5 and Steam release Helldivers 2 is almost perfect, and if you can grab a squad of three others to join you in the never-ending fight against the monstrosities existing in the brutal vacuum of space, you'll find that it's one of the best games you'll ever play.

Or at least one of the most fun.

A sequel to 2015's Helldivers, Helldivers 2 essentially redesigns the first game from the top-down to deliver a punchy and action-packed third-person shooter that offers a meaty and devastating sci-fi war experience for players.

The world of Helldivers 2 cribs heavily from political pastiche sci-fi, stirring in Warhammer:40,000, Aliens and The Terminator into a Starship Troopers stock to offer the premise that you - soldier - are the last-line of defence for 'Super Earth' and the human mission to 'spread democracy' (see: Fascism) across the galaxy by way of the assault rifle and orbital strikes. You'll complete a small tutorial, get given your wings and a ship, then be sent into the fight. You, and up to three other teammates will drop from the skies onto a planetary front of your choosing to offer aid in ongoing - and live - campaigns to reclaim planets for the good of the human race.

So you suit up, pick weapons and stratagems like a 500kg bunker buster bomb that you can call in from the skies, or a railgun that can pop the head of anything nearby, and make your way in to complete a series of objectives. You'll sometimes have to be the grunt protecting a refueling station, or the grunt trotting across a map to destroy bug nests, or the grunt picking up ICBM codes so the higher ups can fire it. Every success adds up alongside other players' fights, and with enough victories, players can win the fight for a planet, before heading off to another battle in an almost endless galactic front.

That's made it sound really easy, but Helldivers 2 is a beast. It's you, and your little gun, and your little army, and your little squad against the worst beasts in the universe, and thankfully you'll be given a whole lot of support firepower - not that it'll do the job for you though.

The narrative grounding is good enough for a game itself - but the mechanics backing it all up are incredibly solid. Every mission has an increasing level of tension, and is completed by players engaging in gameplay that is heavily tactile and crunchy. The player manually defines their landing spot, and their targets on a map. You can adjust your landing spot mid-dive. Reloading is performed manually, at all times. Calling in supplies and bombing runs is performed by executing a number of cheat-code like button combinations that need to be pulled off mid fire-fight. Missions can be long treks across hazardous terrain. There's a feeling to Helldivers 2. A vibe.

A brutal one.

Spoilers for enemy types here: You'll be devastated by giant bugs, torn limb-from-limb as your puny rifle fires bullets against rock-hard carapaces of thoughtless organic killing machines. You'll be chased for eternity by robots, firing at you without pause and the need to reload. You'll be killed by your own air support - called in by you. You'll turn your teammates into swiss cheese, desperately firing through smoke and trees into an unknown threat and they will do the same to you. You'll land on their heads, instantly evaporating your only allies from existence. Your squadmates will scream at you while you forget to reload as a horde of car sized insects encroaches your position, you'll scream at them as you activate a floor-based nuclear bomb that you need to get away from - stat.

Dying is fun in Helldivers 2, and you'll die a lot. Thankfully, it's fairly meaningless to die - up to a point. You're given a pool of five lives per player - up to a shared pool of 20 lives shared between four players. That's good, not because it takes a lot of frustration away from the game, but because dying is where the stories are at - as well as the triumphs.

Those triumphs are glorious. As slapstick and madcap as the deaths are, escaping an alien world by the skin of your teeth after barely completing a mission is an all-time gaming experience. It's an nerve-wracking experience enough, but the need to call in an extraction shuttle and wait for it while the world is blowing up around you is such a dramatic and satisfying bit of gameplay that it's almost a robbery that the game allows you to simply run out of lives to end a mission as long as you've fulfilled your mission objectives. You'll lose the in-game rewards associated with a full escape, but you'll also lose the stories and white-knuckle fun that the end-mission grants.

Helldivers 2 isn't a 'story generation' game by design - like Dwarf Fortress, or Rimworld - where the point is to build up player-based lore in a savefile that is worth talking about - but it happens to be one just by existence. It's perfect forum and water-cooler fodder. Every single dive into a mission creates stories based on those failure, and those glorious triumphs. And you'll talk about it, what happened, how you got out, what went wrong. You'll talk about it a lot. It'll eat your thoughts up.

With its nature as a live-service game, microtransactions are a feature - but thankfully not entirely unwelcome, and they fit well into the game. There is a 'war bond' (battle pass) as part of the ongoing war that offers helldivers new equipment and cosmetics, and an additional premium version that offers more gear and cosmetics. Due to the PvE elements of the entire game, this doesn't make it 'pay to win' in the slightest - it's more 'pay to get ever so slightly better'. Helldivers 2 is primarily skill and luck based as a game, and owning the premium warbond simply makes you slightly shinier, equipped with a slightly better gun than everyone else.

You don't actually have to pay real money for anything in the game either. Your main warbond is paid off with one of three in-game currencies that are exclusive to people who simply play the game, and the main differential that will save you from death - your gear and stratagems (calling in aid, like strikes, gear and bombs) - are paid for simply by collecting in-game currency by completing missions and picking up collectibles. If you picked up enough super credits (the premium currency) during gameplay - it's possible to buy the premium warbond. Who can complain about that?

The only 'problems' with Helldivers 2 aside from entirely excusable server issues and bugs (it's the most popular PlayStation steam launch, and that was unexpected) that are preventing online play in some instances is that the game is a slog, and especially for a solo player. That will put a lot of potential players off, especially when the core gameplay loop is so simple, and so repetitive. This game is what you inject into it, and what you apply to it within the sandbox & framework of what it offers. If you're looking for something feature-packed and fully-fleshed out within minutes of boot-up, this might not be for you. War is hell, and it's not a quick operation - especially when the front is waged across the entire universe. If you're in Helldivers 2, you're in it for the long haul and while getting into games is quick enough, and you can play in short bursts, the real meat of the game is in the ideas it offers and backs up with the gameplay. Again, there's a vibe to it, and the ludonarrative pays off.

For those that fully buy into the narrative of the world and the game - that they are a tiny and almost insignificant instrument of something much bigger, and can learn to put their blinkers on and enjoy killing the same hordes of enemies over again - there is so much fun to be had and so many stories to tell. The loop of the narrative, gameplay and objectives feeds that belief, that you're doing your part, especially when your squad drops in, and it's just you, your pals and a big sandbox full of squishy enemies that are already on their way to beat you to a pulp, and eat you. Helldivers 2 lets you trip on that soldier of fortune narrative again, and again, and again.

Helldivers 2 is currently available on PlayStation 5 and on PC via Steam. Unfortunately for Xbox gamers it is not available on the console or game pass - and is currently exclusive to PS5 and PC. Personally, I'd love to see that change.

Everyone deserves to play Helldivers 2. It's that good. If you give it the chance it deserves and link up with friends - or find some at r/helldivers - it's one of the best video games you'll ever play, and if it fails at that hurdle for you personally, it'll still be one hell of a blast to play.

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