Helldivers

 

For awhile, recently all the hype was around Helldivers 2. I'd never really heard of the franchise, so it peaked my interest. But before I could play the sequel, I needed to know what the original game was all about. So I waited and picked up Helldivers on a decent discount, without knowing much about it other than its a sort of top down shooter game.

Upon first playing the game you do a little tutorial mission teaching you the basics. The controls feel smooth and responsive, its a twin stick shooter where you get a laser reticle showing you where your bullets will go, but also you have to shoot in small bursts or else the accuracy is bad and the bullets fly all over the place, which is a nice touch that I appreciate the game having. Soon the game introduces I guess its most novel mechanic: pulling up a menu with Lb and having to do these button combo's to use special perks. This system was jarring at first, but the more I played I grew to also appreciate it. In the heat of the moment in combat it really can make things more intense, which is fun. For instance to revive your co-op partner, you need to press a button combo. Or trying to drop a nuke, or drop a supply crate for ammo.

The games basic premise is you are in a spaceship, and you can view a global overview map of the War against the various alien factions and their planets. And you have to go around these planets eliminating the aliens until you've wiped them all out. Simple enough on paper, you would think, but in reality the execution is the most unintuitive, vague, mysterious bullshit I have ever seen. I'll touch on that soon.

The game is "fully" playable co-op. Joining your friend is easy enough, you can join from the main menu or from Steam networking. Though, the co-op isn't perfect. Only the host gets to see this overview map. The co-op partner only gets a trimmed down menu where he gets to vote on a mission. It's always disappointing when games do this, it sucks that one person gets the inferior experience.

The general gameplay has you picking a mission, dropshipping into it anywhere you please, and completing the random objectives. It seems like each mission is more or less randomly generated. Theres seemingly an infinite amount of them that keep spawning up. None of it has any story or cutscenes or is a real "campaign". It's all a series of random open field maps, where you drop into it and then complete a handful of copy+pasted objectives. Stuff like disabling the machinery, or putting a nuke down to blow up hives, or using a metal detector to find bombs, or carrying a briefcase to a building, or rescuing survivors. To objectives like simply killing a certain amount of enemies. It's always the same handful of objectives that get swapped around on each mission. After awhile it makes the game feel very repetitive. At the end of every mission you run to a designated point, call for extraction, survive for a minute, get on the ship and leave. The only variation in the scenery is that of biome changes. Like one planet will be the winter planet, the next one will be desert. Thats about the only variation in the visuals you get in the whole game. Each planet also has its own enemy types, and especially the main boss enemy types. Like one planet will have this giant beetle bug enemy that is a huge bullet sponge, and another planet will have this big humanoid guy with a shield. Its always the same general idea though, one big enemy thats very tanky and hard to kill, and then you get swarmed by tons of small little trash mobs of different visuals. Its mostly like a lot of insect type enemies.

On paper it may sound boring and repetitive, but actually the gameplay is pretty fun and enjoyable. The general combat, shooting down dozens of enemies, the basic arcadey gameplay of dropping onto a map and completing simple objectives and then extracting. The twinstick shooter mechanics, and things like unlocking new weapons to play with is interesting and exciting. You start off with a basic machine gun but start to get other weapons like laser guns and laser shotguns which don't need ammo unless they overheat a few times (which is hard to do). I stuck with the laser shotgun for the whole game because not having to worry about ammo was comfy. The general gameplay can be exciting and keep you on the edge of your seat, because you can have most of the objectives in a mission complete, but then you can get wiped out and have to do it all over again. The co-op system is nice, with having to do those aforementioned button combo's to revive eachother is a mechanic that keeps you awake and paying attention.

So for awhile we began playing through the game. Scratching our head at this global overview map system, not sure how to actually progress through the game. Each region has a completion bar, so we figured we just pick regions and do missions in them to fill this bar up. Missions have difficulties, and the harder the difficulty, the more completion in the region we would achieve, we thought. But no matter what missions we did, the bar would barely move. We would grind the game away, doing dozens of missions, and still after all that the bars on the regions would just not move. It would say stuff like "+6 points awarded" and it seemed like nothing we did had any actual impact to progress the game. After scratching our heads and hammering out more missions, eventually we felt like we just were not making any progress in the game at all, which felt terrible and made the game not fun. Having no sense that anything youre doing is meaningful or impactful is one of the worst feelings a game can give you. It feels like you're wasting your time.

Finally I decided to do some research and Google around how to actually progress through this game. And even then for awhile it wasn't clear what was happening. The games "campaign" is so convoluted, gimmicky, and stupid that it was truly baffling. After 15 hours of playing the game I just got fed up and needed answers. Well it turns out virtually nothing you do individually matters. You see, Helldivers has this ~brilliant innovative~ gimmick where everything  happens in an online interconnected way. So the only way to progress the game is not by yourself playing it, but by many of thousands of other people playing and completing missions also. What this means in effect is you can play the game nonstop for 10 hours a day, and after a week of playing nonstop you can see virtually no progress. The only way to "beat the game" is to just wait until everyone else in the world completes enough missions to where all the regions are eliminated and then one day you login and suddenly you get a "Congratulations! The world has been conquered! The campaign is ended!" and then you see the end credits, and then the online game map rolls back to being at "Day 0" again.

Yeah, I really dislike that.
Maybe it would be fine if it was some optional online mode, but no, theres no single player. Theres no way to just playthrough the game with a buddy. In essence nothing you do has any real tangible impact, once we realized that, guess what? We figured theres no point to try to play the game for hours each day to try to progress through it, we actually just stopped playing the game entirely for a week, logged back in after a week, and sure enough the game was beaten and we got end credits, without even playing.

That is such a stupid, inane system that it totally ruined the entire game.
Helldivers is a great example of how fun gameplay is not enough, when the sense of progression is completely neutered and non-existent.
The game actively does not respect your time, and makes your efforts and play time feel meaningless and pointless.
I really hope Helldivers 2 is not like this, but something tells me it is, in which case I don't think I want to play it.
It's such a shame, this game could of been a solid experience, but this stupid gimmicky online campaign system (which I guess is what the main selling point of the game, ironically) totally butchered any feeling of a coherent, fun playthrough.

5/10