I wouldn’t pay $60 for this because it is absolutely set up like a F2P game with pain-in-the-ass story that I’m sure works way better if you’re actually used to MMO storytelling, but hot dog is this the best 80 gig free download I’ve made in a while, the shoots and moves are cozy but most importantly it’s a first person shooter where, get this:
YOU CAN SEE YOUR HECKIN’ LEGS.
Which I’m actually kind of mad is something I’m excited about, because it should noT BE REMOTELY THIS RARE DANGIT.
The fact that people have mixed opinions on Pyre is a good thing
More than that, people who were fans of Bastion and/or Transistor are just as likely to be harsh on Pyre as a critic of Supergiant’s past work likely to fall in love with their latest foray into magic sports-ball. What this all means is that Supergiant have more or less succeeded in what they set out to do; create something new every time they make a game.
What one person loves about a given Supergiant game might be what someone else hates about it. The appeal of the mechanics in any of their games is highly subjective, not to mention divisive. Often the same person who loves one Supergiant game will be lukewarm on the next one, and vice versa. The matter of fact is that each of their games appeals to a different niche audience in terms of their gameplay, as opposed to catering to a wider audience or hitting the same niche every time. The fact that Supergiant have now made three video games, each filling a very different niche, is nothing short of incredible. The fact that each of their titles has a different set of fans and detractors is a testament to this.
More importantly, no matter what side of the fence people are sitting on, there is near-universal agreement that Supergiant’s games both look and sound fantastic, and are produced to a high standard of quality. Whatever gripes people have with their games have to do with personal taste in gameplay and story, not with the overall quality of the games themselves. Even though people will disagree on the merits of Pyre’s magical dunkball gameplay and its expanded scope and cast of characters, there’s a consensus that it’s a well-made game. What all this means is that Supergiant Games is, more than ever before, a studio to keep your eyes on. It’s going to be impossible to know who of any of us will love their next game, and who will merely feel lukewarm. However, we do know that whatever it is it’s going to be like nothing we expect, and it’s going to look and sound fantastic.
Keep making new things, Supergiant. Keep surprising us.
Helldivers, developed by Arrowhead Studios, published by Playstation Mobile, Inc. Available on PS4 and Windows (Steam).
It’s interesting how I started playing Helldivers just this year, as the climate of North American politics becomes ever more absurd. Interesting because Helldivers is “Starship Troopers: The Game” in all but name. Not Starship Troopers, the novel, but rather the Verhoeven movie which satirized everything from fascist ideology to Hollywood’s idea of battle strategy to military propaganda films. Like all good satire a good many people failed to see the joke, but that’s another story. Luckily for us, Helldivers’ satire is very on-the-nose with its vainglorious musical themes, the defense of Democracy for Super Earth™, and various Helldiver vocal barks such as “How d’you like the taste of democracy?!”, “Freedom delivery!” and “Have a nice cup of liber-TEA!”. Taking Helldivers seriously is like taking any aspect of the Warhammer 40000 setting seriously. Indeed Helldivers does seem to have some 40k in its rather Imperial Guard skulls-and-fascism aesthetic.
The fact that I’ve only begun to play Helldivers in the recent few months is also interesting because the game is extremely focused on cooperative multiplayer, and my friends are three time zones away from me. I’ve had to mostly play Helldivers with random strangers, and while I’ve had some great moments of team triumph and disaster, it’s really not the same as experiencing those kinds of moments with friends. Helldivers’ co-op nature won’t be a surprise to anyone who has played Arrowhead Studios’ claim to fame: a little game called Magicka, in which a team of between one and four incompetent wizards try to save the world. Part of what made that game tick was the spell casting system; you controlled your wizard using a top-down Diablo-like control scheme, and you could combine eight different magical elements on the fly in various quantities and combinations to create spells. Learning various spell combinations and unleashing over-the-top displays of elemental death was a big portion of the game. Either that, or you’d accidentally leave a crucial element out of a spell and set yourself on fire, or electrocute yourself, or heal an enemy instead of disintegrate them, or... well, let’s just say that there’s a reason Magicka is known to many as the Mage Suicide Simulator.
The other thing that made the game tick was other players, since spells could interact with other spells, and there was no option to turn friendly fire off. Fire a beam of healing energy and if it accidentally touched your friend’s arcane death beam it would create an explosion, probably hurling your friend off a cliff. Cast a bubble shield to keep everyone safe while your friend is firing a blast of electricity and the energy would ricochet around inside the bubble, zapping everyone. What kept it from turning into a rage-fest were a couple of things. Firstly, the revive spell was very easy to cast even while you were being mobbed by enemies and it would bring all your dead friends back to life immediately. Secondly, a team of wizards who knew what they were doing would become a force of nature, combining elemental effects to devastating effect. Occasionally even a competent team of wizards would self-destruct in spectacular fashion (my “favorite” is “exploding circle of electrified arcane ice walls”. That’s right, Thegiant, I’m talking to you), but the results are generally as hilarious as they are explosive.
Helldivers, then, is a decent if finicky top-down shooter when played solo, but truly shines when you start playing it with others. It takes a little more nuance to play than you might expect from the seemingly standard twin-stick shooter template. Weapons have a fairly small amount of ammunition per magazine, the number of magazines you can carry is limited, reloading takes a long time, and whatever ammunition was left in your magazine when you reload is dropped forever. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect from a simulation-focused game like ARMA, not from a twin-stick shooter. On top of this, your character can equip four “stratagems” - air support and special equipment dropped from orbit. These are called in by pressing a sequence of direction keys, a system which is a little reminiscent of the famous Konami code. Completing the sequence correctly gives your character a beacon which they then throw like a grenade. The stratagem will then arrive at the beacon’s location: generally a pod containing the requested equipment, landing at terminal velocity from space. As this is a game from the people who made Magicka, the pod (or airstrike, or vehicle) will kill anything it lands on. The contents of the stratagem usually need to be treated with care as well, since things like turrets and airstrikes will not care if you happen to be in the way. They won’t deliberately target you, but a turret can and will shoot anything that’s between itself and its target. All in all, at this point Helldivers is a game that requires some finesse to play, but doesn’t seem all that special. In fact, a lot of the things it does seem like small inconveniences for the sake of inconveniencing the player.
And then comes the point at which you call in some friends or strangers, or join someone else’s mission in progress. On the easier missions, what usually happens next is pure chaos. Friendly fire is once again a reality of life, not an option to be turned off. It’s easy enough to call in dead friends as reinforcements from orbit, but the stratagem beacon is damnably imprecise, and its resemblance to a grenade means that all too many people will throw it at a mob of enemies. Then again, the pod you arrive in will kill anything it lands on, but that can also include the guy who dropped the respawn beacon in the first place. Being killed by your own friends is a reality in Helldivers, even by complete accident. Even something as simple as waiting for the shuttle to pick you up at the end of the mission can become deadly as people start calling in spare mech suits, extra turrets, landmines and airstrikes whether they’re actually needed or not. The shuttle itself will crush anyone incautious enough to be standing under it when it arrives.
But then you play enough games with the same group or with your friends, you start playing harder missions, and something magical happens: everyone starts working as a team. You start noticing how entire systems of the game are built to encourage, nay, require cooperative play. The camera itself, locked into a top-down view which forces all four players to be on the screen at once, ensures that everyone is always moving as a team. The risk of friendly fire means that everyone instinctively starts moving in staggered formations and will maintain clear cones of fire. Simply calling in an essential stratagem can take time and attention away from incoming enemies, and having friends to cover you when you’re stratagem-ing and reloading your gun is enormously helpful. Since each player can only bring four stratagems into a mission, this encourages specialization. One player might use two slots for mech suits so she has a spare if one is destroyed or runs out of ammo. Another player brings a personal shield generator and a repair gun to act as the engineer. Another one brings turrets and barbed wire. The fourth brings a variety of heavy weapon options.
Many weapons and vehicles themselves flat out work better if you’re playing with a team. Simply wielding a lot of the heavy weapons keeps you stationary, so you’re relying on teammates to watch your back. Mech suits turn slowly and have a weak point in the rear, so it’s a good idea for other players to keep enemies off of the flanks. The APC has huge blind spots in its firing angles unless a full team of four are manning all the turrets. The rocket launchers in Helldivers come with a support pack which carries all the spare ammunition. The player using the rocket launcher can carry the support pack themselves and reload their weapon solo, but this takes several seconds during which they’re immobile. If another player carries the support pack and reloads the launcher for their friend when prompted, however, this only takes about half a second. A team of players who know what they’re doing can bring a truly impressive amount of firepower to bear, and are all the more impressive for the fact that this represents a lot of trust, communication and genuine teamwork between them.
The final thing that makes Helldivers a blast to play is the way that the game throws in small bits of chaos. Mainly these involve the inherent lack of precision when tossing out stratagem beacons crossed with the abundance and power of friendly fire. The finicky nature of a lot of this game’s mechanics at this point become points of failure, things that can and do go wrong when you’re under attack and just want to call in some more ammo, dammit! Small crises can cascade into larger crises, leading to panic and improvisation and the moments of triumph or disaster which make a good co-op action game shine. Two people reload at the same time, and suddenly cyborg dogs are eating your faces off. A stratagem beacon, thrown in the middle of a pitched fight, might bounce off a rock. Seconds later, your respawning friend arrives in a pod dropped from orbit and flattens your team’s APC. The guy piloting a mech suit might step backwards at the wrong moment and take off most of your health. One enemy patrol might wander in while you were dealing with a persistent tank, extending the engagement long enough for two more patrols to wander in, and then what was only a small, controlled engagement becomes a full on brawl. A turret might get placed just a few feet short of where you had meant to put it, and your friends were paying too much attention to the incoming wave of enemies to notice that they were between the turret and its targets. Like Magicka, the ease with which dead friends can be brought back means that death is mainly a source of comedy rather than a major setback. Like Magicka, it is when you’re teetering right at the edge of triumph or disaster with a dozen small things that could tip you either way that the game is really at its best.
A knife’s-edge of tension and a lot of balls to juggle isn’t required for all cooperative multiplayer games, but it certainly seems to be an important element of the shooter ones at least. Left 4 Dead’s Director AI was designed explicitly to keep players constantly on their toes, and the composition of later waves in Killing Floor is tuned to overwhelm the players unless they prioritize targets properly. The famous Nazi Zombies mode of the later Call Of Dutys kept players running around performing damage control by putting up barricades to keep the horde at a manageable level. Helldivers accomplishes the same thing by giving everyone a dozen things to do and get wrong at the same time, but compensates by keeping the price for each individual failure fairly small. A great mission in Helldivers is one in which each small crisis leads into another just as the previous one is resolved, and you don’t quite get the opportunity to recover and brace yourself for the next one. A great mission in Helldivers ends when the extraction shuttle lands on top of a giant alien bug and narrowly avoids crushing the player that the bug was about to eat. That player piles in just as another player dives out of the way of a badly placed strafing run and the third player sprints over from where he’d been taking cover next to his minigun turret and a pile of bug corpses. Finally, the shuttle takes off moments before the explosion of a nuclear bomb stratagem someone dropped just for the hell of it.
Tune in next time when Taihus thumps a rhythm somewhere out beyond the limits of sanity.
-Taihus “How about a nice cup of liber-TEA?!” @raincoastgamer
One of if not the best RTS-on-console control schemes, super simple to pick up and play. Simple but seems to have a satisfying amount of depth thus far. Great aesthetic. You know how Animal Farm is supposed to be an allegory for the Soviet revolution? Tooth and Tail is much more literal, except that famine and social change is driving all the animals to eat meat. Someone in this society has to become dinner.
I haven’t had a chance to dabble in multiplayer yet, but the single-player campaign has done a fine job delivering a great variety in missions thus far, along with a story that turns out to be more complex than the surface might suggest.
Some might think that the limited control scheme of this game - you control a leader character who basically acts as your cursor and scout - would make for clunky controls and reduced depth. However, in my oh-so-very-humble opinion the reduction of RTS gameplay to the basic principles of resource flow, army composition and unit positioning allows for a surprising amount of depth while keeping things simple enough to control with a controller. The controls are unorthodox, but they work once you get your muscles used to them.
More detailed thoughts might come around later, if I ever get around to it.
This is the most engaged I’ve been in a real video game for years, though part of that may be the fabled autistic hyper-fixation. It is the right genre of horror for me and i can’t believe I didn’t try it until now. It also takes a lot of time because I play rather cautiously to the point I haven’t died yet, and I overprepare for exploration way too much while constantly forgetting the specific necessary things I need to prepare over an over again, but that’s just a normal day for me.
Now the game says I’ve been surviving in the water crater for 87 days in game despite all the monsters and super pandemic bacterium.
