Helldivers Motherfuckers!!
Helldivers brings the kind of white-knuckle cooperative gameplay that even Diablo III can’t bring. The fact that you can be killed by pretty much everything in the game, the equipment and support you can have delivered to you when all Hell breaks loose, and the constant, ever-waging war against the game’s enemy races all make Helldivers so much more than just another analog stick’d throwback to top-down shooters like Contra. Helldivers wants you stressed and paranoid when the hordes of enemies start charging at you and you accidentally blow away one of your friends with a shotgun before they even had a chance to be torn apart by something scarier than you. The staggering amount of friendly fire should be seen as a hindrance, but it keeps the game fresh, forcing players to actually become skilled instead of finding the most ridiculous pieces of kit and spamming them against the NPC hordes they come across.
Helldivers’ story and most of its gameplay mechanics come from a heavy-handed Starship Troopers overdose. Every mission involves players choosing their gear and drop-zone, running around a sandbox-style map to complete various objectives, and extracting via drop ship, all while fighting an army that outnumbers you, at the very least, 100-to-1 (or 1000-to-4, but damn the odds). Weapons range from the fairly typical firearms like assault rifles and sniper rifles to the more exotic sci-fare such as railguns, lasers, and shock-guns that shoot chained-lightning. The support items players can have dropped in to them scale in a similar fashion from airstrikes and boxes of ammo to exosuits and APCs that have have whole armories strapped to them. More often than not, successfully completing objectives in Helldivers relies on having a sentry turret dropped in to rain torrents of death on the encroaching hordes while players carry on with their missions; unless those scrubs forgot to go prone and got turned into a sloppy pile of human marinara sauce because they stood in between the democracy-hating enemies of Mankind and white-hot multi-barreled freedom.
Again, this game is intense, but it’s not just the team-kill factor that makes it that way. Every action that players make require physical button input. This might not sound too horrifying, but having to manually tap a button to go through the slow process of reloading an LMG in the middle of a balls-to-the-wall firefight traumatizes you. Calling in the support items and completing most of the objectives requires a multi-step button combination (remember the Konami Code?) that, again, will traumatize you, especially when you’re forced to do it as your screen quickly fills up with hostile forces and you begin to realize, “Wait, they aren’t being shot at…” This results in a very Dark Souls way of literally beating skill into players over time as they die and die again and again and again, which is entirely needed to develop the courage to graduate to taking on the game’s higher difficulties. From Medium on up, the teeming hordes of death just get more expansive and the game is more than happy to throw the heaviest enemies like tanks and rampaging rhino-esque bug-beasts into the fray and players also see an increase in the number of objectives they have to complete in this whirlpool of chaos and death.
Helldivers instills a sense of involvement that doesn’t come around often enough. The entire game is built upon a community-focused online experience that has everyone involved fighting the good fight. Players can even set a reinforcement beacon in the middle of a mission that invites other players on their behalf. Successful missions result in an increased influence on the Godless droves that oppose the Helldivers, but consistently failing missions or even neglecting to log on to fight leads to that same influence quickly diminishing. At times, all players will be called to take part in either the defense of a bastion of Mankind or a critical strike on a key enemy world. As these massive missions are either completed or failed, players will eventually be called upon to annihilate an alien homeworld, or be the last line of defense on Earth. It all depends on how well the community of Helldivers players wage war and spread freedom against the insurmountable odds they are set against.
Helldivers is one of those rare gems that should be unearthed more often. When you hear your Helldiver yell, “HOW’S ABOUT A NICE HOT CUP OF LIBERTY?” at the top of their lungs while emptying whole magazines into scores of enemies, you realize how much of a camp-fest this game really is. That being said, this is one of those camp-fests that has an underlying sense of dread, not unlike the first time you see Evil Dead II or even The Cabin in the Woods alone after 1:00 A.M. This really is one of the harder games I’ve ever played, but the sense of accomplishment it gives you when you see the big black dropship come into view after your first mission above Medium difficulty is mindblowing. Though, it is true that Helldivers is not the best looking game ever made, it is certainly one of the most rewarding games I’ve played. The best part about it is that it’s about the same price as a case of beer, but for that price, Helldivers is more fun and brings infinitely more anguish than alcohol ever will.
Git gud, scrub!