Helldiving ain't easy, but it's necessary. There's a lot of bugs. And robots. I haven't seen any robot bugs yet, but I wouldn't put it past the enemies of managed democracy to stitch together hideous, chimaerical Terminid-Automaton hybrids born to hate our way of life.
I'd heard murmurs about Helldivers II using the top down view, and what did it mean (?!?!), but that's the thing I wanted them to get rid of first. Not being able to see what was fucking happening harmed my experience of Helldivers, even though I thought it was really good. Relentless dedication on the part of developer Arrowhead Studios to a kind of murderous slapstick via team damage is a holdover from Magicka, a whackadoodle co-op game where you… craft magic in real-time? Weird as Helldivers is, it's positively mainstream compared to their earlier shit.
When I was talking to Gabe about Helldivers II a couple days ago, for him the Starship Troopers+ tone is sort of a no-go. If they aren't taking it seriously, it makes it hard for him to take it seriously. But I think (oh here we go) that the game fundamentally requires this ironic shell around it in order to work at all. Dying is usually a failure state, and has a bunch of negative connotations - both in game, and in real life. Helldivers doesn't really agree. Death is expected, and the best possible case is that you can get into the spirit of the whole thing and take it as silly. They're priming you for the airstrike whose detonation radius you have sorely misjudged - the summoned autoturret that has a high rate of fire, but no ability whatsoever to distinguish the champions of Super Earth from grotesque alien war-forms. The greatest indication of this is that you start with a huge pile of respawns. This means the game can be hard, stupid hard, and failures - however they may occur - are a resource.
The game is a lot of things on paper. It has guns and soldiers and shit, and is a shooter kinda - the gunplay is exceptional. But as a play experience, it's much woolier. You have to accomplish sometimes very complex things based on the missions that world has - you're gonna have to play a bunch of Finger DDR to launch an ICBM, etc. But the raft of tools you're given - between the carried arsenal, crew served weapons, co-op weapons, orbital strikes, attacks from fast movers and autonomous emplacements - give encounters a profound amount of possibility space. And the fact that so many of these things come from off-map sells the the idea - absolutely sells it - that you're in an active theater and it's much bigger than you and your people - some of whom are still alive.
That said, shooter skills are going to help you because Arrowhead certainly isn't. And not because they're mean - they want you to learn all of this on the job, and remember it, because while Helldivers II might be a product it's also a community. One of your "stratagems" - call-down abilities, basically - sends a signal to other players. Despite how many times you might kill teammates, you know… per minute, the game has no official PvP mode that isn't just the PvE mode played very poorly. Oriented toward the setting properly, allowing for the occasional "accident," I've had tremendous success a substantial amount of the time playing with Rando Calrissian. A player dropped in, and the first thing this motherfucker did out of the pod was salute me. This means a couple things - one, they know where the B key is. Always a good sign. And two? It was time to go to fucking work.
They're still working out backend shit, two big patches just since Monday, but they're turning the surprising sales into jobs and a focus on content. Their friendly "warbond" take on a Season Pass kicks ass - one you can progress however you want, it never goes away, and feels like filling out a stickerbook or a Passbort booklet on your own terms. The legs on it could be substantial - judging from its predecessor, which saw airdropped vehicles and trench-style emplacements alongside cosmetics and weapons, the sky is the limit. Or "skies," perhaps I should say, hanging dark over a thousand million doomed worlds.
(CW)TB out.
