ZiggingZebra

This game can easily be a 10. Unfortunately, the number of bugs (non-arachnid kind) and the inability to engage in quick play consistently, takes a large hit on what it an online co-op only game. There is enough here to see that this isn’t a bad game by any stretch, but due to the limitations of the online infrastructure at the moment, it does cause bad experiences. If Duke Nukem is about kickin ass and taking names, Helldivers II is about getting your ass ripped from your torso and being replaced with another nameless soldier. You will die a lot, but aim for the gaster. These bugs were designed to kill you in so many glorious ways. Some shoot lava out of their mouths. Some secrete poison upon death. Some can fly for about, oh, forty feet and break your leg as you try to run away from a swarm of peons with an empty clip in you secondary weapon and trying to reload your primary. The haptics also do a great job at immersing you further into the game. Did you leg break trying to run away? You probably felt a pop. Just blow off half of an arachnid’s face off? You felt the pump-action motion. Did you orbital-launch planet-side? You felt the launch. The PS5’s Dualsense controller is well adapted for this sort of thing, and you will feel everything that it has to offer. It punches above its weight in this way. The gameplay in Helldivers II is almost second to none. While on the surface, it’s just another GaaS with a battle pass and buyable in-game credits, the moment to moment gameplay, planetside can get as cinematic as any war game out there. The move from a top-down to a third-person perspective was smart. Now when you interact with a terminal, you can feel the pressure as your comrades die around you… or accidentally blow you up with an orbital strike. The range of tasks that you have to complete are just plentiful enough that you won’t feel like you’re doing the exact same thing over and over but there aren’t so many unique tasks where you always feel like you’re playing a new game and tripping over cumbersome, new mechanics. At the conclusion of a mission, you’ll receive mission details, like who shot friendlies the most and who had the best accuracy. You also get a live view of how much your little squad impacted that planet’s liberation, which is almost comical when your squad could have had a hell of time making it to extraction only to see that your total impact was .0032%. You operate in a shared world, and everyone’s .0032% add together, so the more liberate one planet, the more progress shows. It’s not all good, though. A sore spot in Helldivers II is the ineffective matchmaking system. How a developer of an online-only game can manage to mess up the online connection so badly is a masterclass in “oof”. Though we’re only a few days from launch, 95% of the time I try to find random players via quick play, I immediately lose connection. I heard a remedy for this was to add people as friends that then just join their session directly. I’ve tried that, and I get the same error code about as often. It seems to take a stroke of luck to to finally connect to a group of people, and by that time, I have to hope that the game doesn’t crash at a pivotal moment. Out of six hours that I’ve spent playing the game (on the planet, shooting bugs), my game has crashed three times. It’s also never crashed in solo play, but it’s crashed when I’m with other people, making it more frustrating because if I lose connection with my group, the chances that I’ll be able to connect to another group for a wile is slim, meaning if I want to treat my addiction immediately. All in all, what is here in Helldivers II is fantastic. The moment to moment gameplay can be as good as it gets in modern gaming should everything server side work as intended, but even when it doesn’t, there’s still a lot of fun to have in the memories you’ve made during your jumps. Should Arrowhead figure out these major issues, I’d be glad to come back here and give the game what it deserves. Until then, I’ll continue to do my part. 8/10

Pretty bad single player and incredibly unbalanced multiplayer. You get shot from everywhere. It’s one of the most unsatisfying CoDs to date. And the audio is absolutely atrocious. When you hear footsteps they might as well be behind you then way it sounds. And the game is buggy as hell. Massive disappointment.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

This is the worst Gears game I’ve ever played and it’s one of the worst games I’ve ever beaten.