Helldivers: 2 is a celebration of gaming. It’s fun, frantic and promotes antics among friends. It exists in a landscape of triple A, bug-infested (Terminids don’t count), monetization-heavy tragedies, rising above to deliver an entertaining experience without the heavy-handed tactics commonly utilized nowadays. It’s far from a perfect game, but it has more potential than many others released in proximity.

You are a soldier sent to fight the enemies of democracy. That’s the entire story here. There are currently two factions of enemies that exist to cause problems for Super Earth; you are tasked with eradicating as many of them as you can to keep the world safe. Player characters will shout pro-democracy slogans all throughout the battlefield, adding to the world-building. These voicelines are quite humorous at first, but become tiresome after a few hours of play. 

The real magic comes from the hijinks that occur with friends. It is as fun as your comrades make it, which is both the game’s strength and its downfall. Without friends, the experience feels barebones, but it’s fine. Alone, the game is impossible. To play alone you must select a lower difficulty or you will constantly die. It is balanced for cooperative play only. Playing with friends results in lots of “accidental” friendly fire scenarios and constant yelling of obscenities and democracy praising jargon. It is a wild game with the right people, as such your results may vary.

Gameplay is chunky and reactive. You can blast limbs off of enemies with a moderate array of weapons and stratagems. The power weapons, turrets and nukes that you get from stratagems tend to trivialize the experience. A friend put it like this “you are a scout for the guys in orbit” and this phrasing equates to the experience perfectly. You are responsible for aiming the big ships in orbit and not much else. It gives you the perspective of a replaceable drone, which does not lend to a rewarding progression.

Movement is weighty, and can be a slog. This is a problem when you need to trek across half the planet to reach an objective. Moving through fauna and water is a task that your soldier is not equipped for. As of now there are no vehicles in the game (minus a mech). With these obstacles, you also have to deal with stamina. Why do these trained soldiers have a stamina bar? I don’t know, but it further dampens the traversal issues I have with the game. Diving to the ground is always entertaining and the added stability while firing feels great. You can also acquire this stability while crouching; adding variety to the formations you and your squad can take adds to the squad mentality and cohesion.

Progression is tied to in-game currency and a battle pass. The prices are not egregious and you earn quite a bit of currency by playing missions and finding places of interest, though in the early stages you will feel weak compared to others. Your main power comes from stratagems and you can upgrade these further through ship augments. To get new stratagems you need currency earned from completing missions. A few separate currencies are used for upgrading your ship, and these can only be acquired in missions by finding samples or opening caches. The grind for these upgrades can take a while, and the entire time you can be matched up with people that already have powerful stratagems. These matches are usually one-sided endeavors where you are carried by your teammates, not because you want to be, but because they are constantly dropping bombs on the enemies, leaving none for you to dispatch. Progression is relatively well-paced regarding weapon and armor unlocks, but the others need some adjustment.

There are also armor classes. Each armor set has stats and some passive effects. Currently this system feels unnecessary and tacked on because most of the options don’t make much of a difference. There are slightly modified versions of weapons as well, but like the armor, their implementation doesn’t change the gameplay enough to warrant use.

Mission types are varied and allow for more diverse gameplay per drop. It usually boils down to gunning down enemies while a teammate completes the objective, but it’s still satisfying. Escorting survivors can feel like a chore, but the other objectives lead to some tense moments. Aligning a satellite or readying a nuke while the enemy closes in, heightens the pressure for the situation to a new level. Most of the objectives require a good amount of teamwork and again this is where you will need to party up to guarantee success.

The game itself is well-made, but has a few quirks that I am not a fan of. The solo experience is abysmal and playing with randoms is a mixed bag. Guns feel great, but do not impact the gameplay as much as the stratagems. Your importance in the war effort is minimal and the game makes you aware of that quickly. With some tweaks this game can become one of the greats, but as of now it’s a moderately entertaining experience with friends and nothing more.