Dhelio Helldivers II Review

There's a quote a read somewhere about Bioware, where development of I forgot which game was trudging along all while developers were preoccupied by the state of the game; but the management was confident in the "Bioware magic", that being the capacity of the game to come together in the final stretch of development into one, cohesive product. This is what happened with Helldivers 2; a bunch of haphazard systems thrown in there that, together, merged into one unforgettable experience. And it really feels like Arrowhead is learning along while making updates for the game. There are and were plenty of systems that were broken, "didn't work as intended" (translated: we borked it up and didn't check before release), inconsistent in behaviour and mechanics, all of which were worked and reworked in the first few months of this live service game. And oh, how angry it made me, feeling the potential slip from this game. For a couple reasons. Arrowhead's motto is "a game for everyone is a game for no one", and it showed in how they approached balancing. They wanted an hard game, an unforgiving coop, where the Helldivers were expendable, thrown into the meat grinder of their fascist regime with no regard for their safety, brainwashed as they are. Sure, it made sense in the ingame lore. But players wanted a game they could actually play and excel in; they wanted a power fantasy with a little siding of satire, not with a whole serving. This friction was apparent with all the nerfs and baffling changes (I still am so angry with their change to the single player spawning rules, I still am not over it); up until they decided to swallow their pride and give player what they wanted: a fun game again. Another reason is probably the engine they're using with this one, that being Autodesk's Stingray, a now defunct engine that I'm sure Arrowhead is meticolously updating and reworking in the background. And I'm sure that this is hard work, with all the complicacies of making apparently simple changes or how simple changes cascade down to apparently unrelated changes (for example, how changing the spawn rates apparently disabled player count checking, making spawn rates work always like there was a full 4 player team playing.) And yet the game is so cohesive, so atmospheric, the shooting is so fun, the enemies so compelling, the objectives so varied, the setting so gripping, that even with these defects it remains one of the greatest third person shooters ever made. I have high expectations from the future of this game. I strongly recommend Helldivers 2.