First Impressions: Helldivers

For liberty! For democracy! For why the hell not?! Helldivers is a co-op top down shooter that I first played back in EGX a couple of years ago, enjoyed and then forgot about, due to not having the necessary console to play it on. However, after giving in and buying PS+ so as to play some games online, I downloaded Helldivers (it was the free game of the month) and am really enjoying it.


1 part difficult shooter where everything can kill you (friendly fire has definitely been turned on), 1 part social experiment (everyone who plays online contributes to the Galactic Campaign) and 12 parts satire on 'just' wars and democracy for everyone. Helldivers is just a fun game plain and simple really. The game opens up with some graphics detailing what the story is about. As a Helldiver you are protecting your family from the alien menace in a preemptive strike against everything. The great thing is that the text and the photos seem at ends with one another, with 'bring democracy' and a photo of aliens being blown to pieces being shown at the same time.

I've played a couple of missions so far, completing a planet with Harry. As I said earlier, everything can kill you, from the machine guns that you place down, to the aliens, to your comrades. And this is exactly what happened. I played sniper with a pistol, taking carefully calculated shots at the precise centre of the enemy. Harry ran in with a shotgun and proceeded to melee everyone to death. Including me. But that's all part of the fun and 'accidentally' getting your revenge is great. Also being able to be revived nearly straight away is nice as well and lessens the frustration. I won't point out that after spending nearly 20 mins on a mission I threw a grenade and ended up killing both me and Harry in one fell swoop, just as the extraction ship landed on the planet. No, that definitely didn't happen.

The humour helps lessen any misgivings about the game as well. From shouting 'have a cup of liberty' to an alien bug that's head was blown off by some portable napalm to frantically jumping for cover as a nuke comes down (I was *this* close to getting blown to smithereens). The graphics are impressive with dynamic shadows and varied environments (even from my limited playtime). One gripe I did have was with finding the 'unexploded ordnance' as it didn't seem too intuitive to have to get a metal detector stratagem (the special weapons of the game) and I had to search it.

Overall though, I can't wait to play more of this game and it is definitely one of the surprise hits for me this year.

Thanks for reading, Satamer.