Rest assured girlfriends everywhere, it’s not another woman, your boyfriend has just joined a fake military in his new favorite video game. Arrowhead Studios and Sony Interactive Entertainment have called to arms both Playstation and PC gamers alike to join the fight for “Managed Democracy” and defend Super Earth’s way of life in Helldivers 2.
Helldivers as an intellectual property borrows heavily from the premise of Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film, “Starship Troopers.” The film satirically presents the hypothetical propaganda a spacefaring fascist hegemony might produce by loosely adapting Robert Heinlein’s 1959 pro-fascist sci-fi novel of the same name.
Helldivers adapts the film’s satirical ethos to its new medium somewhat poorly. Where Verhoeven, using cinema, parodied fascist films like Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” Helldivers could do more to parody peers in the gaming industry like the Call of Duty franchise, which has historically been used as a recruitment tool for the US military. One point in Helldivers’ favor is that it can at times be genuinely funny, such as allowing players freedom to name their starships what they like; I went with the “SES Legislator of Family Values.”
As for the gameplay, Helldivers 2 is a major departure from its predecessor, moving away from the top-down twin-stick shooter to a third-person over-the-shoulder shooter. This second installment takes many cues from Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (MGSV).
Entering an open zone with primary and secondary mission objectives along with tactically deploying orbitally dropped munitions and supplies are just a few core mechanics shared between the two games. Managing resources to upgrade your starship and gear between operations are also central to the core gameplay loop. During a firefight, combat can feel remarkably similar to MGSV’s Fox Engine, dramatically diving into the prone position, toggling iron sights, and navigating ordinance deployment without pausing the surrounding carnage.
From a starship, players select a planet within contested sectors and deploy to fight in what is currently a two-front war against both the insectoid Terminids and the robotic Automatons. Each planet displays a “Liberation” percentage, which will increase as more players successfully complete missions on said planet. A particular planet that has become the subject of endless memes is Malevelon Creek, home to particularly difficult missions and Automaton forces.
Future content rollout could include a third front to the war against the “Illuminates,” an aquatic interstellar alien civilization that appeared in Helldivers 1. The game’s galactic war map also seems to include additional unutilized space for what could be a fourth enemy faction.
Arrowhead Studios and Sony unfortunately did not anticipate the level of interest the game has garnered since its release, and even now several weeks post-launch, little has been done to alleviate the problem of insufficient server support. Launching into the game typically greets the player with a screen stating “Error: Servers at capacity. Please try again later.”
Once, while sitting on this screen, I received an invite to join a friend’s game and after accepting it, caused my whole computer to crash. This anecdote is just one instance of the many bugs players are forced to contend with (pun intended).
Johan Pliestedt, CEO of Arrowhead Studios has recently stated that for those who want to play the game, it would be “worth waiting until the servers can support the capacity.” Hopefully, in time, these issues will be addressed and we can get our soldiers back on the front lines fighting for our planet and spreading freedom throughout the galaxy. Until then, I’ll be doing my part, waiting on the error screen with my comrades.