Summary

Review

I feel conflicted about Helldivers. I enjoy it. Generally. But I strongly feel that the core gameplay loop is not enough to hold up the game overall. I feel like it's missing one or two verbs. The missions are fun enough, but you do two or three of them and you can see the shape of the rest of the game. I know there's the increasing difficulty. But my core problem is that no matter how easy or hard the game is, you're doing the same things over and over and I feel like there's just not quite enough going on on the map. Like there's a dimension missing.

I want situations where you've gotta split up the divers into two groups to investigate a facility overrun by Xenos. You're creeping around in the dark and then suddenly hear the other squad start screaming bloody murder and then they're gone. There's just something missing from the game and that extra layer of unique incidence feels like it. Each map is slightly different but you're doing the same thing on each.

I think that's what made me not care about Helldivers 2 even though it blew up. The 2d was not the thing that bothered me. The 3d is cool and it seems like they put a lot of work into it. But you still seem to be doing largely the same things every time and that's the big issue I had with the game.

Overall fun, but I don't have much interest picking it up again.

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