![]() ![]() Clips are short and stringently rationed. While Helldivers basically operates like a fancy twin-stick shooter, the endless ammo of Robotron is but a distant memory. You'll even need to think about how it affects the order in which you should tackle those missions.Įxample. Equally, you'll need to think about how your gear clips together with the missions you're facing in each level. Suddenly, the loadouts you take into battle with you make a huge difference to your chances of success. So strategic, in fact, that Helldivers becomes something of a puzzle game if you choose to go solo on higher difficulties. As a lone wolf, you need to be a lot more strategic. After all, you can chug through pretty much anything the game throws at you with four well coordinated players. The rules are the same, the missions are unchanged, and it's still all about those waves, but the emphasis is completely distinct. (Speaking of which, it offers cross-play in a similarly elegant manner, and your progress is carried across between platforms with few hiccups, as far as I can tell.) Multiplayer's pretty wonderfully supported, too, offering local play and online match-making with a minimum of fuss. It's where the real tension lurks, as you try to not be the guy who scrubs the mission three mini-objectives in. Needless to say, multiplayer is the heart of the game. What do space fascists like to do in their spare time? Spin their capes theatrically, apparently - there's even a trophy for it. If you don't take a few comrades with you when you expire, you're not really playing Helldivers as it's meant to be played. You just have to plug away at them as efficiently as you can, taking them out before they raise the alarm, prioritising the bigger guys over the smaller guys, and not shooting any friendlies as you go. These critters come at you endlessly, too. It's all about busywork and holding territory as you fend off waves of critters of varying sizes. Whatever shape they take, missions generally involve frantic matching of complex d-pad prompts as you interact with terminals - if you're familiar with the brew-your-own-spells system that brings Magicka to chaotic life, you'll know the kind of dexterity that's required - and then a lot of waiting around while a timer ticks down. Instead, you're there to do purposefully infuriating little missions - readying a missile launcher, priming an oil pump, escorting survivors to a bunker, protecting a rocket as it prepares to launch. Helldivers is ultimately a game about panic: your four-man team is never landing on a planet to wipe out all members of the game's three alien races and clear the map. It is hard to make up for something like that, so I simply leapt into the evac ship that he had called, and disappeared back into single-player as swiftly as I could. Sadly, dear reader, I squashed him flat with my falling Hellpod. The other day I decided to head into multiplayer, and I landed in a map just as a heroic Helldiving stranger was finishing off what had clearly been an epic one-man stand while he waited for evac. I'm worried about the inevitable court-martial - or game boot - when I do something stupid. I'm not worried about my part in a wider galactic war, or even the obvious ethical problems with my mission. ![]() I'm not worried about the bug hunt, although it's relentless. Price and availabilityįriendly fire's what I fear when I drop into play, screaming out of orbit, gun ready, grenades primed. Or stepped on by them if they've unlocked mechs. It's so terribly easy to be shot by your own team-mates. The biggest of these is friendly fire: it is so terribly easy to shoot your own team-mates in Helldivers. In other words, you should expect a few quirks. But this is also the latest game from Magicka developer Arrowhead Game Studios - a studio, right, whose logo shows an arrow going through somebody's head. Helldivers is a top-down shooter for up to four players, and it sees you blasting your way through procedurally-generated alien worlds as a cheery space fascist, spreading Managed Democracy across the universe. That is to say, in the future, social anxiety will have a lot to do with whatever weapons you'll be carrying around. In the future, social anxiety will be weaponised. Brutal, panic-inducing and hilarious, Helldivers is Arrowhead Game Studios' co-op madness at its best. ![]()
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