There aren’t many games like Helldivers 2 where you casually accept the fact that you might be kicked from the servers at any moment, forcing you to boot the game up again to rejoin your friends. In my last session, my party experienced six crashes between us, and yet somehow this didn’t put a dampener on our experience. Every time someone crashed out of a mission, there was plenty of time left on the clock for us to wait for them to hop back in so they didn’t miss out on the mission rewards.
It’s been two weeks since the co-op game launched and, just like DJ Khaled, it suffers from success. Server issues for AAA games aren’t uncommon as they usually get hammered at launch, but this is practically unprecedented for a game like Helldivers 2. Despite suggestions from the developer’s CEO to wait for the server issues to get fixed before spending your hard-earned cash, that hasn’t stopped the PC player count from rising as it continues to rank among Steam’s most popular games.
Helldiver 2’s gameplay loop can be understood by anyone within five minutes: head to a location to either blow something up or gather some data, and kill anything trying to kill you. There are two types of enemies that you can encounter, Terminids (aliens) and Automatons (robots), and you should customize your loadout to account for their weaknesses.
In this squad-based third-person shooter, playing with three friends drastically enhances the experience for both hardcore and casual players. While you can play the game with just two players, you’re missing out on a lot of chaotic action by bumping the party up to four. Before deploying onto a planet, you’re equipped with a primary weapon, a sidearm, and a selection of stratagems. Stratagems are special tools that offer offensive and supportive abilities, featuring a limited number of uses depending on its power level, and a cooldown timer.
It’s easy to see how players could spend hundreds of hours learning to perfect each mission with their squad, carefully selecting different weapons and stratagems to suit the occasion. You’re going to need to strategize to accomplish any of the missions on Helldive, the game’s highest difficulty, but it isn’t required if you’re just looking to have a fun time. That’s part of the reason Helldivers 2 is so popular: it features nine difficulty levels to give every type of player the experience they want. My squad and I aren’t about that life. The challenging difficulty suits my squad perfectly; it’s hard enough to keep us on our toes without having to optimize our builds for each mission with the best Helldivers 2 loadouts.
Each member of your squad comes packing numerous explosives ready to take down waves of enemies; however, it’s important to remember that friendly fire is always on. While your laser-spewing ‘Guard Dog’ Rover drone may seem cool, that thing doesn’t care about its targets. Likewise, that Eagle 500KG Bomb is capable of dealing serious damage, so you need to let people know when you’re about to set one off, otherwise you’re going to be public enemy number one among your team.
Trust me, I’ve been killed by that damn Guard Dog drone so many times that I almost forgot that my game crashed earlier in the mission. That’s why a lot of people don’t seem to care about the server problems or any technical issues Helldivers 2 is currently experiencing. When you’re in a Discord server with your friends, pumping lead into a never-ending wave of robots, while attempting to dive out of the way of a poorly timed orbital strike, all is forgiven.