You’re encouraged to be a jerk in Helldivers. No, really.
Your antagonistic nature is partly due to the premise of the game; as a Helldiver of Super Earth in 2084, you’re a member of a specialised military corps dedicated to bringing a single, ‘managed’ democracy to the rest of the galaxy. Reading between the lines that means conquering every single planet you can travel to. It’s done under the guise of protecting Super Earth’s citizens, but really, you travel to planets and wipe out their ever-spawning inhabitants using guns, nukes and whatever else you see fit to rain down.
The other way to be a jerk is perhaps unintentional; Helldivers allows for up to four-player co-op, and all the while, friendly fire is a go. You’re of course encouraged to co-operate with your fellow Helldivers, but why bother when you can simply wipe them out for sport?
Helldivers is a top-down, partly strategic, quasi-twin-stick shooter. You control a single Helldiver, armed with a primary weapon, sidearm, grenades and melee ability. Your weapons are fired with the right trigger and aimed with the right stick. Grenades are tied to the left trigger, and you can also run or drop to the earth for cover.
That latter ability is important, as Helldivers are also able to call down things called Stratagems, which fall from the sky and provide ammo, nuclear capabilities, an auto-turret — that’ll target you if you don’t duck — and much more. Stratagems, like normal objective beacons, are activated using a precise button combination using the d-pad. Think the Konami code without the A, B. Strategy comes into play with Stratagems; when they rocket down to the planet from your support ship, they have the potential to wipe out anything that happens to be under it. That’s friend or foe, by the way.
That’s it; the rest of the game involves moving from planet to planet, wiping out inhabitants and activating objective markers… and then repeating. There’s a bit of variety in planets and enemies, but not much; you’ll either find yourself on a snow, sand or forest planet fighting spiders, ghost-things or robots. Single-player gets quite boring very quickly, even with the game’s MMOesque grind for better equipment and upgrades. It also gets quite boring even considering the game is hard as all hell, throwing wave after wave of enemy at you with no end in sight.
Multiplayer alleviates some of this boredom, but causes its own problems in kind. Travelling through a planet with three other friends or randoms certainly livens things up, but only with the right mix of people. Playing with randoms, I jumped into an existing game… and, because a fellow player didn’t think to move when he saw my Helldiver jumping down, got crushed by my travel pod. Apparently pissed off beyond believe, he spend the entire rest of the match chasing me around, trying to shoot me to death.
He succeeded a few times, too. Way to get your ‘revenge’, buddy.
A neat little addition to the game is that no matter your poison – single- or multi-player, every planet you conqu— um, liberate, adds to a global count. Helldivers works on a cycle, with all players racing against the clock to either take over the galaxy, or fall to alien ‘aggressors’. It doesn’t really affect day-to-day gameplay all that much, but it’s a neat little idea.
Cross-buy, play, save and chat means that you can take your game across PS3, PS4 and PS Vita, but I wouldn’t recommend using the latter. On PS4, the game plays perfectly on the DualShock, offering a range of commands at easy disposal. On Vita, you’re running with a press of the touchscreen, and reloading and throwing grenades using portions of the rear touchpad. It’s clunky at best. The Vita version also loses some nice finishing-touches when compared to the PS4; when downed on the Vita, you don’t get the neat little river of blood that trails you when downed.
Priced at $32 AUD, Helldivers is a great buy for groups of friends who know they’ll want to play together, or for fans who simply can’t get enough of Starship Troopers. For the rest of us, Helldivers is a neat little romp that’ll get old pretty quickly.
Helldivers was reviewed using a promotional code on PS4 and PS Vita, as provided by the publisher.
