The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 13th

Would you like to know more? Open the door and earn your citizenship today.

It's Helldivers 2!

Graham: Ever had a weird, funny friend who one day cut off his long hair, started wearing shirts, and put all his Warhammer figures away? He's being "a grown-up", he says, and - totally coincidentally - he's got a posh girlfriend now. We all need to just keep our mouths shut until he realises for himself that she's awful.

That's how I thought about Helldivers 2. Arrowhead, famed makers of topdown, slapstick, friendly fire-filled shmups like Magicka and the first Helldivers, had shaved off the 'rough' edges that made up their personality. Now they were making an over-the-shoulder shooter like everyone else. Sony was their girlfriend now.

The first joy of Helldivers 2 was discovering that my fears were misguided. It's remarkable how much of the studio's personality comes through, from the slapstick, the friendly fire, the deliberately cumbersome controls that are just begging you to throw away your weapon by mistake.

The second was discovering that it hasn't adopted so much of the live service grind favoured by its new peers. Yes, absolutely you can unlock weapons and cosmetics through play or via a real money battle pass or two, but your starting arsenal is basically as good as anything you'll get afterwards. I played for dozens of hours with weapons I unlocked in the first five, and later unlocks usually just provided a brief novelty before I was onto the next.

Helldivers 2's missions are also perfectly bite-sized. Each one drops you on a planet overrun with aliens or robots - in the way that any planet can be said to be overrun by its inhabitants - and you have a mission to transmit a signal, say, or destroy some big eggs. You'll run about, blow your friends up by mistake (or on purpose) a few times, relive some scenes from Starship Troopers, call in an airstrike or five, and 15 minutes later you're covered in egg goo and high-fiving your pal back on your spaceship. That means I've never felt like I'm falling behind on any kind of unlock curve and I can fit a Helldivers 2 session into my grown-up life perfectly well, doing a couple missions with a pal while the kid is asleep. In 2024, there are few blockbuster multiplayer games where that's the case.

Sometimes, that friend? Fast forward a few years and you realise that the posh girlfriend is alright, really. She's his posh wife now. And their dining table? Covered in Warhammer figures.

Nic: I waited a while to play Helldivers 2, and the thing that most surprised me about it was how simulation-y and physical it feels to play - a far cry from the arcadey horde shooter I’d imagined. The injuries. The way you need to pick and choose your reloads. The intensity of the fights. By making the actual encounters feel like serious stuff, Arrowhead allow the comedy to shine in other areas in the knowledge it’s much funnier to get hit by a drop pod if you’ve come out of an intense firefight. Truly genius stuff.

Edwin: I still love playing this game solo. It has all the ingredients for a great sandbox stealth game in the MGS5 tradition - I feel like all they need to do is tweak the spawning, but I’m sure it’s not that simple in practice. I’m also… interested in how they’re playing out the fascist forever war element as a live service metagame, inspired by table-top role-playing. I think we need to start reporting on it as though we were Automaton sympathisers, reporting Major Order failures as victories. Every good propaganda machine needs a subversive pirate radio station.

Ed: One of my favourite in-game 'things' of this year is the 380mm barrage, which bombards a huge area with earth-shattering shells for what feels like an absolute age. There's something so immensely satisfying about watching it reduce a colossal machine fortress to piles of metal splinters by the time it's finished. I also like calling it in on literally any objective (mostly small ones), just to really annoy my friends. I am awful, I know.

Brendy: You are evil, Ed. But it's the kind of evil I like. I'm not as in-love with Helldivers 2 as a lot of folks, but I did play enough to appreciate the comedy of desperately diving away from your pal's too-keen artillery barrage. Friendly fire in video games is always funny.

Head back to the advent calendar to open another door!