For you PlayStation Plus owners out there, Helldivers is available for free this month. The GamerSushi crew, plus a friend of Eddy’s, checked it out last night and an awesome time was had by all.
If you are not familiar with Helldivers, it’s a top down twin stick shooter where you play as the eponymous soldiers who are dropped onto various planets to wipe out the alien races for the glory of Super Earth. The game has a very tongue in cheek sense of humor; when you kill aliens, your person shouts things like “HAVE SOME DEMOCRACY!”. If you’ve seen Starship Troopers, then you’re familiar with the kind of milieu this game is going for.
Helldivers is pretty unforgiving difficulty wise. You can get killed quickly by just about anything (the game actually kills you right away in the tutorial to drive this point home). Friendly fire is on and more than once the GS crew were the victims of stray bullets and in one hilarious instance a drop pod fell on somebody and killed them outright.
In addition to your guns and grenades, you also have power ups called Stratagems which are called in via Street Fighter-esque d-pad combos. These Stratagems range from reinforcements to resupplies to extra weapons, air strikes or a giant mech suit.
Missions are brisk, with only a few objectives to accomplish before you have to extract. Extraction is a crazy last-stand sort of deal, but to help us survive until the dropship came Anthony called in his mech suit with missile launchers and a mini gun to lay down a thick torrent of righteous fire to cover our escape.
Helldivers has an intriguing social layer to the game: each planet you conquer against from the three alien races adds to the meta game campaign against your foes (the PS4 version of the meta campaign is on the bug homeworld for example) and in orbit above each planet you’ll see the names of players who are in orbit on their spaceships.
If you have a PS+ subscription, I recommend checking this out. It’s free so why not! Helldivers is also 30% off on Steam right now.
Has anyone else tried Helldivers? What was your experience with it?
I actually bought the PC version awhile ago and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. There are times where you can get overrun by enemies super quickly if you’re not diligent, but that adds to the fun and difficulty to the game. The biggest thing I love about this game is that it feels like a gigantic love letter to Starship Troopers. It feels the most like that in the intro cinematic. All in all I wasn’t disappointed in this game, and I’ve had a lot of fun with it.