Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer.
Helldivers 2 was on my radar pre-release, but from its first week I knew it was one of those games I'd be playing for a very long time. I've dabbled in lots of live service games without ever going full no-lifer on any of them and, being a middle-aged dad, Helldivers 2 instantly ticked a lot of the boxes I wanted: Quickfire sessions, simple and self-contained goals, and a real sense of progression atop that, which might be the game's greatest achievement of all.
These interactions are by far the strongest element of how Helldivers operates as a live experience: Arrowhead reacts fast and, more often than not, it reacts with humour and it reacts well. Like the time the Helldivers got it wrong and botched a Major Order at the last hurdle, and Super Earth issued a missive commending their"tactical brilliance.
I think the only major misstep Helldivers 2 made in this opening year was one that the studio relatively quickly self-corrected on. The first few months of Helldivers 2 saw a whole load of balance patching, as Arrowhead tried to tamp-down overpowered weapons and strategies while making other options more viable.
Finally, as all of the above shows in some form, Helldivers 2 has a tone and it sticks to it. This is a comedy game that also takes itself seriously, and from the game's opening video you're sold on the galactic dystopia it presents, and the ludicrously bombastic ideals of Super Earth. Players talk to each other using the game's language, joke about reporting each other for infringements of democracy, and semi-inhabit the fiction outside of the game.
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