Recente recensies door FireRising

The game will become literally unplayable without a PSN account in three days. Way to torch all your community's goodwill, Arrowhead.

UPDATE May 6th, 2024
Sony has decided to back down from their decision to force the linking of PSN accounts to play Helldivers 2. I am changing my review to a recommended, because this is a solid game. I am still apprehensive for the future, however. Just because Sony has backed down this time, does not mean they will not try a similar stunt down the road at some point.

Got a Vitamin D deficiency, then tried to run 50 meters and got mauled to death by zombies while having an asthma attack, 10/10 realism and immersion for fat sweaty gamers like me.

Okay, serious review time. Here's the stuff I like:
- Gunplay is really, really good.
- Puppets feel like a legitimate threat for far longer than they are in a game like DayZ.
- The minigames for certain activities mostly feel really good with some exceptions.
- The sheer variety of things to do. My group can, and DOES, have individual members who focus on specific activities like fixing cars, gathering or farming food, cooking, base building, or just picking through specific points of interest that they personally know well.
- Gorgeous views in a variety of different biomes, on a massive map where it feels like players have plenty of room to spread out and avoid one another if they want to, while having certain areas where there is plenty of reason for people to congregate and compete with one another for the highest concentrations of good loot.
- Weapon painting using paint you find in the world. This has allowed my group to continuously create the most tacticool camo patterns we can dream up, the most absurd COD gun skins we could desire, and the most horrifically gauche color and pattern combinations we need to make one another groan in pain at our favorite guns being defiled.
- At the risk of slipping out of objective review, the vibes of this game and its world are really, really interesting.

Now for the stuff I don't like.
- The lockpicking minigame feels goofy and unsatisfying. A lock having a timer to solve the picking before the tools randomly break doesn't make any sense. Screwdrivers degrade too quickly and picks snap far too easily. These decisions were made to balance base raiding, but they also effect the PVE gameplay a lot since much of the best loot is behind high-tier locks. Some players can get this mechanic instinctively, but I am not one of them.
- The horde mechanic needs a bit of work. Puppets (This game's name for zombies) pop into existence too close to the player and too quickly fade away when the player slips away from them without server settings being tweaked.
- Inventory management can feel annoying at times. Moving items to base storage containers requires dragging them one by one, and I have lost more than a few pieces of gear out of containers by double clicking them, thinking they will be placed in my inventory or equipped on my character, only to then have that item placed on the ground under the container, never to be retrieved.
- Stat leveling can feel obtuse, and progresses at a glacial pace. Skills are less offensive in this regard with a few exceptions (such as lockpicking, where even the easiest lock on the training device will be too hard for new lockpickers to train on either for personal experience or to level their character's skill) but your base stats of Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, and Intelligence, depending on the one you with to level, require you to: for Strength and Constitution, spend actual, IRL days with your character spinning a wheelbarrow full of logs while you AFK; for Dexterity, to defy all survival game instincts by leaving your food bar half empty and run a calorie deficit; for Intelligence, brave end-game areas for an implant that upgrades your brain to work more gooder.
- Blood types should be implemented. They were a great source of fun and funny moments when my group would play DayZ with regularity.
- While I personally don't mind much, YOU might not like how much of this game's cosmetic content is in paid DLC while the game is still in early access.

Overall, I think even with many of the minor annoyances, this game offers a lot already, and they're not done yet. There are plenty of flaws, but for me and a lot of others, those flaws are far outweighed by the compelling and deep gameplay on offer.

Now to cap things off, I'm going to issue a wishlist for the devs, which does NOT include bug fixes because I assume they already want to nail the bugs anyway.
- Craftable boats and rafts.
- Bigger land vehicles with more cargo and passenger capacity, maybe some sort of military cargo truck like the American M35 2.5 ton truck or the British Bedford MK as endgame vehicles?
- Just in general more variety of vehicles would be nice, but especially for air and water. Hot air balloons, helicopters, small sail boats, bigger boats that could conceivably be mobile water bases, possibly even vehicles inspired by the so-called "narco subs." Let your imaginations run wild.
- Shipwrecks further out to sea in deeper water, along with SCUBA gear, dive knives, and spearguns. Just give us more stuff to do in the water, please.
- Possibly car trailers for carrying loot, camper trailers to sleep and cook in while on the move, and/or boat trailers so you can lock up your boats behind walls instead of beaching them on the shores?
- Modding support, ASAP. I heard somewhere that this is a goal at or after the 1.0 release, but it would be cool if people could have the opportunity to start working on their mods sooner than that so a healthy modding ecosystem has the chance to develop BEFORE the full release, if that's in the cards.

I'd call this game pay to win, but even if you pay you can't win. The game always sucked and now it sucks even harder. I had hoped the devs would eventually pull their heads out of their rectums but that clearly will not be happening. On the bright side, my SSD will now have some space open for games that are actually fun, made by people who respect their communities.

Game is dying soon to make room for a cash grab "Upgrade" so they can double dip that and ARK 2. Also, this game's files are massive (Hundreds of GB) and the game is NOT optimized. Avoid avoid avoid

Feature incomplete, years old bugs, but yeah, emotes are what we needed. It was fun while it lasted, fellas.

TARGET-THAT-RIFLEMAN-TWO-HUNDRED-METERS-FRONT *beep beep*

Don't play this game, buy it or spare it a thought. "Why," you may ask, and to that, I will try to give a concise answer with every major reason I can think of.
- The game is poorly optimized, with stutters and fps drops being pretty common even on a mid-high end machine.
- Cutscene audio is out of sync by far, and texture/LOD pop in is very noticeable in a distracting way that makes it seem like no polish was put on this product.
- The gunplay leaves much to be desired, with guns that sound and feel weak despite having obnoxious amounts of recoil.
- Every member of the resistance that I've met is extremely unlikable, a good example being the leader of the resistance cell you end up joining going from being prepared to torture your character for no real reason to welcoming you on board in the course of a 90 second conversation with her peers, at the end of which all she says to you is "No hard feelings, right?"
- Philadelphia is a bland setting, and the world you are released into is a big, empty, open one, filled with copy/pasted assets and generic near-future sci-fi enemies.

TL;DR Game bad, just go play Far Cry or something.