The first “Helldivers” was released in March of 2015. Despite it being the biggest game Arrowhead Game Studios had made at the time, its peak players was only 7,000. This low player count did not discourage them, however. They realized the premise of the game was fantastic, and they decided to add onto that. Fast forward a while, and “Helldivers 2” was released on February 8th, 2024. Immediately, the game started to be picked up by the original player base, and then it only snowballed from there.
“Helldivers 2” has experienced immense success as well as insane amounts of popularity. This is mainly due to its simplicity; just shoot bugs and robots. It could also be due to the large amount of content the game has to hold. “Helldivers 2” takes place in a universe in which the entirety of humanity has united under one managed democracy. Earth is now called Super Earth. Helldivers are elite soldiers sent by Super Earth in order to take over new planets for more territory. You do this while protecting Super Earth as well as other planets in order to protect humanity from the threats known as Automatons and Terminids. There are several different sectors, each ranging from two to six planets. “Helldivers 2” is a third person shooter as well as a community based game. You go on objectives ranging from difficulties to easy to Helldive (hardest.) You, as well as the entire player base, are working together in order to take over these new sectors to gain more land for Super Earth.
Despite reviews being incredibly positive about this game, there is one thing that the entire game community despises. The queue in “Helldivers 2″ is quite frankly unbearable, and you’ll wait for hours and hours on end to play. Last Saturday, I was in queue for six hours before I got to play. There was also an unprecedented series of glitches that occurred on the 22nd of February. For some PC players textures wouldn’t load, as well as the game crashing as soon as they loaded into the game. While PS5 players didn’t experience game crashes and textures not loading, they did experience stratagems (items you can call in from your main ship that help you fight the main threats of the game) not being able to be thrown as well as spawning without a gun.
Despite this game being new and the studio that created it being indie, I think this game is genuinely one of the best games I have ever played. It is so incredibly stress inducing while being so fun at the same time. I would give it a 5/5 stars, and I would definitely suggest it to any player with a PC that can run it or a PS5. Hopefully, we’ll see more updates from Arrowhead Game Studios that will further improve the state of the game.
