Helldivers features an extremely intuitive drop-in style multi-player system which makes it easy to find squads to join or to allow others to join you during your mission.

One poorly tossed grenade and it could be lights out. You also have to be responsible about your attacks because of friendly fire.

You rely on your team for so much: to provide cover, to pick you up if you’re knocked to the ground (on your own you have to mash buttons for a while to get back up, and you run the risk of bleeding out), to bring you back to the fight if you die, to activate objectives, and more. The idea of not being within a healthy range of your squadmates is terrifying since it’s so easy to become surrounded by enemies.įighting alongside people is a rather endearing experience, too.

The game doesn’t allow you to stray far from your squad since there’s no split-screen mode, but you wouldn’t want to wander away even if you could. The cooperative aspect of the gameplay has been masterfully crafted. Team work doesn’t stop at simply covering all possible angles with gunfire, the mission objectives will have you activating things like SAM sites which require multiple phases of button combinations, each phase challenging you with longer combos, which leave you vulnerable to attack. I spent a fair amount of time playing solo, and though I haven’t experienced the higher difficulties yet, I’m convinced that you need other human players to progress at that point. The difficulty doesn’t take long to ramp up and suddenly your facing an onslaught of alien enemies, relying on your reflexes and your teammates to stay alive. How about a defensive stratagem, like a plot of landmines? But you placed them too close to the building you’re trying to capture and now, again, your teammates are suffering due to your negligence. For example, one stratagem calls an airstrike, which is great… unless your teammates are caught in the crossfire. You then need to decide where you want the stratagem to perform its action, which depending on if it’s a defensive, offensive, or support type, you’ll want to be careful about where you place it. Each stratagem has it’s own button combo. In order to use a stratagem you have to hold its assigned button down to open the list of stratagems at your disposal, at which point you have to enter a button combination on the d-pad to execute. Stratagems cannot be expended on the fly like, say, Diablo 3, with only a cooldown to worry about Helldivers is unwaveringly focused on timing and positioning and, as such, makes you sing for your supper. Stratagems, otherwise known as spells, abilities, or special attacks in most games, are a big part of what sets Helldivers apart from other action games. Guns will be your primary source of destruction in most cases, but there’s also various types of grenades and, more uniquely, stratagems. The guns have different recoils, clip sizes, ranges, and so on. You’ll get a chance to try out various weapons that perform surprisingly different – you’re not going to play the same way if you’re strapped with a laser beam cannon as you are with a shotgun or an automatic rifle. The missions start out on the easy side, accurately labeled “A Dive in the Park”, giving you a chance to acclimate to the control scheme. You need to teamwork your ass off if you want to survive. That’s not the case in Helldivers, though. It’s more like there are multiple people doing their own thing but with a common goal. It doesn’t feel very much like teamwork, in most cases. I tend to disagree with what other people consider a good co-op game because often times it’s simply a good single-player concept that happens to scale when you add more players to the mix. I’m always on the hunt for a good cooperative multi-player game, but sadly they are far and few in between.

Broken age 2 player helldivers