Helldivers II US sales went up yet again during its 3rd week in market. An honest-to-goodness inverse decay curve so far...
https:// twitter.com /matpiscatella/status/1764693637248803170 Helldivers II US sales went up yet again during its 3rd week in market. An honest-to-goodness inverse decay curve so far...
I am unplugged from a lot of advertising, but this seems very much like a game that is spreading due to word of mouth/direct exposure rather than purely marketing driven. I know that I usually wait at least a year to pick up games, especially multiplayer games since I'm almost always playing those solo. Enough people I know actually got this one and praised it, though, leading me to break my habits and pick it up.
23The game itself is mechanically good, but the important thing is that socially excellent. A fantastic game to have fun with friends. That gives it an evergreen nature
19Fun with what?
3How's the general community when playing with randos? I bounced off the first one because of toxicity.
2Mostly fine. Some people will kill other players to take the samples they collect (in game credits for upgrades) which is just silly because all credits are shared by all players.
5Pretty good. Just used common sense. When you join a group. Talk to them on your mic. See what kind of people they are. If they don't respond. Maybe move to another group
2
Fun is the only metric that matters.
It's been running pretty much perfect the last week or so.
I bought it at launch and it wouldn't work at all so I refunded it. When the first major patch came out I have it a second shot. Very happy I did.
15Too bad about the invasive anti-cheat. Sounds like a fun game otherwise.
9If you play on linux then you don't have to deal with kernel anticheat. But it might also not work in the future, but right now it's gold on protondb.
5
I bought it after waiting for the server issues to resolve.
8I personally know nothing about it, I just see more and more people on my friends list playing it. What kind of game is it, is actually that good, how much is it?
6It's a third person 4 person squad based shooter wherein you're dropped onto randomly generated maps and must complete a main objective, with random secondaries and extra collectibles placed around.
You can bring a limited load out of "stratagems" that you can call down during the mission, which can be anything from dropping explosive ordinance to dropping secondary weapons or defensive turrets.
You complete the missions to gain experience and different currencies used to unlock more stratagems and equipment, with more options unlocking as you hit certain level thresholds.
The shooting model is interesting in which projectiles are aimed based off where the actual gun of your character model is pointing, so where the game is fun and chaotic at easier difficulty levels, precision, strategy, and loadout choice become increasingly important as you go higher in difficulty levels, giving it a range from "blow a bunch of shit up with your buddies" to "complete objectives and extract by the skin of your teeth through extremely tight and considered tactical play".
Friendly fire is a huge deal in this game, you can crush yourself or friends with drops, easily accidentally kill each other with your guns or with turrets trying to shoot past you at enemies, it can be hilarious, but also puts major importance on lines of sight and caution.
You can unlock certain loadout options through a sort of battle pass in which you spend points acquired in gameplay to unlock equipment in tiers, with the next tier becoming available after spending a certain amount in the overall pass. $40 USD for base game, another $20 for a second battle pass track that has alternate loadout options. Most of the really good unlocks are in the free pass, though, and after about 45 hours I've earned enough currency through gameplay to unlock the premium pass without paying real money.
That being said, that only unlocks the pass, unlocking the equipment within it requires in-game currency, so I wouldn't say it's pay to win since you still have to put in the legwork yourself, and getting the pass without paying extra is more than doable, compared to the first game which had a ton of DLC that could only be bought and instantly unlocked.
Personally, I really enjoy it, the game looks great, plays great, it can be as infuriatingly difficult as you make it through difficulty choice, but it's a great time with some friends, or even with randoms.
17The super credits used to unlock the second battle pass can also be found in game in a relatively healthy amount (including in the first battle pass), making unlocking that second battle pass very possible without spending real currency.
5
You deploy in a team up to four people, kill some bugs/robots, complete some objectives, and then exfil.
It's third person, but clicking right joystick gives you ADS and the game never mentions it.
Bought it on a whim and played a couple games. Not too hard to figure out, there's just zero instructions on how to complete objectives.
What makes it different is everyone plays the same objectives like "defend this planet" and people have to participate or the planet is lost.
Not the best game ever, but for $30 it's cool enough.
0It took me forever to finally salute the flag in training. Not sure why that was so hard to trigger. The instructions were told once his to do it and I accidentally clicked though it so fast I missed it. Took me 10 minutes of walking around trying to salute.
1
I'm doing my part! I'm not normally into this type of game but I'm here for the propaganda!
4It's fun, but extremely raw right now. Lots of balance issues, random disconnection issues, game stability issues, occasional game breaking bugs. More fun with friends than solo or randoms. Wait for a sale, though if $40 is nothing to you, then I guess go for it.
4What balance issues are there? I want to play with some friends but they have a habit of metagaming and killing the joy.
4Man, I love the singleminded drones downvoting me just because I didn't say this game is perfect. I still like this game a lot, I'm just saying it's got flaws right now.
-There are a lot of fun primary, secondary and support (big guns) weapons to use. The gun play is very fun. Cool weapon models, cool weapon SFX, cool VFX. Unfortunately, only the automatic shotgun and arguably the incendiary shotgun or SMG are viable at any difficulty past the beginner stuff since the ones I mentioned are the only ones with enough DPS and/or ammo reserves to be useful at that level.
-Support weapons are the big guns. All of them very cool. Unfortunately, at difficulty 5 and higher, your team encounters multiple enemies during each swarm wave with heavy armor - heavy armor that is untouchable except to a scant few weapons that can pierce that armor. GG no re if your team doesn't have a competent person bringing one of these. At the moment, the meta is just use a railgun for everything, not because it is overpowered, but because it is the only weapon that isn't severely undertuned.
-General difficulty balance: OK, so the game sells you this idea of being a badass space soldier who gets to slaughter hordes of bugs or robots, right? But at higher difficulties, the meta shifts from being DOOM guy lite into being scared little babies who need to stealth past all the enemies on each map in order to succeed.
There's more I could nitpick but those are the big balance issues imo. Like I said, very fun, but expect to be frustrated by bugs and balance issues the more you play.
6Railgun is the best support weapon by a wide margin and many orbital strikes are just bait. Many of the primary weapons are mediocre and the secondary weapons there's basically only 1 good one.
That's said I played a lot of Helldivers 1 and trust that balance and new progression will come.
... I've already hit level cap in-game and am almost fully capped on all the samples.
Playing with friends is great imo. If they meta game I suggest just really leaning into a chaotic roleplay.
4
Well deserved. Awesome game.
1