For xmas I was given Helldivers for the PS4 and I've been playing it for the last month, when I can get a chance with my girlfriend playing Fallout 4 endlessly!
Helldivers is set in the future where Earth is now Super Earth and you play a Helldiver, one of the mighty defenders of Super Earth desperately fighting back against their 3 hated enemies; the heavily armoured and tanked up Cyborgs, the hordes of the spikey limbed Bugs and the high tech, mind altering Illuminates. The game is presented in a tongue-in-cheek style, very similar to the film Star Ship Troopers.
It's a top down shooter with a whole lot more stuff than your average top down shooter. The game revolves around multiplayer with up to 4 players working through missions together to bring glory to Super Earth. There is full friendly fire and a vast array of weapons, military hardware and strategems to choose from.
Each mission requires the players to try and achieve several objectives, which could be rescuing stranded troops to pushing in codes to activate surface to air missile launchers. Players are constantly kept on their toes as the enemy will be patrolling the map, and if they see you and you don't take them out quickly, then the alarm will be raised and more heavily armed and armoured enemies will drop from the sky, or come out of the ground, or teleport in, all depending on which foe you are coming up against. So teams end up in a desperate battle where at least one of them will need to be focussing on tapping in lines of up, down, left, right arrow combinations at a computer terminal, while his squad mates blaze gun fire, anti-tank rockets and call in airstrikes on the ever increasing hordes of enemies.
It has a similar look to other Arrowhead studio's games, Gauntlet and Magicka; an isometricky-top-downy sort of view where all the players share the same screen space, which gets really annoying when players drag their feet and end up splitting players between the very edges of the screen! The graphics look excellent, with great weather effects and nice details, like leaving footprints in certain ground types, which can be useful for tracking patrols. Explosions, gun fire and flame effects are also exquisitely shown.
The sound design is also very nice, particularly the gun sounds. Guns, artillery and general hardware noises are so satisfying! Firing that 90mm cannon attached to the side of your mech will make you feel like a god of war or opening up, full auto, with a heavy machinegun is joyous, particularly when you see the enemy exploding into a fine red mist in front of you. This might sound mildly disturbing, but I can't deny it. I can only assume the developers have a genuine love for real gun sounds. The music and voices are ok fit the feel of the games overly dramatic, tongue-in-cheek style.
It's not all gravy though. After a month of playing I have to admit the game is quite repetitive. Missions are procedurally generated, so you will never ever play the same mission twice, but that doesn't stop them feeling very much like doing the same thing over and over. There are only so many different combinations of landscapes and objectives (although there are quite a few, to be fair) and the fact the map shape and features are in different places and the objectives are also in different places, doesn't change that really. In this way it's similar to Gauntlet, but I'd say Helldivers has more variation and is on the whole a significantly deeper game.
So Helldivers is a game really enjoyed with friends, although I've been really surprised at how cooperative the random people dropping into my missions have been. If you can form a tight team with different players specialising in different aspects of the mission, anyone who loves a big change and a healthy dose of pure gun violence and games that need teamwork will love this game!
Oh, and it's really hard!
And lastly, it is now out on PC and I feel very reluctant to buy it twice, but I know some of my PC mates would love this one... arg!
No comments:
Post a Comment