4.5/5 ★ – Artagah's review of Helldivers II.

This game is incredible! While the premise and the main loop is simple, I could not help but sink well over 100 hours into it. It really fires on all cylinders when 2-3 of your friends are able to join in on the fun, especially if you're able to communicate via voice chat. The main loop goes like this: you prepare for a dive on your ship, select your loadout and launch down onto whichever planet is on the front lines at the time (they dynamically shift based on player community activity in the war against either bots or the terminids). You then do some very simple missions on the planet, along with various side objectives and treasure cache hunting. The objectives remind me of the busy work you do in Among Us, but they're not really the point. The fun of the main gameplay loops comes from the fact that doing these missions agitates the current occupants of the planet and they start sending more and more waves of combatants your way. Each dive happens on a randomly generated map, so each time you do an objective, even an identical one, the experience is completely different! On top of the terrain, each run your friends tend to bring brings different loadouts, and the enemy waves are always different too, which is bolstered even more by random locations of specialized enemy nests on the maps. Once you finish your objectives, you extract back up to the ship (or not lol) you go on to buy some upgrades with the resources you've extracted, rinse and repeat! A big portion of the fun really comes from the game feel. The devs nailed down the feeling of traversal and gunplay, combined with incredible feedback from the enemies and the world when you interact with it all via your guns. It feels incredible to hit some explosives, to destroy a bot factory, wreck a big group of enemies with guts and blood flying everywhere, obliterate some buildings, etc. everything feels very epic and so very impactful and satisfying to execute. The last few bits that make this game unique are the friendly fire, which adds a ton to the strategy and the hilarity of every mission, as well as the command input system where interacting with terminals or calling down strategems (various types of bombardments and additional heavy equipment like turrets shields and guns that get called down from your super earth allies in the skies above) requires you to input lengthy sequences of directional commands (like you're doing a fatality in MK or something). While the arrow inputs don't sound all that special out of context, they really ratchet up the tension when you're fresh out of ammo, swarmed by a dozen bugs, and have to run for your life while simultaneously entering a dumb button combo as your last ditch effort to survive (of course you then proceed to mistype it and curse at your own incompetence, which is all part of the fun). Regardless if you're playing with friends or with randoms, this game is a gem that's worth experiencing. Developers add fresh guns, armors, emotes, etc. every single month via the battle pass system, and while you're required to spend premium currency on the pass, you're also able to earn an unlimited amount of this currency through gameplay! On top of the passes, devs continue to add new mission types, strategems, and according to rumors a whole new enemy race is coming as well! The only reason the game isn't getting a 5/5 is due to a ridiculous amount of bugs it launched with and still has to this day, months after the release. While a lot of them have been patched, many still remain and boy do they get in the way of the fun from time to time.