Action · 2024 · Arrowhead Game Studios · online
Helldivers 2
Four soldiers spread democracy, and the biggest threat is your own airstrike.
What it is about
You are foot soldiers of a government that says the word democracy often enough to make it suspicious, dropped onto planets to clear out insects or machines. A mission consists of an objective, a route there, and an extraction you still have to reach.
Equipment is called down from orbit: turrets, supply crates, artillery, a mech. All of it genuinely falls out of the sky and hits whatever is underneath — including you. Friendly fire is active on every difficulty and cannot be switched off.
You play with two to four people, online only and across platforms. Empty slots stay empty. In the background runs a shared war whose fronts shift according to what every player does.
Our verdict for couples
Friendly fire here is not a glitch but a design principle: when one of you calls in an artillery barrage, it lands on the other one too, and that happens roughly six times on the first evening. Out of exactly that grows the kind of shared story you are still telling a year later — provided you can both laugh when a rocket wipes out the last ten minutes of progress. It does not get easier with two: the game does not fill the empty slots, so you get the same missions at half strength. On the lower difficulties that is entirely manageable; higher up it takes practice on both machines. And a word on its condition: players have been unhappy with the developer for months, which shows plainly in the Steam rating. None of that affects the co-op itself.
Pros
- Cross-play between PlayStation, PC and Xbox
- A mission fits into half an hour
- The war carries on for everyone together
Cons
- No local co-op
- With two, two slots stay empty — nothing fills them
- Friendly fire cannot be switched off
Suitable from
Hobby–Gamer
- Conflict potential
- Spirited
- Cosiness
- Draining
- When you can stop
- After 15 minutes
- How long it lasts
- No ending
What other co-op fans say
What gets praised is remarkably uniform: the teamwork, and of all things the friendly fire. Several reviews describe it as the best part of the game, one explicitly with regard to their own partner. The anger is just as uniform, and it is aimed not at the game but at its upkeep: crashes after updates and changes to equipment come up often enough to visibly drag the overall rating down.
- “Play this game with my Girlfriend. Blow her up, She blows me up. 10/10 would get blown up with significant other again”
- “Fantastic game to play with friends, but playing alone gets boring quite easily.”
- “Since the last update game crashes permanently. No fun playing any more.”
Summarised by machine from 60 Steam reviews, not written by our editors. The quotes appear verbatim in those reviews.
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