![]() It’s a nice enough looking game, dolling up the top-down shooter with great lighting, nice textures and some fantastic dust effects, but the actual maps are pretty dull. Let’s be clear: Helldivers doesn’t really work as a single-player game. You can also unlock new armour, while every contribution you make in battle feeds into a community-wide war, so that you can build a reputation as a hero and help humanity defeat the fiendish bugs. The game also has a separate technology tree, where levelling and collecting samples can net you research points, which can be spent on weapon upgrades, drop enhancements and other perks. Luckily, in solo play you have a limited number of respawns, with that number rising with every completed objective.Ĭompleting missions, killing bugs and extracting successfully nets you experience points, levelling up your Helldiver and unlocking new weapons and drops. Tapping up, right, left, down, up or some such while facing down a rush of bugs isn’t as easy as you might think. Call in automated machine gun turrets to thin the waves of bugs so that you can take out any stragglers while the shuttle’s on its way.Įven here, though, the game seems determined to make life difficult for you, asking you to master D-pad sequences that take a few seconds to trigger even when you get them right. Call in airstrikes to take out tougher enemies. Call in ammo drops to keep the bullets coming. ![]() The trick, of course, is to make the most of your support drops. The first few missions are easy enough for you to cope with all these issues, but after a few planets you might find the going tough. Reloading is slow and leaves you vulnerable, and after a few reloads you’ll find yourself entirely out of ammo. The bugs come thick and fast, your weapons don’t seem fit for purpose, and you need to reload more often than seems plausible. At this point, predictably, an avalanche of bugs descend on your position.Īt first, Helldivers seems to have its design out of whack. When you’re finished, you call in the shuttle then wait ninety seconds for it to arrive. ![]() You wander around the map, tackling them in any order that you fancy and blasting the ravening bugs that skitter, sprint or lurch towards you. Objectives come in a number of guises, ranging from taking a control point to activating SAM sites to destroying bug nests. L1 either throws a beacon to call in the required support, or a grenade. The R2 button reloads your weapon, while L2 brings up a menu of airdrops and airstrikes, summoned by a sequence of taps on the D-pad. You move with the left stick and optionally aim with the right while dispensing vengeance on the murderous mega-insects with the L2 button. Through the tutorial, you’ll get a grasp of the basic mechanics. In its OTT, sardonic take on sci-fi warfare, its talk of ‘managed democracy’, sacrifice and liberty, Helldivers is singing straight from the Starship Troopers hymn book. The tutorial makes it clear what kind of force and what kind of war this is: life is cheap, war is glorious, and today is a good day to die. ![]() As one of the Helldivers of the title, you’re dropped on the surface of an alien planet, given a series of objectives, then expected to complete them before calling in a shuttle for extraction. ![]() Helldivers covers the ongoing wars between humanity and three intergalactic enemies, with you placed firmly on the front lines. Why Starship Troopers? Well, it helps that Helldivers’ first enemy race is a bunch of giant bugs, but the bigger reason is that premise is ripped nearly entirely from the movie. Most importantly, it’s smart enough to wrangle an unholy array of influences, including Diablo, Destiny and the Renegade Ops school of shooters, not to mention Paul Verhoeven’s film of Starship Troopers, into one coherent whole. It’s smart in its humour, smart in its core mechanics and smart in its long-term systems. It might look like just another twin-stick shooter, but Helldivers is smarter than you think. Available on PS4, PS3, PS Vita (PS4 and PS Vita reviewed) ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |