Recent reviews by DocNasty

TLDR; I give it a 5/10, unfortunately most of those points are just because the game is playable, does not crash, little to no bugs, and plays smoothly. Loses all of its points on gameplay and design, It is worth the download and try for yourself as it is a small game.

Pros:
- It runs (which unfortunately is a pro for games launching)
- Movement is smooth, missing some elements like crouch-sliding keeping momentum.
- Hits feel impactful
- Good spread of common weapon varieties
- Destructive mechanics for walls felt solid
- Base and Siege engine design, actually feels wonderful the first time you see them

Cons:
- Audio is completely whack, someone walking 20 feet away behind a building sounds like they are walking on your face.
- 1 base feels good, the other 3 felt way too big for 3v3 (Ill change if they add 5v5)
- Respawn mechanic favor's sweaty camping
- Sliding feels boring
- The character models are weirdly low-res in many areas and changing settings just makes it worse.
- Harvesting is boring, felt forced to make it seem 'different'
- Siege Engine felt like a gimmick, it doesnt really give attackers an advantage and is only useful against 1 of the bases that no one should pick.

Neutral:
The dev's missed a lot of opportunities, the big siege engine was actually quite impressive but you don't respawn on it, why not? The bases are built for attackers instead of defenders, some of the bases should never be picked no matter what because the defense points can be accessed by a single wall and completely exposed to make attackers jobs easy with only 2-3 walls destroyed, other bases require multiple walls destroyed to get to them. The mirrored map supports a 'competitive fairness' but it makes the game feel copy/pasta.

Game is not in a working state, With 37k players during beta at peak it is completely crashed for the first 7 hours of launch (and it is still going on as of writing this) with only 21.5k players. Cannot recommend at all until the dev's fix these mistakes.

TLDR;

Would not recommend where it is now, CoOp is a lot of fun but it is so expensive to play as each commander costs like $5 minimum. Campaign is alright, amazing writing but just like coop its not worth $30 for about 3 hours of gameplay.

Long Version:

Pros:
- A lot of differences to other RTS's, does not feel copy-paste
- Gameplay is smooth and different factions are both diverse but still easy to pick up
- Factions feel like they specialize in one thing over another, which makes you really think about what to play

Cons:

- Some factions are too specialized, so they can feel bland and act like one-trick-ponies.
- The cost, it is ridiculous for a game that is still missing about 60% of the overall game with only 1 campaign and minimal maps.

General feel of the game: More in-depth than Diablo 4, less complicated than POE4, honestly takes the best of both games into 1 with very few faults.

Pro's
+ High number of legendary's and high drop chance, giving you access to fun tools to enjoy.
+ Early access to fun skills, not locked behind days of grinding to get to the fun builds
+ Smooth gameplay and easy to speed through the story after the first playthrough (most scripted events are skippable

CON -
- Mastery was not very well explained, although did not take long to figure out
- Game starts a little too easy at times, started my first character in Hardcore and even on bosses I rarely worry about dying, though it may be my broken build.


tldr: Scratches the itch of a the ARPG genre without being too easy or casual, easy to get my dumb friends as well as the sweaters to both enjoy and play.

Its OK, we will do Pro/Con first before my thoughts... If I mention GOT it is Ghost of Tsushima, I will limit my references but it is good to note as they are incredibly similar styles.

tl/dr: If you like older AC games, play with instant assassinations, if you like Samurai and the idea of Yasuke then play Ghost Of Tsushima, not a bad game but needs a lot of updates to fix the problems. 6/10

PRO
- Beautiful Scenery and towns,
- It runs well, I have had stuttering once or twice but it is not bad
- The initial problems with climbing and running on Naoe were mostly fixed in the last patch, so they are updating and making it more playable.
- fighting is relatively smooth, very much like origins but combat lasts a little long sometimes.
- I like the instant assassination option, feels less like an RPG and more like just an open world AC game.

CONS
- Game is built to follow roads.
- Mastery is terrible, Knowledge Points are terrible.
- Riposte/Counter attack feels awkward.
- Abilities are generally weaker then just parry.
- Some enemies with fans just call in airstrikes from no-where.
- They clearly want you to play Yasuke.
- You cannot sprint with Yasuke, he just charges randomly boxes and people.

NEITHER
- Kunai are busted

Do not let the hours played fool you, after the first 12 hours I started just AFK riding across the map to unlock fast-travel locations so there are quite a few hours of eating dinner, bathroom breaks, and watching movies.

You can climb the mountains but it feels like you are Skyrim horse-glitching up the rock faces most times, the game really wants you to just follow the road and makes off-road area excessively dense foliage to hide sub-par graphic areas as 'filler'. Knowledge activities are 5+ minute stops out of the way to a temple, gather some scrolls to not read, to get 1/10 for the next tier. Worst part is only 2 of the 20 temples I have been to were actually used for story, otherwise they are throw-away locations only for knowledge. All of the knowledge activities are awful. If you fight more than 2 people then every time you parry someone will instantly swing at you forcing you to parry them instead of counter-attacking making 'posture' attacks (charge attack) harder to perform, and enemies can hit you during the animations with no animation-cancelling. GOT made enemies stagger when abilities were used but here they just swing away at you. The fan enemies calling in random arrow barrages is very RPG-like when your in the middle of a forest in a one-on-one and they call in fire arrow barrage from the rice fields. Finally yasuke does 1,250 dmg to Naoe's 432 damage at my current level in combat which would make sense if you build Naoe as assassin, but if you build her for Combat she still does less than half his damage when he is built for literally anything else, and he can still assassinate people!

It is a nice little game, a little basic but it has charm. It has a looped gameplay at first when getting to the second area but once you unlock more things to play with it starts feeling a bit more open to how you want to play. Will update later in the game, only just getting to the 3rd zone.

So far it is a beautiful game, the PSN Account was optional for me unless I want to play multiplayer (which I made one for). It is actually difficult on Hard, not even on the highest difficulty and early game takes 2 hits to die without healing. The scenery is beautiful, the distance between landmarks is short, and the game does not punish you for doing side missions during a main mission or walking away and picking flowers while stuff is going on. Only thing I wish is that some of the gathering would be done automatically when walking over, it takes away when I have to run around a room hitting pickup to get everything.

EDIT: After getting a full 100% playthrough, all achieves beside multiplayer ones and a kick someone off a ledge achieve I am thrilled to have played this. Took 61 hours with suboptimal gathering, I would say it is probably best right now to use your first playthrough to get everything and get as much of the achievements as possible. I beat it on Hard and I play on playing the Lethal game mode and feeling out the difficulty, I did get bored a bit in Hard and ran less gear by the endgame, so I am looking forward to the promise of NewGame+ Harder enemies, on top of harder difficulty, on top of charms that make the game harder.

Pros
- The only real bugs are the dead bugs crushed beneath the Helldivers Boots!
- Fast paced gameplay
- Solid balancing (I have a favorite but there is almost no unusable weapons/gear)
- Difficulty 1 through 9 gives you a wide variety of experience to new and old players.
- Warbonds (DLC-like content) can be earned in-game

Cons
- Difficulty 1 through 6 are almost too easy, makes the 7-9 ramp feel good but the highest difficulty is more like a Very hard in most games rather than "You are going to DIE!" that this game should be. (95% of players only play 7-9)
- Warbonds take up to 30 hours of farming to unlock which is good for the 4 we have but could feel like paid content in the future after the 10th warbond.

EDIT: Early 2024

I am standing with my fellow Helldivers and this will change to a positive depending on the outcome with PSN and Arrowhead. I am prefacing this with the fact that this is an amazing game and an amazing development team that has had to pull so much weight against an absolutely passionate community. This game is worth the money and more, the discord communities we have made for this are honestly some of the best.

EDIT Mid 2024:

Managed Democracy has prevailed! Never let those Automaton Sympathizers win at SONY!


EDIT: 12.01.2024

Still an Outstanding game, I stopped playing in Polar patriots due to the weapon nerfs and just start now that Viper, Flame, Caustic, and the Patriotic warbonds are all released. It is better than it was before and I am so glad that more cosmetics have been added as well as an Emote wheel, so now I can run my 4 favorite emotes instead of just having salute.

EDIT: 06.27.2025

Still an avid player, play when a warbond is released, put in maybe 50 hours then go play another game so I dont get bored. For all the the complaints I hear from temamates I look around and see 300, 400, or 500+ hours of gameplay and the same people saying "This game is just terrible and frustrating". Don't let them fool you, join a helldiver discord, listen in to a round or 2 and you will learn real fast how entertaining every single match can be. I enjoy it because I can turn it on for 20-30 min and play a game before heading to work, or I can spends 4 hours spreading democracy. If this was a Warhammer 40k universe I would never play another game again.

Worth it if you enjoyed the starship trooper dark comedy, in the age where we think a game costing $30 should give us weeks of playtime and be perfect, this is awesome as it currently sits. I hope they add a few different base defense maps with an infinite mode just to get that feel of utter dread and no-hope that the Mobile Infantry feeds on.

Note: this is not a game you can hop on for 30min and enjoy, this is a time commitment of 2+ hour session if you want to get the full scope of the game and truly enjoy what the developer intended. There are a lot of mixed reviews because some people think that getting any less than 100 hours of gameplay for $30 is not worth their time so they go and spend that much in a cash shop for some cosmetic items somewhere else. Those are most of the negative reviews, I do not share that and I give Frostbyte the benefit of the doubt when they promised a game with in-game trailers and it turns out to be pretty darn close to what they promised.

PRO's:
- The scale of the game is enormous, you can fly for minutes and feel like you have really traveled without feeling like you are sitting around.
- The ship designer lets you customize your ship far more than any game I have played
- Damage to ships is easy to repair and ship maintenance is actually enjoyable.
- No connection Issues with servers, smooth gameplay
- Lots of options when it comes to choosing ships in the mid-game


CONS
- The ship builder can be complicated and at times buggy, practicing manually adding parts will save time.
- It can feel like a grind for the first few hours and not worth investing in building ships when you can just purchase better ones.
- The Origin Base can be complicated to get around and not well laid out.
- within the first 10 hours you will start venturing far enough where Pirates (pvp players) start showing up. (starter areas are PVE only)
- The game is complicated... really complicated... like every tool requires an ammunition type, your reactor rods for power need to be manually pulled and exchanged, you need fuel on top of that, and many buttons/graphics are run on simple scripts you need a guide to use or just copy/paste from to work. Oh and you need to run power cables and fuel lies manually around your custom ship to get power and fuel where it needs to be.... this game is not for those 'simple ui' or '<5 min tutorial' kind of players.