Changed this review several times, and as of now its probably going to stay negative.

Game is fun, but its not going anywhere good. Its a fun gameplay loop with nothing else going for it. Devs that repeatedly nerf fun weapons using nothing more than the analytics of whats being used the most, lack of any meaningful updates in the six months since launch (Keep in mind this is a "game as a service" game), constantly breaking their own game by buffing enemies that are already massively overpowered while refusing to patch issues, and spending almost all of their time developing the next month's battlepass.

Dont even get me started on how long it takes them to fix massive issues, with them finally releasing a fix to trolls kicking players during the final seconds of a mission only just now while this has been a HUGE problem since launch. They claimed over and over that a solution was just so hard to implement, while the solution they landed on was just to give partial rewards to those who were kicked.

To me, this sort of behavior from the studio is bizarrely immature as they make excuse after excuse for why they miss the mark at every single turn, with the best example to this being how they immediately excused the Escalation of Freedom's lack of any substantial content and numerous broken attributes as "Oh well a huge portion of our company was on vacation while we developing this which resulted in a lack of communication, sorry :\". Remember when Sony required a PSN login for this game and Arrowhead insisted it was all Sony, and the CEO only attempting to do anything about it once he had millions of players backing him? Its an interesting shift of blame considering Arrowhead knew of this requirement, yet didn't do anything to warn the fanbase prior to the "forced" rollout of PSN. Even now, many countries still cant access this game because of the PSN requirement despite the requirement now being dropped. Arrowhead shifted the blame from Sony to Steam in that regard, but I have a hard time believing that the studio is entirely powerless here. To me, its more likely they dont want to spare any resources trying to fix that problem as they continually try to put out other fires they have created themselves. Basically, I think Arrowhead hides behind every excuse it can for their problems, and at some point you need to look at the big picture and wonder what the constant variable is in all of these problems: Arrowhead's involvement and lack of initiative until after the community is in uproar.

This most recent update was over hyped and massively underwhelming, and from what I've seen the newest difficulty is a broken mess by Arrowhead's own admission. Since launch, this game has felt like early access as it is even missing one of the three main factions from the first game plus all of the leaks (made by Arrowhead themselves on several occasions) of the seemingly nearly-complete vehicles and other stratagems none of which have made it into the game still. Now, six months later, all of these things are still missing from the game, and while the battlepasses continue to roll out with increasingly boring and useless weapons and recycled armor abilities, the amount of actual new content added into the game since launch can be listed within a few seconds. Of course, when talking about the nerfs to popular player weapons, this list becomes several pages of changes. They spend seemingly the majority of their resources on making battlepasses, but dont seem to realize that nobody will buy them if the game isn't fun.

All in all, this company is proving over and over they have no idea how to manage an active fanbase, much less a "game as a service". The implied service here, of course, is that in another year once they nerf every gun into the ground then maybe they'll add a new mission type that doesnt work. Their take on making the game fair for all weapons is not to make bad weapons good, but to make good weapons bad. And, in a PVE game, this has to be one of the worst stances a studio can have and IMO will lead to their downfall in the long run.


Edit September 14th: The future finally looks promising for this game, however I highly recommend any current and prospective fans stay extremely wary of these promises (In reference to the coming player buffs, such as bringing back OG breaker and railgun). Keep in mind they are rolling back 6 months worth of nerfs, and during all of that time they ignored their player base's anger and issues with the nerfs. That is a lot of wasted effort on their part on something that NOBODY in the playerbase asked for or liked. It took them about 6 months and for their playerbase to become a shadow of what it once was for them to finally listen to players. Helldiver 2 will never fully recover from the damage the devs have done to it all by themselves, and frankly they don't deserve to recover. You cant just ignore your playerbase for 6 months and then suddenly decide to rollback the majority of those disliked changes and expect for everyone to forgive and forget, ESPECIALLY IN A ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ LIVE SERVICE GAME. Thousands of fans have already entirely dropped this game due to the devs total incompetent mishandling of this game, myself included until their recent promises of massive buffs. Not to mention that over a hundred countries are STILL barred from the game.

I know I am harping on the same points over and over here, I just am completely astounded that one of the coming changes is the un-nerfing of the breaker, the first controversial nerf from like 5 months ago. Five months for them to look back and think "Hmm, maybe that actually wasn't a good idea :\" when the community has been in uproar about it since it happened. They have consistently ignored and even insulted their community's suggestions. All that time ago with the breaker nerf, people pointed out that the only reason the breaker was getting used so often was due to the fact that every other available gun was woefully underpowered, and yet nothing was done about that. Now here we are, months later with more nerfs and no substantial buffs to offset them, and surprise surprise, nobody wants to play a game where the guns hit like wet noodles and the enemies feel like waves of tanks. What a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ shocker.

Imo, Helldivers deserves to fail. AH has COMPLETELY mishandled this game, AND the dev they have in charge of the nerfing and balancing of weapons is a braindead idiot. Alexus Kravchenko, the same dev who threw the wrench into Hello Neighbor 2 and bailed on it just before launch, is the one in charge of all of these nerfs. How does he do it? As previously mentioned, he simply looks at what weapon is most popular and nerfs it to force weapon diversity based on literal spreadsheets. An actual buffoon they NEED to replace, along with his notoriously toxic engagements with the community.

Despite my literal essay of hate, I actually love this game. Thats where all of this frustration comes from. I hope it bounces back. It certainly deserves to fail after everything it has done and the numerous times it has spit in its fans' faces for no reason, but I actually sincerely hope they turn it around. If they cant, its completely on them. My problem truly isn't with this game, its with the devs behind it. AH seemed to have good intentions at launch, and then immediately put earplugs in and decided that the people who play their game for hundreds, thousands of hours surely don't know what they want from the game they play daily.

TLDR; dont get too hopeful just because of the promise of buffs. AH has stated that of course there will still be nerfs in the future, after all.

Changed this review several times, and as of now its probably going to stay negative. Game is fun, but its not going anywhere good. Its a fun gameplay loop with nothing else going for it. Devs that repeatedly nerf fun weapons using nothing more than the analytics of whats being used the most, lack of any meaningful updates in the six months since launch (Keep in mind this is a "game as a service" game), constantly breaking their own game by buffing enemies that are already massively overpowered while refusing to patch issues, and spending almost all of their time developing the next month's battlepass. Dont even get me started on how long it takes them to fix massive issues, with them finally releasing a fix to trolls kicking players during the final seconds of a mission only just now while this has been a HUGE problem since launch. They claimed over and over that a solution was just so hard to implement, while the solution they landed on was just to give partial rewards to those who were kicked. To me, this sort of behavior from the studio is bizarrely immature as they make excuse after excuse for why they miss the mark at every single turn, with the best example to this being how they immediately excused the Escalation of Freedom's lack of any substantial content and numerous broken attributes as "Oh well a huge portion of our company was on vacation while we developing this which resulted in a lack of communication, sorry :\". Remember when Sony required a PSN login for this game and Arrowhead insisted it was all Sony, and the CEO only attempting to do anything about it once he had millions of players backing him? Its an interesting shift of blame considering Arrowhead knew of this requirement, yet didn't do anything to warn the fanbase prior to the "forced" rollout of PSN. Even now, many countries still cant access this game because of the PSN requirement despite the requirement now being dropped. Arrowhead shifted the blame from Sony to Steam in that regard, but I have a hard time believing that the studio is entirely powerless here. To me, its more likely they dont want to spare any resources trying to fix that problem as they continually try to put out other fires they have created themselves. Basically, I think Arrowhead hides behind every excuse it can for their problems, and at some point you need to look at the big picture and wonder what the constant variable is in all of these problems: Arrowhead's involvement and lack of initiative until after the community is in uproar. This most recent update was over hyped and massively underwhelming, and from what I've seen the newest difficulty is a broken mess by Arrowhead's own admission. Since launch, this game has felt like early access as it is even missing one of the three main factions from the first game plus all of the leaks (made by Arrowhead themselves on several occasions) of the seemingly nearly-complete vehicles and other stratagems none of which have made it into the game still. Now, six months later, all of these things are still missing from the game, and while the battlepasses continue to roll out with increasingly boring and useless weapons and recycled armor abilities, the amount of actual new content added into the game since launch can be listed within a few seconds. Of course, when talking about the nerfs to popular player weapons, this list becomes several pages of changes. They spend seemingly the majority of their resources on making battlepasses, but dont seem to realize that nobody will buy them if the game isn't fun. All in all, this company is proving over and over they have no idea how to manage an active fanbase, much less a "game as a service". The implied service here, of course, is that in another year once they nerf every gun into the ground then maybe they'll add a new mission type that doesnt work. Their take on making the game fair for all weapons is not to make bad weapons good, but to make good weapons bad. And, in a PVE game, this has to be one of the worst stances a studio can have and IMO will lead to their downfall in the long run. Edit September 14th: The future finally looks promising for this game, however I highly recommend any current and prospective fans stay extremely wary of these promises (In reference to the coming player buffs, such as bringing back OG breaker and railgun). Keep in mind they are rolling back 6 months worth of nerfs, and during all of that time they ignored their player base's anger and issues with the nerfs. That is a lot of wasted effort on their part on something that NOBODY in the playerbase asked for or liked. It took them about 6 months and for their playerbase to become a shadow of what it once was for them to finally listen to players. Helldiver 2 will never fully recover from the damage the devs have done to it all by themselves, and frankly they don't deserve to recover. You cant just ignore your playerbase for 6 months and then suddenly decide to rollback the majority of those disliked changes and expect for everyone to forgive and forget, ESPECIALLY IN A FUCKING LIVE SERVICE GAME. Thousands of fans have already entirely dropped this game due to the devs total incompetent mishandling of this game, myself included until their recent promises of massive buffs. Not to mention that over a hundred countries are STILL barred from the game. I know I am harping on the same points over and over here, I just am completely astounded that one of the coming changes is the un-nerfing of the breaker, the first controversial nerf from like 5 months ago. Five months for them to look back and think "Hmm, maybe that actually wasn't a good idea :\" when the community has been in uproar about it since it happened. They have consistently ignored and even insulted their community's suggestions. All that time ago with the breaker nerf, people pointed out that the only reason the breaker was getting used so often was due to the fact that every other available gun was woefully underpowered, and yet nothing was done about that. Now here we are, months later with more nerfs and no substantial buffs to offset them, and surprise surprise, nobody wants to play a game where the guns hit like wet noodles and the enemies feel like waves of tanks. What a fucking shocker. Imo, Helldivers deserves to fail. AH has COMPLETELY mishandled this game, AND the dev they have in charge of the nerfing and balancing of weapons is a braindead idiot. Alexus Kravchenko, the same dev who threw the wrench into Hello Neighbor 2 and bailed on it just before launch, is the one in charge of all of these nerfs. How does he do it? As previously mentioned, he simply looks at what weapon is most popular and nerfs it to force weapon diversity based on literal spreadsheets. An actual buffoon they NEED to replace, along with his notoriously toxic engagements with the community. Despite my literal essay of hate, I actually love this game. Thats where all of this frustration comes from. I hope it bounces back. It certainly deserves to fail after everything it has done and the numerous times it has spit in its fans' faces for no reason, but I actually sincerely hope they turn it around. If they cant, its completely on them. My problem truly isn't with this game, its with the devs behind it. AH seemed to have good intentions at launch, and then immediately put earplugs in and decided that the people who play their game for hundreds, thousands of hours surely don't know what they want from the game they play daily. TLDR; dont get too hopeful just because of the promise of buffs. AH has stated that of course there will still be nerfs in the future, after all.