Helldivers 2 is the best game of 2024. by far.
I usually don't play brand new games the year that they've been released. I tend to stick to racing games, which lately hasn't been the best genre on the gaming market. As a result, I've had to branch out. I tend to do so very cautiously; there are a few games I really enjoyed at first, but started to irritate me or break my immersion in ways that couldn't be rectified. Call of Duty is a great example; its gunplay is as great as it has always been, but its cosmetic skins and the guns locked behind paid battle passes make the game look incredibly dissonant with its vanilla game design... not to mention those aforementioned battle pass guns tend to be "pay to win" overpowered garbage.
Arrowhead Studios looked at all the shit going on in the gaming market, and said "what if we didn't do that?"
Enter: Helldivers 2.
This game is nuts. It's a co-op PvE third-person extraction shooter - a string of adjectives I shouldn't at all enjoy based on my previous experience with these kinds of games, and yet it's the most fun I've had in video games in a while. Sonic x Shadow Generations gets pretty close to being this fun, but the co-op aspect of this game elevates it to my top game of 2024.
The clip I embedded above shows exactly why. I get a big four-legged walking tank dropped near me, so I reload my anti-tank rifle in a bush and try to flank to its weakspot to destroy it in one shot. A two-legged flamethrowing juggernaut obstructs my flank route, forcing me to run away - straight into a tank. I immediately split away from the tank and up the hill. Looking behind, I see the four-legged Strider walking around. I take a shot at it and hit, but I've missed its weakspots - it's still walking around wreaking havoc. I run down the hill and reload my anti-tank rifle, only for the two-legged Hulker to crest the hill and light me on fire. I dive away to extinguish the flames, heal then run away from him. I find a tree, so I lead him around the tree so I can get behind him and destroy his weakspot - only for the four-legged Strider and the tank I'd previously run into cornering me. The Strider then easily turns me into swiss cheese with its miniguns.
There was no linear scripting that forced me to experience that. This was just the game's enemy scripting naturally having its enemies chase me down in the same way I was chasing them down. They bullrushed me, flanked me, and ultimately outsmarted me. There just aren't a lot of games out there that can build unique cinematic moments like this without forcing me into a cutscene or a quick-time event.
Helldivers 2 is filled with moments just like this. The setting and the characters will change all the time, but the pure kino keeps on coming. Whether you're on an ice planet in the middle of a blizzard, a desert planet with fire tornadoes swirling around, or a low-atmosphere planet with meteor showers, you will find a setting that looks like it's straight out of a movie. It doesn't matter if you're fighting against bugs, robots or aliens, your enemies will use a variety of tactics to stop your imperialist attack. There is not a single mission I've done where I haven't been utterly floored by the extremely immersive, dynamic gameplay.
This game does come with some baggage, however. It's not heavy baggage, but it's still worth mentioning.
First things first: it's a bit janky. In the urban combat environments that you're in while fighting the Illuminate, you can expect your framerate to suffer unless you have a top-of-the-line PC. My computer is quite powerful, yet sometimes dips down to 48 frames per second while in cities with three dropships-worth of Illuminate swarming me. Add to this the latency that tends to show up in the form of jagged/twitchy gun movements while in first-person, and the jank can break the immersion a bit. The depth of the game more than makes up for this, but it's quite frustrating to try and line up a long shot with the anti-material rifle and taking more time just to wait for the sights to settle onto your target. Beyond the latency and frame issues, there are also some strange interactions that the Illuminate have with walls. At times, they will phase straight through walls and, if there's a floor above them that's within their collision box, they'll warp up to the floor. It makes tracking the Illuminate through wreckage incredibly difficult, and they can sometimes get some cheapshots on you after no-clipping through the wall like a GMod DarkRP admin.
The micro-transaction scheme is better than most other games in the current market, as players are able to find Super Credits - the game's MTX currency - while exploring the battlefield. However, I've found 40 Super Credits at most in one mission. For context, Premium Warbonds - their version of battle passes - are 1000 Super Credits. Each item in the warbond is unlocked with Warbond Medals, free tokens that are earned in-game by finishing missions and scattered around the battlefield like Super Credits. The warbonds do come with a couple slots that give you 100 Super Credits each though, and are scattered throughout the free warbond all players have access to, so the MTX grind could be worse than it is. I've seen a few people glazing Arrowhead for a "non-predatory" MTX plan; they're not wrong, but it's not like the grind isn't there. It just so happens to be tied to a really fun game, so the grind doesn't feel like one. This is still a phenomenal game, though. Every single operation has a unique war story to tell...
But to that point, what's the story?
Helldivers 2 is set in a sci-fi future where Earth has become Super Earth and the entire planet has unified under a single government. You are a new recruit into the Helldivers, an elite (read: expendable) battalion of soldiers instructed (read: brainwashed) to defeat Super Earth's enemies at all costs. Set 100 years after the previous Galactic War shown in Helldivers 1, you now find yourself in the middle of the Second Galactic War fighting off similar factions that Super Earth had fended off a century ago. The Automatons were created by ex-Super Earth citizens who had been exiled for modifying their bodies with cybernetic augmentations, and at the end of the first Galactic War those exiles were pushed into Cyberstan to work as slaves for Super Earth. These exiles - known as Cyborgs - then revolted by creating a giant army of replicating robots called The Automatons. Meanwhile, the Terminids are descendents of The Bugs from the first Galactic War which evolved extremely quickly and became hostile after a hundred years being farmed for the valuable resources they produced - Element E-710. (Fun fact: 710 is OIL upside-down.)
For the first few months of the game's release, these two factions were all Helldivers needed to fight. The Illuminate - a third faction Super Earth fought in the Galactic War - were thought to have been made extinct... until now.
A recent update introduced the Squi'th, an advanced alien race with incredible technology. Known by Helldivers and Super Earth citizens as The Illuminate, these squid-like humanoids are transforming the bodies of Super Citizens and turning them into Illuminate zombies. Their intentions aren't yet known, and they've been attacking planets in a seemingly random pattern - one at a time.
Now, let me break the immersion a bit here. This game's mission selection is pretty similar to classic Star Wars Battlefront titles, where you select a planet and then select an operation on that planet. If you zoom out on the mission select screen, you'll be able to see what territories the Terminids, the Illuminate and the Automatons currently control. Players receive Major Orders that direct all players to particular planets or sectors to fight on, and players all watch their collective progression live on the mission select screen. The thing is, an employee (or a group of employees) at Arrowhead Studios actually control the narrative of Helldivers 2, sort of like a Dungeon Master would in Dungeons and Dragons. This means that the narrative of Helldivers 2 is just as dynamic and free-flowing as the gameplay is. The GM's provide Major Orders to the players, the players complete or fail those Major Orders, and the GM then pushes the narrative further. This ensures that the Helldivers 2 story continues to develop over its lifespan, influenced by the contributions the players have in the battles they fight.
Let me give you a brief summary of one of these narratives that came out of Helldivers 2.
A Terminid-controlled planet known as Meridia became overrun by Terminids. The Ministry of Truth had found out that some Terminids were given a non-lethal dose of the Termicide that was being pumped into Meridia's atmosphere to control the Terminid population. This non-lethal dose allowed them to mutate and become resistant to Termicide altogether. This turned the Terminid colony on Meridia into a supercolony that was rapidly reproducing and mutating, and soon the Terminids completely overran the planet. Super Earth implemented a scorched earth policy and demanded the planet be destroyed by pumping Dark Fluid, an exotic substance taken from the Illuminate in the First Galactic War, into Meridia's crust. Helldivers successfully dumped the Dark Fluid deep into the planet, causing Meridia to collapse into what was initially thought to be a black hole. However, after a handful of other Major Orders were completed to give scientists some time and space to research Meridia, the Ministry of Truth eventually learned that the planet had actually turned into a wormhole. That wormhole can't be entered by Helldivers (yet), but they can take their ships to Meridia and observe the wormhole for themselves. The wormhole serves as a reminder of the Battle of Meridia, the Helldivers lost in the operations, and a failure of Super Earth's scientific community.
TL;DR: This game's fucking nuts. There's no other game like this. Holy shit, play this fucking game lol.