Super Democracy; or, Squishin' Bugs 'n' Launchin' Nukes
Watching Niamh, one of my partners, and its partner Zoey play Super Democracy Simulator 2 (aka Helldivers 2) gave me a bit of a "ooh, might I like this game that is entirely outside my typical preference for game genre" kinda thought. The more I saw the gameplay as they squashed bugs and destroyed robots, the more I liked the idea of playing it. I'm pretty hesitant when it comes to shooters though, because I've purchased games before that I grew to hate over time. Destiny 2 is one of those games.
D2 isn't really objectionable as a game to me, at first. I had fun for the first 60 hours or so of gameplay, shooting various enemies on different planets or plinking guardians in Crucible. The last 50 hours weren't really so great, though. For me, D2's story was a jumbled, hard to follow mess that assumed the player was obsessed about all the lore in the game. As far as I can tell, D2 gets going right where D1 left off and never gets off the accelerator pedal. Getting into the story years after D2 released meant all of the dialogue containing even a slight reference to the world-building done either in earlier stages of D2 or in the previous game flew right over my head.
More than that, there was something that just... bounced off me about Destiny 2. Maybe it's the looter shooter mechanics, maybe a little bit of trauma surrounding somebody I used to know who used to play a lot of it. I dunno. Whatever it is that bounces off of me in D2 though, isn't present in Helldivers 2 so far.
In HD2, there's only PvE gameplay. There's no really fun PvP mode that's only really fun if you find the right guns in the right missions with the right buff rolls. The story is simple enough for idiots like me to understand. The tongue-in-cheek humor gets good chuckles. It's just me, some buddies, some guns, some artillery and a buncha bugs that need to be squashed without anything to make me confused about why I'm even doing anything in the game.
Thinking about it now, I feel like the reason why D2 bounced off me for good is the grind. Trying to get a weapon that I wanted with a highly optimized - yet still randomized - roll was irritating and disheartening. Destiny 2 requires an obsessive level of play time to try and get good weapons that are fun to play with, but I just don't feel as connected to the shooter genre as I do to racing games. I can throw down ludicrous playtime figures in hardcore simulators like iRacing and Assetto Corsa without more justification than "take car, go fast," so it's not some inability to commit to something. It's just... doing the same gameplay loop over and over and over like it's a slot machine feels gross.
HD2 isn't like that. You just go to a planet, shoot some bugs, launch some nukes and come back to the ship to unlock the stuff you want. There's no frills, no goofy randomized stats, no grinding. The gameplay loops are all very same-y like D2's, but you don't get some shitty gun you hate at the end of it all. You get what you want out of every bug-crushin' mission in HD2.
My opinion about HD2 might sour over time, or it might not. I've only got 3 hours in the game so far so it's hard to say whether I'll love it or hate it. But what I've played of it so far is fun, especially with friends and partners. So we'll see how the next 20 hours of playtime turn out, I suppose.