Helldivers

 PlayStation 4
User Score
8.0

Generally favorable reviews- based on 493 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 373 out of 493
  2. Mixed: 73 out of 493
  3. Negative: 47 out of 493
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  1. Sodastra
    Mar 28, 2015
    4
    Sadly, Helldivers lacks to many design flaws to be a good game.

    Especially: 1. All players of a mission are restricted to the same screen, although they are connected via Internet. This restriction is only normal for offline koop games. Leads to following problems: - Line of sight is greatly reduced compared to single player, as the screen centers in the middle of the players    Sadly, Helldivers lacks to many design flaws to be a good game.

    Especially:

    1. All players of a mission are restricted to the same screen, although they are connected via Internet. This restriction is only normal for offline koop games. Leads to following problems:

    - Line of sight is greatly reduced compared to single player, as the screen centers in the middle of the players position. Which leads to the tactic to fire blindly in directions where enemies MIGHT come along.
    - Frequently one player happens to fall back and be OFF SCREEN. Thus, he can't see what is happening with him and dies.

    2. Usage of equipment is a chore. You need to press certain key combinations for equipment to activate. Often in the midst of an chaotic battle, which leads to mistyping very often. Same applies for activating mission targets. This is ok for the latter, but inacceptable for own equipment. Imagine a Diablo 3 where you have to type long key combinations to use your skills. This leads to following consequences:

    - At the beginning of each mission and every time a new player arrives, equipment has to be summoned. However, the existing group regularly doesn't want to wait until the new players has summoned his toys.

    - More powerful equipment has longer combinations. This would be ok, but leads to players not using them as they are not really usable for the desired situations. Additionally, more powerful equipment tends to kill your comrades more easily, as friendly fire in this game is always on...

    3. Equipment is unbalanced, especially in teams. There is equipment which can be used indefinitly apart from cooldowns. And there is equipment that you can summon ONE TIME. If you die, this equipment drops to the ground. In hectic situations this means you often won't be able to retrieve your equipment - or it is stolen by your comrades instead. Consequently, most players in groups don't use equipment that will be dropped on death.

    4. Equipment progress is a fatal misdesign. You get new equipment mostly from completing planets with increasing difficulty. So, if you don't want to play overly chaotic, hectic and often impossible missions, your game progression comes to an end at half the game. However, you don't need the higher equipment in the easier missions. Nonetheless this cuts the progression content severely.

    5. Respawn system is ridiculous. On lower difficulties, it is possible to defeat enemy groups and have some rest, as new spawned groups take some time to get to you. On higher difficulties, there are ALWAYS enemies around, the only option is then to press forward and complete mission objectives while fighting enough enemies to proceed. Tactics are then non-existing. In many cases it is easier to run away from the current path than to try to get forward on the previously selected. Tedious.

    6. Single Player is possible, but broken as well. On the one hand, many of the multiplayer mistakes are gone. You have a full line of sight and you can retrieve fallen equipment any time. On the other hand, every difficulty other than easy is meant for groups. The only option to single them is to avoid fighting at all. This requires a special equipment not being available from the start. And of couse it offers some tactical depth. But why did I want to play a shooter then? The other option is to stay at easy missions, but these get boring very very fast.

    Conclusion:

    Depending on player type, Helldivers quickly leads either to frustration or to boredom. It is no bad game in terms of general game mechanics, but it could have been far better in keeping the players at bay. In the current state, I can't recommend buying it. It is challenging, yes. But it does so not with tactical depth like XCom, but with chaotic situations, friendly fire and other distractions. This can be done better - and has been done better before.    … Expand
  2. ujinroth
    Jun 8, 2015
    0
    Automatic weapons don't shoot with some DS4 controllers, the dev's said they won't fix it, suggesting to people to buy another controller, obviously 60$ of incompetancy tax.
  3. kris2fur
    Mar 7, 2015
    2
    PLEASE READ BEFORE PURCHASING.

    No one will tell you how broken this game is I have had my level reset from 15 to 0, twice. There are other various bugs too across all platforms. Difficulty is almost random sometimes. Some people can't fire specific weapons because of their controllers. People can't join each other multiplayer, you can't join your friends, you can't invite (This is a    PLEASE READ BEFORE PURCHASING.

    No one will tell you how broken this game is I have had my level reset from 15 to 0, twice.
    There are other various bugs too across all platforms. Difficulty is almost random sometimes. Some people can't fire specific weapons because of their controllers.
    People can't join each other multiplayer, you can't join your friends, you can't invite (This is a feature of the actual game), it goes on and on.
    The facts are this is a great fun and punishing game but the verdict is it's got a high amount of bugs preventing players progression and ruining the experience.    … Expand
  4. Peptide
    Mar 6, 2015
    3
    WARNING!!! This game is the biggest steaming pile of crap ever released on PSN.
    If you are looking for a twin stick shooter, this has about as much action to it as a turtle race in a pool of molasses. For every scene of shooting you haver to sit through a lot of reading, story, background, and recapping. Don't bother trying to play alone. You have to be able to shoot, constantly    WARNING!!! This game is the biggest steaming pile of crap ever released on PSN.
    If you are looking for a twin stick shooter, this has about as much action to it as a turtle race in a pool of molasses. For every scene of shooting you haver to sit through a lot of reading, story, background, and recapping. Don't bother trying to play alone. You have to be able to shoot, constantly Constantly CONSTANTLY manually reloading, running out of ammo, calling in for supply drops and other support drops all while hordes of baddies are overrunning you. Is a haphazzard and messy pile of mayhem. It was a HUGE waste of $20 and after 1 hour has been deleted off my system.
    .
    I love twin stick shooters so much but this pile of garbage is an insult to the genre and to videogamers' intelligence. On this 1 to 10 rating scale, I would honestly give this somewhere between a 2.0 and 4.0 depending on your mood. SAVE YOUR MONEY!!!!!!!    … Expand
  5. illegalmonkey
    Mar 13, 2015
    3
    As a couple that has little time for video games these days, my girlfriend and I look for simple co-op games we can play in our downtime. From the videos I watched Helldivers seemed like the sort of run-n-gun shooter we would enjoy. Some mindless bug splattering nonsense that we can switch off our brains for and enjoy. Sadly this was NOT the case.

    The game, to our dismay, is overly    As a couple that has little time for video games these days, my girlfriend and I look for simple co-op games we can play in our downtime. From the videos I watched Helldivers seemed like the sort of run-n-gun shooter we would enjoy. Some mindless bug splattering nonsense that we can switch off our brains for and enjoy. Sadly this was NOT the case.

    The game, to our dismay, is overly complicated by making you actually run out of ammo(which there is very little of) and making you have to reload your gun manually. On top of that they toss in the Stratagem junk where you have to sit there typing in a code to get a drop of more ammo or an auto-machine gun that you have to hide from or otherwise be killed by. This all makes for a very lame, very frustrating time. My girlfriend and I were greatly disappointed in the game after only 20 minutes. If they had simply given this a Geometry Wars control scheme and cut out all the low-ammo/reload crap and upped the number of monsters to kill we would have enjoyed the game.

    In summary this game is not worth all the hype it has gotten. I dunno where people are getting 9's and 10's for this game, but it's the crappiest game I've played lately and it didn't take long to turn me off to it. I wish I could get my money back on this, but we all know that isn't gonna happen.    … Expand
  6. velvetmeds
    Mar 3, 2015
    0
    Another overrated indie game without anything interesting about it, bad for SP gaming, no story, same as every online centric game out there, and you only need one of those to play, so this is just extra"fat" that serves no purpose. There are much better indies out there, including on the PS4, and some of them were free on PS+ so no need to waste money on this.
  7. jmart0031
    Feb 7, 2016
    0
    Boring, repetitive, and unoriginal. Ammo empties so fast. Ripped off a warhammer series w/ logos and character design. Also warhammer did a way better two stick shooter years ago. Complete trash
  8. MrBill
    Apr 4, 2015
    0
    Log in. Go to the multiplayer pad. Shoot things. For Democracy! For freedom!! For liberty!!! For the sound bugs make when they pop!! I am enjoying myself :)
  9. Turbodowg
    Feb 4, 2016
    1
    Yet again Sony have let us down. We had a terrible xmas on ps+ a terrible New Year and now an awful February. Feb's free games list is headlined by this outdated, mess of a game.

    Twin stick shooters are a dull genre in general unless done right like Binding of Issac. However this is just another example of a piss poor game that has no place on a modern console. Another yawn worthy    Yet again Sony have let us down. We had a terrible xmas on ps+ a terrible New Year and now an awful February. Feb's free games list is headlined by this outdated, mess of a game.

    Twin stick shooters are a dull genre in general unless done right like Binding of Issac. However this is just another example of a piss poor game that has no place on a modern console.

    Another yawn worthy bad looking game we've been fobbed off with this month.    … Expand
  10. jetSetWilly
    Feb 27, 2016
    0
    The games network protocol are all p2p with small updates done to the community stats done by arrowhead servers. We connect to each other using our psn accounts, so you need to be logged in to play with other people. Its not bad but when problems start to occur such as weekends when you can't get a game and you've been looking forward to it all week, well that just leaves a bad taste inThe games network protocol are all p2p with small updates done to the community stats done by arrowhead servers. We connect to each other using our psn accounts, so you need to be logged in to play with other people. Its not bad but when problems start to occur such as weekends when you can't get a game and you've been looking forward to it all week, well that just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. We pay monthly money for our playstation plus service and they can't provide a server for a game they sold for free? Seriously? Like wtf Sony! This is cheap as, fact! Happily pulling in the dosh whilst providing minimial tech capital investment to look after you're customers and developers.

    I have heard Sony can be hard to talk to and developers like arrowhead can have some difficulties getting things done. I have this game a 0 mainly because Sony didn't make it, don't support it, should never have been entitle to own its trademark. That's just wrong.    … Expand
  11. Mr_Wednesday
    Mar 23, 2016
    4
    Great game, but **** servers disconnecting every 10 minutes make it unbearable. Even if you are playing solo, it disconnects and sends you to the main menu. A real shame
  12. MNecromancer
    Aug 8, 2021
    4
    The game is a very fun coop experience, but its structure suggests that you're building up to something, and then you find out that none of the missions really matter and nothing ever changes. That killed the game for me and I haven't played it in 5 years. I've been waiting for any reason to play it again, but they've never released any sort of story mode. So disappointing. There areThe game is a very fun coop experience, but its structure suggests that you're building up to something, and then you find out that none of the missions really matter and nothing ever changes. That killed the game for me and I haven't played it in 5 years. I've been waiting for any reason to play it again, but they've never released any sort of story mode. So disappointing. There are already so many coop games, but most of them allow you to work towards some goal.… Expand
  13. Nath6349
    Dec 11, 2016
    3
    The idea of being of being a part of the big fight is cool but the impact you have on the galactic battle is so small that it has no impact and you are just wasting your time.

    The gameplay is OK, the shooting isn't great and you have to hope the others want to go where you want to go as you all share the screen. Each game is basically exactly the same but slightly different enemies and    The idea of being of being a part of the big fight is cool but the impact you have on the galactic battle is so small that it has no impact and you are just wasting your time.

    The gameplay is OK, the shooting isn't great and you have to hope the others want to go where you want to go as you all share the screen. Each game is basically exactly the same but slightly different enemies and difficulties. The likelihood of even joining other players was actually rather low, it kept failing. When you do make it through a multiplayer game, you typically add 1-3 points each. The total required for each battle is in the millions!

    So the gameplay is average, the achievement is nothing and there was generally alot of waiting around with the multiplayer aspects.    … Expand
  14. ElCaptain
    Jul 20, 2020
    0
    utterly boring in every way, shape and form, just extremely boring and dull

Awards & Rankings

45
#45 Best PS4 Game of 2015
41
#41 Most Discussed PS4 Game of 2015
70
#70 Most Shared PS4 Game of 2015

Critic Reviews

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Metascore
81

Generally favorable reviews - based on 56 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 46 out of 56
  2. Mixed: 10 out of 56
  3. Negative: 0 out of 56
  1. Hobby Consolas
    Feb 9, 2016
    75
    With some great cooperative mechanics, Helldivers is better when playing with friends, but repetitive missions and maps lacks experience.
    Read full review
  2. Playstation Official Magazine Australia
    May 26, 2015
    80
    Will you do YOUR part, citizen? You should. [May 2015, p80]
  3. Playstation Official Magazine UK
    May 20, 2015
    80
    The upgrade paths and gear-gating lend genuine longevity. [May 2015, p.94]
See all critic reviews »