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Notes -
Helldivers 2 is a blast. Haven't had this much fun in a coop game in ages.
I don't understand @Cjet 's objection that the guns aren't satisfying to shoot. They're chunky, with intricate mechanics (they simulate rocket backblast! You can adjust the rate of fire on the MMGs!) and they provide visceral feedback, enemies have detailed damage models and aren't just bullet sponges, you can blow off limbs and see bugs limp, perforate them enough and they'll bleed to death. The robot enemies get blown into scraps in an eminently enjoyable manner. And it's not like the "normal" guns are only an appetizer for support call-ins, they are more more than capable of dealing with 90% of what the game throws at you, and it makes sense that you need to bust out the big guns for tanks of both the biomechanical and engineered kind.
My online buddies have had a great time just fucking around, running through the woods, swamps, taigas or desert with tracer fire lancing overhead, or away from an absolute horde of bloodthirsty bugs.
It's the best Starship Troopers game. It's the best ODST game. It's the best Tempestus Scion versus Tyranids game. You drop heavy fucking ordnance on some very unsympathetic foes, and laugh your ass off when your buddies respawn you in the middle of a minefield or your drones and turrets blow your head off (friendly fire causes half the fatalities in the game, and it's hilarious), and you generally have a great time.
I would heartily recommend it, and hopefully they'll get around to a balance patch that makes some of the off-meta builds less suicidal on the highest difficulties. They're adding mechs and other vehicles soon, and if you wanted a 40k Dreadnought game, this is it.
The game works best in unexpected moments of chaos. Like, you and the squad will be running to the next objective when suddenly an enemy horde side swipes you out of nowhere, so you start sprinting away with lazers flying over head, and you dive into cover, and you start fumbling with stratagems to get an eagle cluster out there but the fucking arrows are weird, and then a robot gets around your cover and you have to switch back to your weapons and you start shooting wildly and then your idiot friend died and he's calling for a reinforce but fuck fuck fuck youre barely surviving. Stuff like that.
Sure, there's that, but I also find it very nice when you happen upon a competent squad and you high-speed low-drag operate your way through the map, wiping out patrols before they can call reinforcements, ticking objective boxes left and right, and generally being the elite of Super Earth's finest.
And then one tiny thing goes wrong and everything's back in your scenario!
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