![]() Call in airstrikes to take out tougher enemies. Call in ammo drops to keep the bullets coming. The trick, of course, is to make the most of your support drops. The first few missions are easy enough for you to cope with all these issues, but after a few planets you might find the going tough. Reloading is slow and leaves you vulnerable, and after a few reloads you’ll find yourself entirely out of ammo. The bugs come thick and fast, your weapons don’t seem fit for purpose, and you need to reload more often than seems plausible. At this point, predictably, an avalanche of bugs descend on your position.Īt first, Helldivers seems to have its design out of whack. When you’re finished, you call in the shuttle then wait ninety seconds for it to arrive. You wander around the map, tackling them in any order that you fancy and blasting the ravening bugs that skitter, sprint or lurch towards you. Objectives come in a number of guises, ranging from taking a control point to activating SAM sites to destroying bug nests. L1 either throws a beacon to call in the required support, or a grenade. The R2 button reloads your weapon, while L2 brings up a menu of airdrops and airstrikes, summoned by a sequence of taps on the D-pad. ![]() You move with the left stick and optionally aim with the right while dispensing vengeance on the murderous mega-insects with the L2 button. Through the tutorial, you’ll get a grasp of the basic mechanics. In its OTT, sardonic take on sci-fi warfare, its talk of ‘managed democracy’, sacrifice and liberty, Helldivers is singing straight from the Starship Troopers hymn book. The tutorial makes it clear what kind of force and what kind of war this is: life is cheap, war is glorious, and today is a good day to die. As one of the Helldivers of the title, you’re dropped on the surface of an alien planet, given a series of objectives, then expected to complete them before calling in a shuttle for extraction. Helldivers covers the ongoing wars between humanity and three intergalactic enemies, with you placed firmly on the front lines. Why Starship Troopers? Well, it helps that Helldivers’ first enemy race is a bunch of giant bugs, but the bigger reason is that premise is ripped nearly entirely from the movie. ![]() ![]() Most importantly, it’s smart enough to wrangle an unholy array of influences, including Diablo, Destiny and the Renegade Ops school of shooters, not to mention Paul Verhoeven’s film of Starship Troopers, into one coherent whole. It’s smart in its humour, smart in its core mechanics and smart in its long-term systems. It might look like just another twin-stick shooter, but Helldivers is smarter than you think. Available on PS4, PS3, PS Vita (PS4 and PS Vita reviewed) ![]()
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