Good Times: The Cinematic Chaos of Helldivers 2

Best practices for marketing games have changed dramatically in the last few years. Avoiding coverage of tentpole triple-A titles is impossible during the run-up to their launch, but in an overcrowded marketplace, smaller games have to catch a viral wave to stand out from the pack.

There’s an art to improving the chances of a game going viral. Some genres make for more interesting streaming than others. Mechanics or themes that regularly create compelling or amusing short clips are far more likely to get picked up by legions of always-online fans. Consider Palworld and its faux-Pokemon, relentlessly abused by their owners for the amusement of the internet mob.

Making a good game also helps. Valheim is far less immediately comical than Palworld, but its innovative take on the survival genre and strong themes helped it take off. Vampire Survivors, which looks a bit like a noisy mess in screenshots, created a whole new genre with its simple and compelling mechanics and ultra-low price point.

So it’s no surprise to me that Helldivers 2 has taken off. It’s a great game, smartly designed. At the same time, it constantly delivers cinematic moments that are both awe-inspiring and funny – perfect fodder for short video clips.

It’s not entirely fair to stack Helldivers 2 up against small indie titles. The developers, Arrowhead Game Studios, were well-funded by Sony. Still, in today’s world, Arrowhead is a squarely small-to-mid-sized developer. They employ about 100 folks – a long way from the thousands employed by a Rockstar or an Epic. 

And the level of success the game is experiencing is enormous. Arrowhead is punching well above their weight class.

From a design perspective, why does Helldivers 2 work so well? What did the team do right?

Let’s dive in.

Build Strong Foundations…

The first Helldivers was a top-down cooperative shooter with a military science-fiction theme. Its tiny soldiers worked together to blow up bugs and robots in various creative ways, all while dodging a hail of friendly fire. 

Helldivers built on the studio’s earlier effort – the well-received Magicka title, a quirky action game with element-mixing mechanics, similar to what Larian leveraged so well in its Divinity RPGs. Similarly, Helldivers 2 builds squarely on the foundations of its predecessor.

Indeed, one of the things that surprised me was how close the two games are in their designs.  Despite the significant shift from a top-down to a third-person perspective, Helldivers 2 feels like a genuinely direct sequel to the first game.

Both games are cooperative, with one to four players working together to complete objective-based missions. Both games feature stratagems and quick-time interactive elements that require a sequence of directional button presses. If you made a bullet list of the features of both games, they’d be 80%+ identical.

Making the framing mechanics identical to the first game was a smart choice from a design perspective. Developers always have to decide where to spend their “points” – they don’t have unlimited time or money. If an existing system in a previous game works well, borrowing it wholesale limits risk, especially for a sequel. Why throw out what isn’t broken? 

The core shift from top-down to third-person was a huge change, one that required iteration for feel, pacing, and look – and that’s where the team smartly spent the bulk of their time.

…Then Blow It All Up

The effort invested in polishing the core perspective shift has more than paid off. 

A designer friend of mine commented on how great Helldivers 2 gameplay feels. Little things feel graceful – the way players dive to the ground, the way a bug’s legs crumple and fold when you blast them, the way grenades arc into bug holes (and sometimes bounce out).

I’m a huge fan of Deep Rock Galactic, a game that has a lot of shared DNA with Helldivers 2. It’s a five-year-old mature game, and there are plenty of things Deep Rock still does better. But returning to a Deep Rock match after Helldivers 2, I noticed more clunkiness in how enemies move and die which distracted me from the overall experience. 

Deep Rock is still a fantastic game in 2024, but it speaks volumes about the effort the Helldivers 2 team put toward their core mechanics that the newer title outdoes it.

I also wrote recently about Sea of Thieves, a game with a highly tactile component to all its player actions – from manually loading cannonballs and putting out fires to lugging heavy treasure chests. Helldivers 2 lifts notes from that school of design as well. 

You steer your descending hellpod to crush enemies (or your friends); you slowly lug heavy shells to load a giant cannon; you trudge across the map carrying a heavy mission objective while meteors rain all around you. Environmental elements and physics feel real and have real weight to a degree that most games don’t attempt.

Truly cinematic moments abound in Helldivers 2. Everything in the game is over the top, from the player chats to the explosions. The first time a team touches off one of the larger air strikes or launches the ICBM mission objective is a massive “whoah” moment. Exaggerated effects, sounds, and superb audio work turn every mission into a memorable experience.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning the excellent core cooperative feel – something I’ve only seen rivaled by Deep Rock. Matches with friends or random people are almost equally easy to join. The game has a “drop-in, drop-out” friendliness to heading out on missions that makes it easy to bail on groups you don’t gel with. 

Yet, like Deep Rock, the Helldivers 2 community is proving to be very welcoming and helpful – at least in the early levels of play. The over-the-top tone, cooperative emotes (who doesn’t like a hug or a salute?), and pure satisfaction of the mission-ending last-minute escape on the shuttle all contribute to every match feeling light and frothy – a cross between a goofy buddy comedy and an eighties action movie. 

It’s even hard to get mad about the frequent but silly accidental team kills – they’re all part of the fun, and the death penalty is small.

Not Perfect, but Glorious

There’s no sugarcoating it: Helldivers 2 had a rough launch. Arrowhead did not anticipate how successful the game would be, and their servers simply weren’t ready to handle the load. 

To the studio’s credit, they responded quickly. As of this writing, after a couple of patches, the game is generally stable and I have yet to experience any lengthy downtimes.

Similarly, nailing the balance has been a constant struggle for the developers. Early on, several of the tools – notably the railgun and the personal shield – were so good compared to everything else that high-level players started to kick teammates who didn’t pack the One True Loadout. 

In a game where a good chunk of the fun is about diverse weapon loadouts, and where the structure inspires cooperative, friendly team play, that’s a misstep. To be fair, it’s not necessarily something the developers could have foreseen. Collective balance feedback of a giant community is always going to uncover flaws that could not have been caught in internal testing.

Again, Arrowhead has responded quickly – tweaking weapons, fixing armor (which, on launch, basically didn’t work), and adjusting enemy behavior and spawning. At some point, the pace of patches will slow down, but the team’s speed of response in the early going bodes well for the future of Helldivers 2 as a live service.

Finally, the game is not as consumer-friendly as Deep Rock Galactic. There’s a premium currency. There are cosmetics to purchase in-game; there’s a purchase that’s basically a battle pass. 

Yet the sins here are minor. Compared to almost any other live service game, the monetization is not aggressive, and it’s possible to grind the premium currency over time.

The game isn’t perfect. Indeed, it says something that, given early stumbles that would have killed a lesser title, Helldivers 2 has thrived and emerged stronger than ever. That’s because moment-to-moment, the game delivers action, excitement, and cooperative thrills on a level with the best I’ve played. 

In a bleak time for the industry, Helldivers 2 deserves all its success. It’s a bright light in the darkness, a blast of pure adrenaline and fun in an age of tired sequels and by-the-numbers games with enormous budgets. There’s a reason it’s gone viral and been embraced by the community. 

I hope it has the legs of Deep Rock Galactic and continues to generate stories, amusing clips, and fun for players for years to come.

Now get out there and stomp some bugs – for Managed Democracy! 

Helldivers 2 is available on PC and PlayStation 5.