Helldivers 2 is the best cooperative video game I have played in a long time. It arrived on PlayStation 5 and PC at the beginning of February and has become, on its own merits, a phenomenon in the electronic entertainment sector. Over the past few weeks, you've probably read comparisons to Starship Troopers or come across funny memes and videos of explosions on remote planets. In this article we are going to analyze what has made Helldivers 2 such a success.
Dutch director Paul Verhoeven brings together great action classics such as RoboCop and Desafío Total in his filmography, although the film that interests us when talking about Helldivers 2 is Starship Troopers. The film published in 1997 presents a dystopian future in which planet Earth is controlled by the Federation, a suprastate organization that has "solved" the problems of democracy and science by replacing the old system with a stable dictatorship with a clear enemy. : the insects.
Starship Troopers is evidently a parody, it is a criticism of fascism and militarism. In Verhoeven's dystopian Earth the only important thing is war and being a soldier is the only way to achieve citizenship and be able to have political participation. But soldiers die in millions on remote planets fighting a war that has little or nothing to do with Earth and humans.
I'm talking about Starship Troopers because Helldivers 2 is an almost literal adaptation of Paul Verhoeven's film into a video game. In Helldivers 2 the player plays a soldier in the Super-Earth space army in his crusade against two great enemies: bugs and robots. The player is cannon fodder, completely replaceable mobile infantry.
War in Helldivers 2 serves to “guarantee democracy” and to protect “our way of life” from the threat of bugs and androids. For this reason, machine guns, grenades and bombings are not weapons, they are means to bring Democracy (yes, with a capital letter) to the rest of the universe. This is what the government of Super-Earth tells you, although the reality is that your destiny is to die fighting for a cause that you don't understand very well. War stuff, I guess.
You can do a thoughtful and detailed analysis of all the details that make Helldivers 2 work, but the reality is simpler: it is a lot of fun. Swedish studio Arrowhead proposes that you form a squad of up to four soldiers and undertake stupidly dangerous missions. Put this together with a set of very well thought out mechanics, epic music and large doses of “democracy” and you have it.
Enrique Alonso from Eurogamerspain said that the secret of Helldivers 2 is how it handles failure. It's a game where everything goes wrong all the time and that's a good thing. It is common for a teammate to kill you in crossfire or in a desperate bombardment. It's easy for everything to go wrong and the game is designed to make it easier for that to happen. The weapons feel comfortable and accurate, but at the same time, it's very easy to miss.
Helldivers 2 is chaotic on purpose. It is a comical game that aims to make you laugh constantly because of the hilariousness of all the situations it poses. And it is normal that a cooperative multiplayer title is very fun playing with friends, but Helldivers 2 manages to be just as fun in all situations, even if you are playing with three unknown people from the other side of the world.
Who knew that to succeed you had to make good video games? This rhetorical question may seem obvious, but as Warner Bros. Games has recently demonstrated with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, it is a conclusion that many large publishers do not reach. You can make good games as a service and Helldivers 2 is a great example.
When we talk about games as a service, we are referring to multiplayer titles that aim to have a very long life with successive updates in the style of Fortnite, GTA Online or Destiny. Helldivers 2 proposes a large-scale intergalactic war and the war map is updated daily measuring the forces between players and the “enemies of democracy.” Additionally, there are two battle passes with which you can unlock weapons, armor, and skills.
Arrowhead's new thing checks all the boxes on the list of things a game as a service must have. But since it is a good game and a very fun experience, players do not take the monetization systems the wrong way. Additionally, it should be noted that all the extra elements of the game can be obtained by playing and that at no time do these monetization systems feel abusive.
The biggest danger with games as a service is that greed breaks the bank, as happened with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. That's why it's important to trust the game and the developers and focus on quality. The money will arrive later (and boy has it arrived).
Arrowhead has not yet published official sales data on the game, so to talk about the success of Helldivers 2 we have to rely on the little information that is public. According to the SteamDB portal, Helldivers 2 had its peak number of players on February 24 with 458,709 simultaneous players on PC. Since then, the trend has continued with recurring peaks of more than 300,000 users.
Analyst Mat Piscatella points out that the sales pattern of Helldivers 2 is the opposite of what is usual in the sector. Normally, a game sells the most copies during the first week, but in the case of Helldivers 2 sales continue to increase as the game establishes itself as a phenomenon and word spreads. Piscatella talks about a “reverse decay curve” pattern.
In fact, at the time of writing this article, Helldivers 2 is the second best-selling video game on Steam, the largest computer game store. All of this data is limited to PC and PlayStation 5 sales or player numbers are unknown, so the total number of actual players is much higher.
A few weeks ago, Arrowhead announced that they would expand the capacity of their servers to be able to support up to 800,000 simultaneous players. So we can get an idea of what figures the game could have reached.
When Helldivers 2 was released I ignored it. I thought it wasn't for me. I don't usually like multiplayer action games and this seemed like a generic and boring title. But reality has slapped me on the cheek and, since I tried it, the new Arrowhead game has become my favorite game of 2024. Quite a surprise.
And it's not that Arrowhead was looking to surprise anyone. The Swedish studio has remained faithful to its proposal and has opted for an idea that, in reality, is not new and has existed since 2015. Because the number 2 of Helldivers 2 indicates that, in effect, it is a sequel, the continuation of something that already existed. Helldivers – the original game – was published in 2015 and already had most of the successes we have talked about in the previous paragraphs. So Arrowhead has known what it does for a long time and the ones who didn't know it were us.
But come on, enough of the chatter that Super-Earth cannot defend itself and more cannon fodder is needed to impose democracy. Helldivers 2 is available on PlayStation 5 and PC.
