Gamescom: In Helldivers, You Probably Won’t Survive

The hardest of the hardcore.

As impressed as I was with PlayStation-exclusive titles at this year’s Gamescom like Killzone: Shadow Fall, Resogun, Infamous: Second Son, and Metrico, Arrowhead Studios’ Helldivers is a game that stood out to me simply because I didn’t see anything like it coming. It’s not a pretty game by any stretch of the imagination. It doesn’t try to tell much of a story, either. What it does do is create a feeling of dread and hopelessness, and yet it makes you want to come back for more.
Of course, “dread and hopelessness” should be put into context, because Helldivers isn’t a scary game, it’s just really, really difficult. It beats you mercilessly; it makes you feel like you can’t complete a single mission. And I had a lot of fun playing it.

Good luck. You're really, really going to need it.

Helldivers is a co-op action game that can accommodate up to four players. It will launch on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation Vita sometime in 2014, and it can be played locally on PS3 and PS4 and online with any of the three PlayStation systems. And yes, it’s cross-play (although whether or not it’s cross-buy remains to be seen). In Helldivers, you’ll take up the mantle of space marine-like characters set on randomly-generated maps where you’re directed to complete a series of dangerous tasks before making a (hopefully successful) getaway.

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What it does do is create a feeling of dread and hopelessness...

In my demo, played with one of the game’s developers and a couple of fellow journalists, we landed on a desert planet devoid of plant life or much in the way of topographical variety. Here, we were asked to activate a couple of oil extractors and lay waste to a series of bug nests. Bugs, not surprisingly, are the enemies on this nameless planet, and not-so-shockingly, they proved to be quite the handful. Some were felled easily with mere melee attacks or a few quick bursts from a firearm, but others required explosives (and even airstrikes and nukes) to destroy.
Before being deployed, each player has the option to equip different weapons, perks, and special skills called stratagems. There were only two weapons available (assault rifle, shotgun) as well as three unique perks, but real depth came by way of the aforementioned stratagems. You can assign things like artillery barrages, ammo resupplies, and more that can be called-up during the heat of battle. What’s really cool about these skills are that they are activated on the directional pad with an almost NES-like code input. So if you have character revive equipped, for instance, you’ll have to hold down L1 while pressing something like up, up, down, left, down, and right on the d-pad. And you’ll have to do this in realtime, hoping your friends protect you while you get the button sequence out correctly.

The going gets tough almost immediately in Helldivers regardless of which difficulty you’re playing on (Challenging, Hard, or Hell Dive). Friendly fire is a fact of life – there’s no turning it off – and you can only take a very finite amount of damage before you’re felled. And that friendly fire rule gets really crazy, really fast. If you deploy a turret, for instance, and you’re in between it and an enemy, expect that turret to kill both you and the enemy at the same time. It made me almost afraid to fire my weapon at times, which was a good thing in its own right, since ammunition is scarce. In our game, you started with only six magazines, and making matters worse, if you reloaded your gun, say, halfway through a magazine, you’d lose the entire rest of that magazine.

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The going gets tough almost immediately in Helldivers...

The result is an almost comically difficult game, but one that feels much more strategic than cheap. Developer Arrowhead Games did confirm that it will be playable alone, but it’s truly meant to be played and experienced with others, and it shows. Teamwork is a must; participants can heal and revive each other, call in ammo drops for one another, and more. And all of this is done under the almost constant threat of enemies which, by the way, are infinite in number. They’ll keep on coming, so there’s no use dilly-dallying when there are tasks to be completed.
The randomly-generated nature of Helldivers means that no two experiences will be exactly the same, though there will be a finite amount of environments and enemy types to deal with. The desert/bug combination is all Arrowhead is willing to talk about right now, though they confirmed that there will be at least three more environment types and at least two more types of enemies.

And you thought it was tough during the day.

What’s also quite interesting is that Helldivers takes inspiration from games like PSN’s Dead Nation, with a global campaign that combines the statistics of everyone playing to unlock certain goals, benchmarks, and milestones. So special things will happen – some better than others – when players kill, say, a million bugs, or successfully escape a hundred thousand missions alive (the latter will require you to call an extraction shuttle and wait several minutes for it to arrive as you’re surrounded by angry foes). It gives fans a reason to come back for more, to keep on collaborating. Fans will also want to come back for more for Helldivers’ character progression system, which includes rankings and new equipment, skills, and stratagems.

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The result is an almost comically difficult game...

Helldivers is still a ways off, and the build we played was pre-alpha. Indeed, the game glitched-out and needed to be rebooted as soon as we began playing. But there’s real promise here, especially considering the fact that it’s playable across all three PlayStation platforms. Hopefully, we’ll learn more about Helldivers soon – including new environments and enemy types – but in the meantime, this is a great title for PlayStation gamers to keep on their long-range radars.