I wish more games would learn from Helldivers 2's deeply unserious weapons
From the Quasar Cannon to the Double-Edge Sickle, most game developers should be taking notes from Helldivers 2's ever-growing arsenal
I've been playing a lot of military-themed games this week. Door Kickers 2: Task Force North has won me over instantly after its recent 1.0 release, and I've also found myself sliding heavily back into Escape From Tarkov again, playing at a relaxed pace and trying to finish quests and loot up rather than mainline it.
Next month I'm in Tokyo and San Francisco for work, so honestly the idea of trying to stay competitive in a time-sink of a game like Tarkov feels a little daunting, but I've also recently fallen into a mindset where I hop through a few different games with friends. I'm enjoying it, and being more casually into a variety of shooters is good for columns at least.
As part of this, I've also dropped back in Helldivers 2. I killed my first Bile Titan this week, blasting it in the open mouth with a Quasar Cannon. Helldivers 2 is an excellent game, but I struggled to get into it at first because it was so difficult to get my head around the different weapons and what I should select at any given time.
Helldivers 2 clicked when I started to use the jump pack and the laser cannon to feel like a proper space marine. I could have written this entire newsletter as a love letter to the jump pack, a ridiculous thing that will hurl you into the sky at a moment's notice. It's amazing for escaping enemies and getting to high vantage points, but I also love it because if the user lands at a weird angle or clips something during their flight, they'll ragdoll wildly, causing everyone in eyeline to giggle. Hell, just the voice line of "for liberty!" followed by the scream of a character ragdolling is enough to get a laugh in the voice chat.
The laser cannon elicits less in the way of laughs, but it quickly became a trusted colleague on the battlefield as it combines functionally unlimited ammo with the sci-fi fantasy of blasting aliens with a giant laser. Later, I found myself experimenting with the Quasar Cannon (basically a laser rocket launcher) and even the slightly naff Chem-Sprayer (acid-spraying flamethrower), the Senator (huge revolver) and the explosive crossbow (explosive crossbow). All of these are fun in their own way – well, maybe not the Chem-Sprayer which is like you filled a Super Soaker with weedkiller. But Helldivers 2's arsenal is full of diverse weapons that do weird and wonderful things.
It's impressive because Helldivers 2 is the first third-person action game Arrowhead Studios has ever made and the weapons and combat feel truly incredible. But it isn't surprising. Arrowhead has spent every year since the studio was founded in 2008 making silly multiplayer games that feel great and will make you laugh despite yourself. I'm still grieving The Showdown Effect, which should have been the biggest game in the world back in 2013, but I'm glad Arrowhead is getting its moment in the sun now.
It's deserved, because despite the fact Arrowhead is dropping a nearly endless stream of new weapons into the mix, there's a decent amount of new weapons that will surprise and delight. You know where you stand with a heavy machine gun or an incendiary grenade but I've found myself a bit giddy burning holes in bugs with the Sickle laser rifle, twatting robot factories with the Commando rocket launcher or just running around the place with a triple-barrel shotgun.
I haven't yet picked up the Eruptor, a bolt-action rifle that fires exploding shrapnel shells. But I am constantly hanging around near my friends whenever they use theirs, in the hope that I can pick one up from their corpse after they accidentally blast themselves with shrapnel or I drop a 500KG bomb on their heads by accident.
I'm getting a little exhausted by identikit assault rifles that feel the same, or shotguns that aren't F.E.A.R's godless killing machine. Battlefield 2142 ended up in a good place, but I still couldn't tell you the difference between the variety of assault rifles and light machine guns I used. Just last week I saw a company advertising the all-new weapon they'd designed, and after watching the video for a second realised it was just some extra bits on an MDR.
Instead, I'm keen to get my hands on something silly. Helldivers 2 is providing that something silly in the meantime, but I'm also looking at Killing Floor 3 as something else that might let me get my hands on something weird. I don't want something like Immortals of Aveum, one of the better looking games I've seen, which made a bunch of wizards doing magic with their hands feel like I was tooling around with a submachine gun, sniper rifle and shotgun, but something that feels truly weird.
Helldivers 2 is starting to wane slightly. But I'm going to go back time and time again, not for the live service elements or the intergalactic war I am occasionally conscripted into by friends, but for the bizarre weapons. This morning I unlocked a grenade pistol. I don't know if it's actually useful yet but I'm keen to blast enemies with it as I fly through the air with my trusty jump pack.
Gibs
- Pour one out for this week's live service casualty, Level Zero: Extraction, which only left early access on January 29. It was a little rough around the edges when I played it in early access, but something was promising to it. Players could queue up as the monsters and be the monsters in a fun asymmetrical quirk. I dug the game's use of lighting too, but now the game's in maintenance mode, so that's that.
- Rainbow Six Siege is apparently going to undergo its biggest change yet. Ubisoft has claimed that the game is going to get a huge shake-up, and we'll find out more in a stream on March 13. As part of this change, the studio is renaming the game to Siege X. I expect this to be a Counter-Strike 2 style upgrade with a new engine and a few big swings, but it will fundamentally be the same game.
- Crysis 4 is on hold after layoffs at Crytek. As ever, my heart goes out to everyone that's just found themselves in need of work in a tough environment. But it's also a real shame for fans of Far Cry and Crysis, both cracking games about running around islands. I had high hopes for Crysis 4 because Crytek is still doing amazing work with Hunt: Showdown. Hopefully, it finds a path forward.
- Good Bad Times for music this week, mostly because I'm seeing Hinds next week but also because it's fitting for the now several months of serious depression I seem to be trying to wade through.