Recent reviews by Riven

Let me preface this by saying I really hope I can recommend this game in the future. Being 167 hours in, max level with all unlocks, regularly playing on the highest difficulty, and on board since launch weekend, I've given Helldivers 2 a full and fair shake. What I can say is that it's a work in progress, and it clearly shows.

The strengths that the game has going for it are unfortunately overshadowed by the fact that it has been and continues to be an inconsistently difficult, imbalanced, and glitchy mess. It's regularly prone to crashing and surprisingly unoptimized, taxing my PC noticeably more on medium-high than other '23/'24 titles that I run well on ultra. There are, and have been since launch, a wide variety of glitches that often get you killed and/or inhibit your ability to collect important items or complete objectives. Enemy damage output is often absurdly high and inescapable resulting in frequent and unexpected one shot deaths, strategies to deal with heavy enemies are nonsensical/impractical, and enemy spawn is brokenly inconsistent, often throwing unreasonably large hordes of enemies at you that are impossible to surmount even with a very competent team.

Despite these glaring issues, the devs seem to care a lot less about fixing egregious glitches and overpowered enemies than they do forcing janky new content that doesn't work properly (were the mechs even playtested?), and nerfing player abilities in order to "break metas." Along with this, some of the team at Arrowhead has met player dissatisfaction with negative criticism of their own, which doesn't inspire confidence for those like me who don't care for the drama; we just want to see the game improve. Back at launch, when the servers were overloaded and the game was mostly a "waiting to login simulator," it was genuinely fun when it did work. Arrowhead has bafflingly decided on messing with the only part of the game that actually worked, and have succeeded in making it far less enjoyable to play.

If you haven't bought Helldivers 2 yet, my advice is to wait a few weeks to see if they actually turn things around and change the game to be both fun and well rounded. You may not notice these issues as much if your intention is to casually play for 10-30 hours only on lower difficulties, but if you plan to be more seriously invested, it's best to consider this an "early access" game that will take more patience to tolerate than it should.