Recent reviews by Zane

Ever since the game came out nearly a week ago, my buddies and I have been playing the game every day for at least a couple of hours. Throughout that time we have never encountered a dull moment and we have been constantly getting better at the game and with it our impressions have been growing as well.

All the time Arrowhead took to develop this title has been a time well spent. The game, out of the box, runs like a charm. I never had to adjust any graphical settings and the game still looks smooth and pretty. Attention to detail in Helldivers also does not go unnoticed. From big things like type of artillery shells you pack into a particular side objective actually being used in order they go in, to even small thigs like when a player join your game, another destroyer ship also appears on high in the air.

The progression in the game is in part centered around Warbonds which can be best described as a unique take on battlepasses. You progress your Warbond with medals which can be obtained by completing missions, found by exploring or by completing certain major or personal objectives. So far the rate of obtaining them has been ok. Early on items are cheap and get more expensive as you get further up to a point. There has been worries that Warbonds will be P2W as weapons and armor can also be found within them. So far I can say that no weapon is strictly better than any other but each weapon has something it is good at and no weapon is good at everything. If there are different versions of other weapons, those are not upgrades but "sidegrades". These guns have some trait the original did not have but at the same time other qualities are also changed to balance out the new positives. (example lower base damage and magazine capacity in exchange for explosive trait or bigger spread of pellets on shotguns for incendiary rounds)

Some people have been complaining about the anticheat software implemented but use of such systems is not uncommon for an online game and I myself have not noticed any impact on gameplay.
Close to launch the game had problems with matchmaking but as we progressed though the week the devs have been hard at work trying to resolve those issues and it is reflected in the game as it is steadily getting better and better.

It's honestly the most fun short game I played in a long while. It's fun to move around, fun to explore and fun to experiment with the tools you're given. I only wish there was more.

An amazing game. I bought it on Origin at first but when it came out on Steam at a massive discount I decided to buy it again just to support the devs. If you never played this game and you like first person shooters, give it a shot! It's worth for the single player campaign alone. The game is often on sale if you want to save money.

Yeah, sex is cool but have you ever hit that 5% shot?

I bought this game thinking that I'll get some enjoyable time with a puzzle platformer. I saw positive reviews got the gist of the gameplay through some youtube videos so I've decided to buy it.

I've found myself stuck on a one puzzle on some sort of side area and I've tried absolutely everything. The only clues I've got where some tetris shapes and blocks to work with. Frustrated I've moved on thinking that I'll be back to solve this puzzle later. 30 minutes later I've stumbled upon a room with an Identical looking problem. Same story as previously.
I've learned that there is some sort of language that the player is supposed to decipher so I've said fair enough and went out to explore and find out the sullution. When I've finally arrived in the right room where you are supposed to solve this alphabet mystery I've got SPOILERS-> Some sort of a cube that is supposed to write in this wierd language. Below me there was a big stone with some strange symbols (some of which were also on the cube mentioned earlier) and some animals. It turnes out that the cube which you find in a chest, which is called an artifact is actually USELESS. What you were supposed to do as I've found out is look at those animals (a fox and a dog) realise that the fox is jumping over the dog quickly and repeatedly and connect the dots with a phrase "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" which firstly I've never heard of, secondly is something that you have to know prior to playing this game and is from outside of the game and thirdly the way of solving puzzles through animals was never introduced before in this game
So while that's out of the way let me present some other issues i had with this game.

I just love how your companion is completely useless when it comes to giving you any advice "I don't know" or "What could this mean?" are some of my favourites. It has come to the point where they say something that may somehow make sense I don't even know if what he is saying isn't just more jiberish.

It amazes me how the game is so reluctant to give you any information about any unusual stuff that may be happening. Like "Why is this sign shining when I come up to it?" or "Why are there ghosts only visible if you are quick to notice them?"

The way of traveling through the map is so clunky to the point of frustrating because when you want to go to some certain place you won't be able to check where a door leads untill you come up to it which may take a whole lot of platforming, side tracking and back tracking. Fall damage trigering way to soon is an annoyance rather than a way to prevent player to skipping some sections, especialy since you spend more time climbing up rather than going down. When you are in the air you basically have little to no control over what you are doing. The movement of your character is so painfully slow that you are better off listening to some sort of podcast while you are playing.
The "platforming" in this game is so uncreative with its core mechanic that it is just going to a platform flipping the world a couple of times: Can you proggress? Yes?> jump to a new platform and repeat No?> go to another platform and repeat.

The game makes a big deal out of a couple of doors you can find early on that are walled of behind cube requirements. You need 4, 8 and 16 cubes for each of them. When you unlock the first two you get essentailly nothing but cube fragments and the last one gives you more of the same but this time literaly says: "Wow you got the half of total ammount of cubes? Good. Now bugger off and go fetch the rest". The game just introduced an interesitng goal and did nothing with it. It didn't even acknowledge the fact that I did it. Not even a dialoge or anything. If the game doesn't care to give me some sort of meaningfull rewards (like satisfaction f.e.) then why should I?

I want to like this game but the game itself comes out of its way to make me frustrated rather than entertained and rewarded and this Fox and the dog situation just made me say "Thats BS" out loud and killed my motivation to finish it.
It will maybe be a somewhat enjoyable experience for me when I'll grab a walkthrough and 100% this game some time in the future but I don't know if I'll care enough to do it.
And don't get me wrong. I like games with some sort of puzzles like Antichamber or sth but this just isn't it

So you are telling me that I can play board games without buying them, crawling out of my basement and actually meeting people? Sign me up!

Smashing a giant hammer against an even more gigantic monster brings a tear to my eye every time

Countless hours of pain, drama, nonsense, crippling depression and FUN!

Best F2P hat simulator on the market. I guess there are some guns too