Aspyr really keeps stepping on rakes with this one don't they? Rereleasing a classic like this should have been a slam dunk. It's really becoming a trend with Aspyr to have issues with their Star Wars ports, but at the same time I have to wonder if if there was pressure from Embracer to rush this out the door. When you're still desperately axing and selling off studios, rereleasing a fan favorite Star Wars game probably sounds like easy money no matter how much more time the game needs to be finished.
Aspyr has a history of laziness and incompetence, unfortunately. I really want to like the company because they were one of the few companies bringing my favorite games to Linux (KotOR and the Civ series) before Steam and Proton got so damn good. But their Civ ports were always plagued with weird bugs not in the original games, not to mention they didn’t have cross-platform multiplayer, preventing me from playing online with my Windows-using friends unless I dual-booted or tried to fight Wine. And somehow their Civ save file format is different, so you couldn’t even switch between Windows and Linux and continue the same game. It was baffling.
It’s really easy to have people join your game, or for you to join others. Also, it’s not terrible playing solo either. I’m really enjoying it both ways. Feel free to add me on steam (same name) if you’re on PC, or if on PS5 DM me and I can send you a friend invite if you want to team up and spread some democracy.
That’s about what I figured. I’m not that great with strangers, and English is my second language. I’ve tried other squad based games that rely on voice comms to be enjoyable, and I only really enjoy them when playing with a group of people I’m comfortable with.
You would be surprised how much you can communicate by just pinging stuff. I’ve had many missions with randos where a single word wasn’t spoken, but we were all actively pinging high priority targets and putting markers on the map for our intentions.
I may honestly check it out. Watched some gameplay vids last night and it looked like a blast. I’m especially intrigued by friendly fire always being on, as that was such fun gameplay addition but this is entirely baked into the experience
I was about to throw orbital strike buoy and my teammate accidentally melee striked me causing me to drop it. Was confused since I didn’t even know that was a thing and as we were figuring out the orbital strike blew us to hell. And that’s how I got the AAAAaaah! achievement.
Y’know, I distinctly remember the friendly fire being the thing I didn’t like about the first one. It was initially very “Oh haha you killed me!” but then something kept you from getting to play again for a long time, and so it was hard to just shrug it off. I’m assuming it’s something somewhat different now.
From the vids I saw, a lot of it is early hijinks at first. Then when shit starts hitting the fan constant communication necessary so you don’t accidentally merc your homies
It’s not as bad as the first one. Some weapons and stratagems are more prone to it (looking at you airburst radius that always seems too big) but since there’s more of a height component you aren’t constantly getting shot by teammates. and because you aren’t confined to the same small area there’s less of a chance of stratagem strikes and hellbombs killing everyone.
There is a bit of a learning curve in terms of knowing the radius of certain stratagems and backblasts and arc range of some of the weapons, but once you get past that friendly fire incidents are much lower. That being said, if you run into someone else’s line of fire you are partially to blame as well.
I think it’s one of those games it’s absolutely designed for an HDR display and I just don’t have one so it kind of looks murky. It’s a good game but I wouldn’t say the graphics are particularly phenomenal, although the explosions look good.
You can disable camera shaking and some post process features such as motion blur, then it’s no different from any other shooter game in terms of motion patterns.
The only real complaint I have with helldivers is the controls are a little muggy. They put out a polished product with good options that isn’t so paywalled as to be difficult to make progress with but still gives them a revenue stream to keep the live service, which actually adds value beyond “play the game”, running.
It's possible people could interpret the way that the reticle follows the actual barrel position of the gun as "muggy" because it can be quite unwieldy if you're not being careful about it, but it's a very deliberate choice and makes the chaos more chaotic and really accentuates how controlled you need to be even when shit gets wild
I didn’t realize it was happening until I used machine gun where it’s slow. I actually like it but if you didn’t realize I could see it being confusing.
Also the key binds aren’t super. There’s a lot of overlap and weird finger positioning for some stuff. The stratagems especially. I’m running, holding L1 and using my right hand to dial in the d pad like I’m hacking the matrix. It’s kinda fun and stressful but I could see complaints about it.
I play on PC so it's hard to say how that stuff feels comparatively. Can you move and use stratagems at the same time?! For me, WASD is both my movement and the stratagems, so if I press CTRL to pull up the menu I can't walk anymore.
And yeah, different guns have different aim speeds to balance them. That's where you may find the machine gun too unwieldy and want to try the stalwart LMG instead
Edit: by default on PC stratagems are done with WASD like the first game, and I just stuck with that. If I rebind to arrow keys then I can move and input stratagems at the same time, but I'll have to relearn all my Helldivers 1 muscle memory haha
The rebinding options are amazing, though. Being able to choose between tap, double tap, press, long press and hold for every input is fantastic. Two seconds after discovering this, press ctrl was crouch while double tap was prone and hold shift was dash while double tap was dive, and it feels so good.
Idk about controller, but keyboard support is amazing.
Personally there are a few UX issues with the controls. Like getting stuck after diving into prone (I believe it’s because you have to press run after you land to get back up, there’s no action queueing), climbing over stuff you didn’t want to climb over because of auto-climb, and a few other similar things. Both of the above have resulted in me and friends dying during intense moments, and because it’s caused by the game not listening to what you want to do, it doesn’t feel good to die that way.
Also not being able to jump over things you think you should be able to jump over because it’s a few pixels too tall. So you just run up against it and stop.
Also the trees are rigid so if you run into a tree it’s like a brick wall it doesn’t brush out of the way or snap like it obviously should when you’re charging at it.
The cross platform friend requests bugs mean I still havent been able to play with the friends who convinced me to buy the game in the first place. But yeah, otherwise quite fun.
Its 100x better of a starship troopers game than the actual starship troopers game that came out last year
I suppose they wrote battlefield in the headline since it’s an EA franchise, but I totally see where you’re coming from. At least they mention halo directly after.
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Aktywne