As in the first game, executions are key. When an enemy is staggered, you can run up and trigger a canned death animation—usually tearing them apart with your bare hands, or impaling them on their own claw-limbs—in order to recover your armour bar to block incoming hits.
I provided a screenshot as an example. Obviously I’m not going to link to every fucking bigoted comment. Those were the top three comments; two of which were useful to my point.
Note that zero of these comments are complaining about diversity
They “think” adding more diversity in the form of inclusion and LGBT representation would make the game worse, since apparently that point wasn’t as clear as, say, a fucking foghorn.
Do you know what people are referring to when they use that word?
Yes. “Woke” means “anything that threatens my worldview of white masculine superiority and reminding me that non-white, non-straight, non-male people exist and should be represented in art hurts my fee-fees.”
But sure, explain how it’s really about “ethics in gaming journalism”.
I edited my comment, but I was wrong in that it’s not the review page that gets swarmed but the comments on announcements that Arrowhead makes. Anyone can comment on an announcement (which makes sense, if [for example] it’s about an upcoming feature that isn’t out yet.)
The Helldivers 2 Steam review page (edit: it’s comments on announcements) is covered with reviews from accounts that don’t even own the game begging Arrowhead to “not add WOKENESS!” to the game.
Let’s face it: that trailer was just bad. We already knew MP4 was in the works; there was nothing that was shown for us to get excited for. No new enemies, no new suits, no new abilities, no new weapons. If I had to guess, I’d say the team was told to put something together for Nintendo Direct at the last minute, so they threw together footage from the intro level. It worries me that Nintendo wants to drive the hype from the existence of MP4, instead of the content of MP4.
On a micro level, it’s very easy to jump in and out when you feel like it. Each mission usually takes under 10 minutes even for fresh players, while a veteran can blitz through some missions in under 90 seconds. You can choose to play either solo or in up to a four-player squad, and if you are in a squad you can get a share of the xp from kills your mates get. Loot is instanced so you never have to worry about fighting to get what you see on the ground.
On a macro level, it’s a free-to-play looter shooter, with all the good and bad that entails. You have about a billion different types of resources you need to craft new weapons and frames, and almost every time new content is added new resources are too (to force veterans to engage in that content). Some things in the game are timegated heavily- for example, once you have the parts and resources to craft a new frame, it takes at a minimum 3 and a half real time days to craft it (unless you pay to skip that, or just buy the frame outright from their shop). The drop rates for some of the things you want might mean you’d take a while to get them if you’re not playing a lot- DE has a published list of the drop chances and the wiki lists the expected number of times you’d have to do an activity before you’d get that item, but I do want to stress the grindy looter-shooter part of the game.
Most of the real-money transactions are in the form of skipping time gates or pure cosmetics. I personally feel their monetization is fair for the most part.
All it all, it’s a F2P game. Go ahead and try it if it sounds fun, and if you don’t like it all you’ve lost is some time.
The game doesn’t do a lot of directing new players, so you gotta be willing to ask other players and read the wiki to figure out what you should be doing.
Assuming those don’t faze you, the community is one of the best and the story is really good- once you get that far.