Helldivers 2 will crashdown on our planet’s surface on February 8th, 2024, and turns the topdown co-op alien shooter into a flashier, fancier third-person version of the same. A new trailer release today details how its ‘Galactic War’ systems work – that is, the macro-scale conflict within which your missions and bug hunts take place.
It turns out that helldivers don’t just rain from the sky when needed, but live on a spaceship in between missions. On that spaceship, you and your co-op buddies have a space map where you can look at different planets on which battle is raging, and different battlefields upon those planets. The galactic war is synchronised for all players in such a way that sorties undertaken by you and your pals are contributing to the overall war effort.
To guide players, you’ll be presented with Major Orders – these are directives from on-high about what planets to deal with – and personal orders, which are little missions to, say, kill a particular beastie that you and your friends can complete for rewards. The actual fights you undertake are called Operations, which are split up into multiple missions, with harder operations having more missions. A mission might be to defeat a “high value target”, to retrive certain resources, or to overwhelm an enemy stronghold, according to a post on the PlayStation blog.
I’m a sucker for this kind of macro context stuff. Where Helldivers 2 starts to lose me again is in some of the progression mechanics shown above, where resources must be retrieve from planets in order to upgrade your spaceship, unlock new equipment, and so on. They don’t look like bad ideas, but they do look like systems designed for people who are going to put dozens or hundreds of hours into Helldivers 2, and I already know that’s not me anymore.
Still, this is the coolest Helldivers 2 has looked to me since it was announced – and just in time, given it’s out in two weeks.
