[h2]Helldivers 2 — bought at launch, Feb 2024, ~500 hours in as of Sept 2026. Would NOT recommend.[/h2]
You're a Hell Diver: a highly trained, empowered soldier deployed to defend Earth from tyranny, whatever form that takes. Bugs, robots, and now the Illuminate. On paper this is exactly the power fantasy it sounds like. I've played this game religiously for two and a half years and I still can't recommend it, and that's genuinely painful to type.
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[h3]Pros[/h3]
[b]The map and environment design is some of the best I've seen in a third-person shooter, period.[/b] Every biome feels distinct and deliberate, not just reskinned terrain. You can tell a huge amount of care, QA, and iteration went into this before it shipped. It shows.
[b]Enemy design across all three factions is genuinely excellent.[/b] Bugs, bots, and the Illuminate/zombies all feel like they demand different tactics, different loadouts, different pacing. None of them feel like a copy-paste of the others, and that variety keeps the core loop from getting stale even after hundreds of hours.
[b]Gun and stratagem design is top tier.[/b] Most weapons have a clear identity and a reason to exist in your loadout. Combined with the stratagem system, building a loadout actually feels like a decision not just picking the objectively best option every time.
[b]The sound design is some of the best in gaming, full stop.[/b] Calling in stratagems from your destroyer, watching an Eagle strike come in and obliterate a target, that feeling never gets old. Not the first time, not the hundredth, not the thousandth. That "♥♥♥♥ yeah, I did this" moment is still there 500 hours in, and that's a genuinely rare thing for a game to pull off.
[b]The playerbase has legitimately stuck around.[/b] Concurrent player count has swung anywhere from around 15,000 up to 150,000 at various points since launch, but the game has never actually died in two and a half years. That kind of staying power says something about how strong the foundation actually is, even with everything below.
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[h3]Cons[/h3]
[b]Arrowhead, the dev studio, keeps listening to the wrong crowd and balancing around the wrong fantasy.[/b] This is supposed to be an empowered-soldier power fantasy, but patch after patch has leaned into a grunt-based, everything-is-scary-and-you're-fragile direction instead. One of the earliest major patches weakened weapons across the board while making bugs and bots more resilient (they call it "adaptive damage," which is its own can of worms I won't get into here).
[b]PSN account linking fiasco.[/b] Forcing players to link a PSN account, and create one if they didn't have one, just to keep playing a game they already bought. Obviously a dumb move, and it was a mess.
[b]Content just hasn't kept pace.[/b] The game leans on randomized mission variation across the same handful of planets to manufacture variety, and it shows. I've had character models get stuck in terrain and missions become uncompletable because of it. Rare, but it happens, and it's a known issue on Reddit too, not just me.
[b]The monetization priorities are obvious and disappointing.[/b] Estimates put this game's revenue (sales plus Super Credit microtransactions for War Bonds) somewhere around a billion dollars. War Bonds have released almost monthly since launch, at one point the game was 26 months old with 22 War Bonds released. That ratio tells you everything about where the studio's priorities actually sit.
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[h3]Bottom Line[/h3]
The bones of this game are genuinely some of the best in the genre. Map design, enemy design, gun feel, sound design, it's all clearly built by people who know what they're doing and had the QA process to back it up. That's exactly why the last two and a half years sting. This game used to have a lot of soul in it, and honestly a lot of it is still there under the surface. At 500 hours I've absolutely gotten my money's worth, no argument there. But there just isn't enough real content or direction left to justify recommending it to someone starting fresh, and the studio's choices on balance and monetization have let down both themselves and the playerbase that stuck around. I want to love this game. I just can't tell someone else to buy it right now.
