Many hours later update: This game is still amazing. They've just released a season pass for the insane price of FREE. Yes, their battle pass is entirely FREE. There's also ZERO microtransactions like some games. There is a bit of "gambling" in the form of loot drops, but you can't buy the specific ones or get repeats so you can grind them all after a while. I'm slowly chugging my way through them as is, and I plan to keep doing it a lot more.

Initially when I first saw the game I just brushed past it, thinking it was just some dumb flashy game. After watching SovietWomble and some of ZF play it, I decided to give the game a try.

The game is a LOT better than I had expected. You run around through randomly generated caves in one of several biomes and murder bugs while you mine various things. Each thing you mine has a purpose, from ammo during the mission to crafting upgrades or beers with funny effects. There's also a lot of fun to be had outside the actual missions as well, including a game where you kick barrels into a hoop to score points for an achievement.

While it is a heavily-MP game, you can also play solo, though it can be quite boring and difficult depending on the mission. Luckily, most of the community is absolutely amazing and will be more than happy to have you join their team on a respectable difficulty (Noobs on the difficult missions are frowned upon, since upgrades are ESSENTIAL for survival. Enemy spawns increase based on number of players, especially past the first two so x3 vets x1 noob is a lot worse than x3 vets). Most hosts will also cycle missions so that everyone can progress, even if they're not doing your mission right then and there.

Short short version: You're a Halo ODST fighting for the Starship Troopers government against zerg, cyborgs, and protoss. Also expect to die a lot.

Edit: Since I've now put a bunch of hours into the game over a week, it's about time I update my review.

SHORT VERSION: Helldivers is an up to 4 person coop game where you all share the same screen. You go on missions to collect samples for upgrades and get influence for completing planets. That influence goes into the region goal, where if enough Helldivers manage to fill it you advance one region. Once you run out of regions to take, you attack the faction's homeworld, hopefully get enough influence to conquer it, and then go on with your day against the surviving factions.

LONG VERSION: When loading into Helldivers, you first need to select a region (or more accurately, enemy faction) you want to fight against. The three factions are
1) In the top left are the cyborgs, a bunch of medium -> heavy armor enemies with guns that shoot you and dogs that knock you down and, as one person put it, "are Germany's leader in WW2's spawn". It's fun to bayonet them and watch the chunks of their corpses fly past you at full speed though.
2) In the top right are the bugs. Think the bugs from Starship Troopers, the Zerg from Starcraft, or the Tyranids from 40k. They're a lot heavier armored but are entirely melee oriented.
3) On the bottom are the Illuminate, basically an Eldar from 40k looking faction that functions like the protoss from Starcraft. They're very lightly armored, however they have shields which absorb ALL damage from a shot until the shield goes down. Doesn't matter if it's an infinity damage nuke, it'll absorb all the damage even if the shield goes down midway. You've likely seen people say that everyone hates fighting the Illuminate. I thought that was dumb and I'd fight them. I. DESPISE. FIGHTING. THEM. One enemy can flip your controls so up is down and right is left. Another can spawn a wall that blocks movement unless you brought the jetpack as your backpack equipment. And let's not even get started on the railguns. It's H E L L.

Once you select a region you want to fight, you can pick a difficulty. Each planet has 2-3 missions you need to complete, and a different difficulty up to 15 in numerical order. The difficulties to highlight are
1- Dive in the park, where you fight only enemy scouts
5- Challenging, where heavy enemies begin appearing. You need AT to kill them.
10- Suicide mission, which is as difficult as it sounds
12- Helldive, which used to be the hardest difficulty until the last major update (afaik)
15- The Inner Circle of Hell, S U F F E R.
"16"- Enemy boss planet where you fight against the boss and endlessly spawning hordes. No rewards except lots of influence. Do at your own risk.
There are also capital city fights, where you fight on difficulty multiples of 3 (3, 6, 9, etc) to earn influence and double xp as you attempt to hold onto a region. If you don't get enough influence fighting on the capital, the region is lost and the next region is attacked where you can then defend the next region. (RIP Winter Hold, we fought like hell to hold you o7)

Once you select your difficulty, you can select your loadout. Loadouts consist of a perk, weapon, and four stratagems. Stratagems come in three general types
1) Blue, which are support stratagems. These include vehicles, mechs, ammo, and anti-tank stuff.
2) Green, which are utility. These include things like turrets, barbed wire, mines, and the UAV drone to find samples (if it's level 3)
3) Red, which are your offensive stratagems. These are entirely focused on dealing damage in an area and range from a wall of fire to a tactical nuke.

Once you set your loadout, you can finally go on the mission. Jump in, call down any stratagems you plan to use, and get to work running to objectives, completing them, and then extracting. Planets are procedurally generated, so while you'll still run into areas that look the same as you've seen before, you won't get exact duplicate planets normally. In the 50 hours I've played, I've only noticed a duplication once with the SAM site objective being rotated. Overall I haven't noticed this though.

Do I recommend this game? Well let's look: I bought this game for $10 with all DLC with the intention of playing with a friend of mine who said we'd play all weekend who didn't wind up showing up since he was simping after an internet gril. So, I bought the game AGAIN for a different friend of mine and we played together. Then he wasn't around so I bought it for ANOTHER friend, who then questioned if a third friend might like it. That friend decided that if I'm paying, he'll play it. I have now bought the game 4 times for $40 in total. Then another friend of mine said they might like the game so I bought the base game and the terrain pack DLC to help with snow planets for them since the sale ended and I'm running out of money buying Helldivers, so that's a total of $65.

Tbh the limiting factor to my enjoyment of Helldivers is that I don't have friends to play it with (you can play with randoms though, as they can be really cool. I've even friended two of them), as playing with friends always increases the fun factor through the roof. I can comfortably run difficulty 6 solo if I run cardio perk + Justice rifle w/ the ammo, EAT, UAV, and Exo-44 mech stratagems while not going down at all, but with 3 friends we'll have a combined total of 20 downs on the same difficulty and 3 almost wipes. It's hilarious and a ton more fun with them but still fun to play alone!

So yeah, 11/10 would buy this 5 times again (though I don't have friends to buy it for except for the people who would play it amongst themselves and ignore me)