Recent reviews by Hidden

EDIT: Since this review, they've released patches to improve on almost all aspects of what I have mentioned below.

I am planning on playing some more to see if I should remove this review, or switch it over to positive, but for now I haven't yet, so this is just going to remain with this disclosure till I can.
-----------------------------


I cannot in good faith recommend a game that has continued to endlessly aggrevate me as much as this game does.

The Ally AI is endlessly retarded. They legitimately fail to do a single aspect of the game in a good way what-so-ever.

Shooting enemies? Can't hit the broadside of a barn. They are basically just walking noisemakers because they aren't going to kill anything without all three of them shooting at them and the sheer volume of bullets does the job.

Covering your back/each other's backs? Never. It almost seems like they're specifically coded to prioritize a barely visible enemy a block away who's elbow is peeking out of a window, rather than an enemy literally stepping on your toes.

They inevidably get wounded? Ah yes. This doorway under fire is the perfect cover to sit there and wait to get healed in.

Trying to clear a building? Let me go AROUND the house, and jump in through a window coming at you head on from the opposite direction, causing crossfire or constantly testing your trigger discipline not to shoot them thinking they're an enemy... You know, rather than flowing in behind you.

Holding a room? Lets all three move to one side of the room and face the same doorway, and just let enemies walk inside through the other doors.

You throw a frag into a room? All of them go into a dead sprint into the most random ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ directions imaginable despite having already been behind cover and clear from the frag... The best part? One of them ALWAYS will dead sprint into the room you just fragged as if they're trying to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ play fetch.

Plant C4 on a massive weapons cash that is going to blow the entier building up? The ally AI will literally move SLOWER than they ever will otherwise to get outside of that building. I have literally walked out of a building, crossed a street, and turned around to watch my ally AI still a mile away walk past two vaultable windows that are facing my direct as I call them in, to get all three blown up.

I put C4 on a door, and moved clear of it, and watched an ally AI hump the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ door as it blew up and killed him. By then I was so frustrated I decided to vent the frustration by ventilating the rest of the team's skulls, before restarting the mission.


The AI in this game is a showcase of how a team lead cannot fend off Darwanism.


Oh, and by the way, you open a door, you can't close it. Once you realize this you might think: Oh then I just wont open certain doors so that I can have cover from the outside.

Don't worry, because your ally AI's will open it for you.

They constantly call out enemies, but they are horribly pointless callouts. Either they say some vague ass ♥♥♥♥ like "In the window" while you're surrounded by multiple two story buildings with multiple windows on every floor. Or they will endlessly call out the most obvious and needless ♥♥♥♥ like: "I hear an enemy upstairs" as you're clearing an entire apartment complex. Flooding you with callouts so you can't tell if they ever say anything actually useful about what's going on around you.

I understand that more callouts is better than none at all, but it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ useless in this game. You either will see the enemy yourself or you wont.

EVERYTHING else about the game?
Okay.

It's pretty neat.

I'm pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sure that the Enemy AI will spawn on top of you sometimes, aggrevated by the fact that your ally AI are blind to any enemies within 10 feet, so one guy standing completely in the open casually walking between your team will pick all three of your ally crew off before they even turn to face them.


Still. I want to like this game, because the gunplay is satisfying.

That said, why do I feel SO ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ squishy sometimes, while these dudes in t-shirts and flanel shorts are tanking 6 bullets to the chest? I get they have like a strip of a level 1 plate around their bellybutton but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ man. I will watch my bullets cause them to do a little dance and jig as they get shot the ♥♥♥♥ up, and the dude doesn't even stop his casual walking strafe before continuing to shoot. Meanwhile I try to pie a door to lob a grenade and I can never get one deep enough because my guy loses his ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mind thinking he's dying getting nicked by some debris by a bullet hittng the doorframe or some ♥♥♥♥.

I really do want to enjoy this game.

Work on the AI before literally ANYTHING else. Please.

I will never like a game that takes actual hours of real time for a resource to be produced, and then requires endless spamming of junk with extremely low amounts of storage, in order to level up and progress in anything you're doing.


Do NOT play this unless you have a whole group dedicated to this game.

The game isn't shy about painting one side of a spectrum as consistently bad, going as far to consistently use caricatures of that side to be the fall guy/perpetrator, and even does as much as trying to be subtle with anti-gun messaging. (Would-be burglar who's actually innocent of murder doesn't use a gun in the hood because that's somehow safer, a random airsofter is somehow the scout of the criminal organization, a former soldier is the guy blackmailed to bombing a mall, and then a priest going extremo that had bombed his own future place of headquarters and manipulates vulnerable schizos.)

So consistently in-fact that you can just identify the bad person before the investigation even begins by reading the file. (If you are good with identifying obvious red-herring tropes), and instead it's more just a constant fight to try and get a meter filled up, while also fighting its own systems to get the right dialogue choices to allow you to progress the narratives.

It's also just..... Not as interesting as I would've expected. I think I would've actually liked it more, if you dealt with realisitic or believable crimes. The first crime was pretty decent, if not completely trope riddled... But it was at least nice to deal in a regular sort of homocide, until of course "right-wing extremism" completely takes over the whole thing, and now it's just a game of: "Which one is the right-wing man who did the crime?" for the rest of the narrative so far.

It's honestly very close to good. Very close. It was kinda enjoyable until it was getting tedious, and I was burning out on "catch the right-winger" rhotoric.
It's impossible to know if what you just said to the person had any real effect on their openess or fear, because the game mechanics make it so intentionally vague, until you've made a big enough change over the course of multiple dialogue options, and even then you can just sit at the same spot going between positive and negative options and can't tell. Even with Profiler, an ability that's supposed to make it perfectly clear what's going on there.

Editing my review now that Sony has backed off and walked back their declared force of a PSN account.

I AM however, leaving all of the former review below. Don't forget what Sony is.

Arrowhead is an amazing studio. This is an amazing game they made.

You should join the battle for Super Earth.

But don't forget the enemy behind the veil.

We won a great victory, but the enemy is still lurking.




Helldivers 2 was an amazing game.

However Sony is killing it with this unnecessary and unwanted forcing of requiring a PSN account.

This change alienates people who are outside of PSN's supported regions.

The changing of their own words from "Optional" to "Required for some games" shouldn't be legal, if it is.

Terms of Services should not be allowed to be altered without allowing you to refund the product and back out if you do not agree with the changes. There should never be any clause in any agreements that automatically assumes agreement if you had signed a prior version.

Sony needs to ♥♥♥♥ off. It's sad to see a great game fall, but Helldivers 2 is a martyr with a clear message:

Do not work with Sony.

This was a great experience for Arrowhead. They hopefully will still come out of this with more resources to put into future projects.

Which I greatly recommend to Arrowhead that those future projects be independent, and published independently.