Helldivers 2 is more than just a great Starship Troopers game

Game developers have long sought to make a great Starship Troopers video game, but no one’s ever come as close as Arrowhead Game Studios’ recent release, Helldivers 2.

Paul Verhoeven’s film Starship Troopers, a fantastic takedown of Imperial capitalism, is just as sharp today as it was when it hit theaters in 1997. The movie follows a young soldier named Johnny Rico as he enlists in the United Citizen Federation’s military to go colonize the galaxy. Half an action movie about destroying very gross bugs and half social satire about the need to destroy them in the first place, Starship Troopers makes perfect sense as the basis for a video game — even if it spent a few years with the original novel’s jingoism being mistaken as an endorsement.

Helldivers 2, the recent massive surprise-hit third-person shooter, nails Starship Troopers’ tone almost instantly, from the tongue-in-cheek propaganda of the opening cinematic and loading screens to a tutorial that ends with the player grabbing the flag of Super Earth, running it around an area to “wave its democracy” in people’s faces, then saluting it to end the mission. Helldivers 2 smartly lets this tone seep into every crack and crevice that shows off even a hint of personality. Characters invade alien planets and scream about liberty and napalm strikes are an unlockable weapon. Everything you do is in the name of capitalism or “democracy,” and even the microtransactions have fake reviews “sponsored” by the government of Super Earth. The satire is the funniest kind: ridiculous, loud, and impossible to miss.

But plenty of games, from Earth Defense Force to official Starship Troopers adaptations, have emulated the movie’s tone. What makes Helldivers 2 special is that it also happens to be a fantastic game to play.

Players start out as lowly soldiers tasked with defending Super Earth from a galaxy of bugs (which actually means going to other planets and killing them, no matter where they live). You have your own ship, which serves as your home base and allows you (and your squad of up to three friends) to launch missions to new planets, customize your loadout, and choose recognizable freedom-saving weapons like orbital drone strikes and chemical weapons, called Stratagems. The game features dozens of purchasable upgrades and new weapons, which can be earned by completing missions and bonus objectives — though the unlocks are admittedly slow-going if you’re not 100%ing every mission.

But where Helldivers 2’s rubber really meets the road is when the bug killing actually starts. Despite the over-the-top tone, Helldivers 2 is an unmistakably tactical game. Even when outfitted with airstrikes, EMPs, and automated weapons systems, each player can still only carry a very limited amount of ammo, which is discarded if you reload early, a dash of realism that most shooters simply smooth over. The planets themselves are hostile environments, with rolling fog and snowstorms that make navigation difficult, and that’s not even counting the fact that they’re crawling with enemies. One of the most interesting aspects is that mission progress is something the entire player base works toward together. Each of these hostile planets comes with a percentage meter that ticks further toward “liberation” every time a real-life squad completes a mission there. Once the planet is liberated, everyone unlocks new areas and missions.

Adding to the tactical feel is the game’s tight third-person camera, which limits the awareness you can have of your surroundings. Among Helldivers 2’s smartest choices, though, is not to just throw thousands of identical, easy-to-kill bugs at you. Enemies more often number in the dozens, but developer Arrowhead Game Studios’ masterstroke is to make each bug dangerous in its own way. Some have armor covering almost all of their body, some can turn invisible, and all of them want to tear you apart. Every attack also has a chance to injure your limbs, slowing you down or reducing your accuracy if you aren’t able to heal. Missions also have time limits, and traversing each map takes careful planning and quite a bit of running.

Even if you’re in a full squad, the smallest bugs pose a real threat, whether it’s killing you themselves or overwhelming you until their bigger, scarier cousins catch up. Thankfully, bugs aren’t immune to specific limb-related injuries either; you can also shoot their legs, tails, claws, and other parts off in a gory spray that can render them alive but harmless — though still extremely gross. This little gameplay and gore nuance, combined with the ammo limitations, mean accuracy is paramount, and every little encounter feels like life or death. All of this makes for an infectiously fun gameplay loop.

Every second of combat is also fueled by the tension of balancing your cooldowns on the razor’s edge. Using the big guns, like orbital strikes and bombing runs, feels perfect for conserving your ammunition and grenades, but those can easily run dry before the artillery cooldowns are back. On top of their cooldowns, the heavy artillery or support of the Stratagems have to be activated using a wrist-mounted computer that requires fighting game-like button combinations to call down anything from extra ammo to a nuclear warhead. Every firefight feels like a war between trying to eradicate every enemy on the screen and just taking off and running for your life, in a way that’s somehow both extremely nerve-wracking and absolutely hilarious.

That inherent comedy is a huge piece of Helldivers 2’s success. Along with the ridiculous barks, like a spray of bullets followed by a “taste democracy” scream, Helldivers 2 also employs gaming’s most eternal comedy gimmick: ragdoll physics. Sometimes a Charger (the aptly named bug that charges at you) will blast you 100 feet to safety completely on accident, or maybe your squadmate misplaced a grenade and you see their newly limbless body whip across the screen at the speed of sound. And, occasionally, the best choice for democracy is to airstrike yourself and launch both your enemies and your own body halfway across the map, and just hope your teammate can revive you soon — and if you’re smart, you might be able to use your revive for kills too, landing your launch pod on an enemy. Every single one of these options is ridiculous. and a perfect and hysterical way to counter Helldivers 2’s otherwise tense moment-to-moment action.

Helldivers 2 is, unmistakably, a Starship Troopers homage, (one that might get away with its blatantness by way of being produced by Sony, the same company that owns the rights to the movie), but it’s also so much more than that. Its tight gameplay loop, excellent combat, and clever squad dynamics also make it one of the best and most fun tactical co-op shooters in years. And that’s good news for democracy.