 Super democracy. You might call it a lie. You might call it filthy propaganda. You might suggest it's striking similarity to fascism. If that's the case, the firing lines this way. Let the bullets hit you on your way out. For all my fellow citizens, I congratulate you. Together we have done much to defeat the threats that surround our very own super-Earth. We've gassed bugs without any negative consequences such as giving them wings due to a thorough lack of understanding of what the hell we're doing to their biology. We've reclaimed lost worlds from the automaton threats to the point where, at the time of writing, we are deployed on major orders to expel them from super-Earth's furthest client planets. We've even saved a bunch of nerds from turning into bug feed or being prodded by an electrical outlet. Alas, I don't know what automatons do to people, okay? Also, I have to mention for the sake of my own health continued, or otherwise, that after the point of writing this, the automaton somehow they returned, just like Palpatine, and apparently they're attacking and everyone is in the deep doo-doo. The point is, I've played over 35 hours of Helldivers 2 during a period that is quite busy for me and that is saying something. Arrowhead Games Studios have done remarkable work creating a cooperative live service game that does not feel predatory the way so many of the games in its genre do. The developer has stepped into a font of goodwill that shows just how starved an audience there is for a game in the life-service space that is head and shoulders above mediocre. I don't actively engage with online fan communities in general. I don't have the strength of conviction or presence of mind to do so but even from the lines reserved for the passive observer, the way the Helldivers 2 fan community has congregated, the way many have willingly, and in good faith, played into the satirical spirit of the game's play-driven meta-narrative, it has made such a strong impression on me. The endless memes the community has produced, the common Starship Trooper derived vocabulary used in discussing this game and the role-playing notes across tweets and Reddit threads, all of these elements have helped create a better sense of community than most and they have actively been grown by the actual developers of the game. That goes double. For the antagonism and vitriol that arise around new life-service releases, the latest example Suicide Squad speaks ably to that end. That game's first season released recently and the disappointment in the outrage that it was met with by the most fateful fans of Rocksteady Studios' latest, it speaks more loudly than I ever could. Just go to its subreddit. No more needs to be said. Sadly, Suicide Squad is far from the only one. From several underwhelming Destiny 2 expansions and seasons to the famed failures that were by our as Anthem and Crystal Dynamics' marvels, discount avengers. Life-service games have become a bitter lesson in corporate greed and misappropriation of development talent. How lucky we are that Helldiver's stew has bucked that trend. It released playable and fun and nowhere near as greedy as those others. Sure, it had server capacity troubles, but those were fixed quickly enough. They were communicated openly through the proper channels and they were ultimately a result of Arrowhead becoming victims to their own success for a very short while. And sure, the game still has plenty of bugs. A lot of them physics connected. Physics-based even, but I believe these we can forgive. They are in that division of bugs that is saved specifically for all those ones that invite hilarity rather than annoyance. What Arrowhead has shown there excellent is the sprinkling of various events in the shape of mechs. New types of objectives connected to major orders. These kind of weeklies that have an actual visible effect on the game's meta narrative. These have convinced this growing community that Arrowhead has things well in hand. More that Arrowhead has a plan. And a plan that is actively changed by the engagement and the actions of the players. Inaggregate. I'm convinced I'm even excited that they know what they are doing. But this is all big picture stuff. What's Helldive is too like to play? The answer in the word fun. Explosive, delirious, hilarious, fun. When you play well and everything is going your way, you have a lot of time to enjoy the feel of the guns of which you'll find a sightable variety. A good amount of weapons in your arsenal. Once you think enough hours you'll have a veritable arsenal on your hands. Your loadout allows you to only have one primary and one secondary weapon. So experimentation with those guns you unlock requires you to engage with the game continuously. It takes place over many matches. The weapons you have access to do not end at just this initial loadout. Beyond what you can purchase with medals from war bonds, you also have some of the coolest and most powerful weapons unlocked and culled down from Dreadnought's true stratagems. These include in the Arkthroa, the Railgun, an autocannon, an anti-material sniper rifle and my current favorite, the Flametroa. Which just makes everyone's day so much worse. If you think setting bugs on fire is fun, just imagine how great it is when you do it to your teammates. The stratagems, the term is shorthand for orbital support, don't end there. Lasers and bombs and cluster ammunitions, deadly devices of all kind, offensive and defensive packs, the variety of explosive horrors you can unleash on your enemies but which will much more likely end up falling atop your fellow squad members. There is no end to the horrors, but like all good soldiers of Super-Earth, though the horrors persist, so do I. Playing with friends and killing each other in endless, entertaining fashion never gets old. A stray burst of laser fire from a guard dog drone cut me to tiny pieces twice, at which point I incidentally landed on the guard dog's owner's head. With a reinforcement pod, took the guard dog pack from his corpse and was promptly squished in turn. Ah, the glory of super-democracy. There is a good variety of missions to select from, challenging in different ways. And if you recall the latest development with the automatons, it actually added a whole new defensive mode of play, a 20-minute one which I find to be absolutely fantastic. That's the word. Awesome murderers, murdery, death-defying stuff going on. Very often, I love it, I love it. Anyway, various maps, offensive and defensive. The offensive ones are usually large, but not always, while the defensive ones are tightly packed and see trunks of foes doing their best to make your life miserable, while you're leading scientists or civilians from bunkers to extraction points or defending generators, as is the case in the new type of map, the biggest fun is in the open-worldish maps, perhaps arguably, with their many resources to collect and various secondary and tertiary objectives to unlock. Well, I say unlock, but really, it's destroy this horrible nest full of bugs or that automaton production facility, you know the lot. Always, always, you will be shooting at bugs or automatons. A various and varying sizes, but of single determination to harm the one thing no hell-diver can live without. Super-democracy. Well, that's in the soft flashy bits which do things like pump blood, or let you control your fingers to pull the trigger with. Collecting different types of samples lets you gather enough to unlock upgrades to your stratagems, while requisition slips unlock the stratagems themselves. In war bonds, the premium ones get unlocked by super-credits. These you can also unlock through play, so it would take you a while. Small sums of super-credits are available to unlock with medals from war bonds, which helps you along the way. Still, smaller ones can be unlocked through play. So is it really a grind if you enjoy the process enough? I can see arguments going both ways. Either way, the truth is super-credits don't cost all that much. If you liken them to seasons, the premium war bonds cost $10 or your regional equivalent. Sure seems better than the Diablo 4 seasons Blizzard has released so far, and getting those items on the war bonds involves a lot less grind, sure. The items on the war bonds are less than you would be getting in a full Diablo 4 or Destiny season, but also, a lot of them feel a whole lot more impactful. The value, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. A live service game has this idea set at its foundation that now the new content will at some point come with a price tag. It's neat that Arrowhead gives you an opportunity to collect its premium resource through enough play. Not all live service games do so, and even those that do are rarely quite so generous. Myself and now I'm still making my way through the latter half of the free war bond. I just unlocked the futuristic marches war bond without paying any extra money for it. I collected the super-credits through play and through the basic war bond. The April war bond just came out at the time of recording of this video. This one I might actually buy with real money, because I won't lie. That's how much I enjoy the game. Outside of that, one of Arrowhead's decisions that I appreciate the most is they have said they aren't sundowning content. When a war bond is released, it's always going to be under. Bucking the trend of live service games playing with content FOMO to try and make you stick around. And you cannot ignore the fact that Destiny 2 sundowns some of its best, most popular, fan-beloved content years ago to the chagrin of both its community and everyone else. Every potential player, including myself, I must admit at one point I started playing Destiny, and then content started getting sundowned. I quickly lost interest. Not only because of that, but it certainly had an effect on me, on my decision, on whether to invest my time in that game. The point is, good on Arrowhead's game studios. This is a good game, a fun game, one that doesn't cost an obscene amount of money during a cost of living crisis. Its community is vibrant, and its players are more likely to offer a hug or a shake than a slur. I never cared for emojis in games this much before. I do know. Good things ahead for Helldivers too, a future bright with promise. I cannot say, but I sure hope so.