Helldivers 2

Helldivers 2's most-upvoted negative review has 34,151 helpful votes. Its second has 22,375. Together that's more engagement than most games get in reviews of any kind, and neither one is about the shooting.

The shooting, for the record, is magnificent.

Why people love it

You and three others drop onto a hostile planet with a loadout you chose and a set of stratagems you call in by typing arrow codes under fire. Then everything goes wrong. A bug breach opens behind you, someone panics, an orbital laser lands on the objective, and the extraction shuttle arrives while two of you are dead and one is on fire.

The reason this works where similar games don't is weight. Every weapon has recoil and consequence, explosions move bodies, and the audio design makes a machine gun feel like a machine gun. Reloading is a decision. Friendly fire is always on and never negotiable, which converts four-player coordination from a nicety into the entire texture of a match — it's the source of the tension and virtually all of the comedy.

Wrapped around it is the galactic war: a persistent campaign where missions contribute to a community-wide front line that actually moves. It gives a co-op shooter something almost none of them have, which is the sense that tonight mattered.

And the satire is genuinely well done — a gleeful send-up of militarism that the playerbase has adopted so completely that recent five-star reviews are written in-character as propaganda. The median recent reviewer has 87 hours.

The best input mechanic in years

Stratagems deserve their own section, because they're the single design decision that makes this game what it is.

Airstrikes, resupplies, sentry turrets, mechs — none of them are a button. Each is a short directional code you input on the d-pad or arrow keys while the world continues without pausing. You are typing, under fire, with your thumbs, and getting it wrong wastes the cooldown.

That does three things at once. It makes calling support a skill rather than a resource expenditure. It creates the game's funniest and most tense moments, because the person entering the code is defenceless and everyone knows it — "cover me, I'm calling it in" is a real sentence with real stakes. And it produces the friendly-fire disasters that define the game's comedy, because a transposed input drops five hundred kilos on your own squad instead of the objective.

Very few games make a menu into a set piece. This one turned requisitioning equipment into the thing you'll be telling people about afterwards.

It also scales beautifully. Early on you're fumbling four-input codes; two hundred hours later you're entering them without looking while sprinting backwards, and that fluency is a genuine, earned skill rather than a stat. It's the clearest example of the game's overall philosophy: the power fantasy isn't given to you, it's something your hands learn.

Which is precisely why the balance complaints land as hard as they do. When players describe playstyles becoming rigid and good options being patched away, they're describing erosion of the thing they practised for. The mechanic invites mastery; the patch cadence keeps moving where mastery pays.

The two revolts

Now the reviews, and both need stating precisely because they're about conditions of purchase rather than opinions about design.

Account linking, May 2024. A requirement to link a publisher account drew the 34,000-vote review at the top of this page. The specific objection wasn't only inconvenience: players in a large number of countries where that account service isn't offered would have been locked out entirely, or forced to misrepresent their location in breach of terms. Negative reviews cluster hard in that month.

Kernel-level anti-cheat, February 2024. The second review, with 22,375 votes, objects to the game installing anti-cheat software that runs at root level, and cites the vendor's prior security record. A separate 4,000-vote review calls it a rootkit. Whatever your view on kernel anti-cheat — and reasonable people differ — installing ring-zero software is a decision a buyer should make knowingly rather than discover.

Both of those are dated, and the situation on both has moved since. I'm not going to assert what the current requirements are, because that's exactly the kind of fact that changes quietly and a review written today shouldn't be your source for it. Check the store page for the current account and anti-cheat requirements before you buy, particularly if you're outside the major markets. The scale of those two reviews tells you it's worth thirty seconds.

What its veterans are angry about now

Here's what surprised me: bucket the negative reviews by month and the largest recent cluster isn't 2024 at all. It's April 2026 — bigger, in this sample, than the account-linking month.

And the complaint has changed completely. It's balance.

A player with 553 hours writes that the balancing is incoherent, that weapons swing between incredible and unusable with no visible design direction, and — the line that stuck with me — "you had lightning in a bottle and decided to pry the lid off yourself." Another with 668 hours says simply: stop releasing new content, fix what you already have, so many weapons are useless. Recent negatives echo it: stop nerfing every good gun; the devs make something fun by mistake then patch it out; playstyles keep getting more rigid.

There's a version of this complaint in every live-service game and it's usually entitled noise. Here it isn't, for one reason: these are people with hundreds of hours who are describing a pattern over two years, not a single nerf they disliked. When a game's identity is power fantasy against overwhelming odds, and its patch history reads as a steady reduction in player power, the objection is about the game losing its own thesis.

A 2026 performance update, reportedly made worse rather than better, hasn't helped.

The verdict

7.5 out of 10. Rated 7.5 out of 10.

As a thing to play with three friends on a Friday, Helldivers 2 is close to peerless — funnier, weightier and more memorable than anything else in co-op, and the 81% recent approval reflects that the game underneath is still very good.

The score is held down by a record that a nine would need to be clean. Two of the largest consumer objections ever registered on this platform, over conditions attached to a seventy-dollar purchase. A balance philosophy its most invested players describe as directionless. And a live-service structure that, as with Destiny 2, keeps testing whether affection survives operations.

Buy it for the co-op, check the purchase conditions yourself first, and make your peace early with the fact that your favourite gun is on borrowed time.