I had every intention of sitting this one out.
There’s a unique phenomenon that applies to multiplayer games, wherein someone tries to convince their friends to buy a new game they’re excited about. It’s peer pressure combined with a lethal dose of FOMO. I’ve been on both sides of it, and it always plays out like a very persuasive cold call. I want to say yes, because I love gaming with friends, but I’ve also spent $60 on games we only played once.
My resistance to Helldivers 2 lasted halfway through the first weekend, until play reports filtered through group text. No details, just vibes. That’s all it took.
Helldivers 2 is an online cooperative shooter deeply reminiscent of Starship Troopers, including enormous bugs as antagonists. It plays a bit like Destiny plus Gears of War’s horde mode plus Call of Duty’s equipment progression (and related microtransactions). That sounds like a Frankensteinian horror stitched together from disparate parts, but it makes for a compelling experience. Helldivers 2 has been out on PlayStation and PC since early 2024 and, per the name, is the second game in the series. It just recently released on Xbox, and since I don’t game on those other platforms, it’s all new to me.
All games are designed around a play loop that drives the experience. The original Super Mario Bros. is all about jumping onto enemies and anti-gravity bricks, occasionally with the aid of psychedelics. Skyrim’s loop involves exploring dungeons, killing everything, picking up everything, and spending 10 minutes deciding what to drop so your character can move again. Gameplay loops are the building blocks upon which the game is constructed. All games have them. Great games find ways to mask or hide the mechanical elements.
There’s no avoiding the gameplay loop in Helldivers 2.
Every session plays out the same. Pick a mission from your ship’s galactic map. Choose a set of abilities. Ride a drop ship down to the planet. Hurriedly equip yourself before the hordes rend your flesh. Complete objectives, fighting enemies en route. Try to survive until the evac shuttle arrives. Accidentally call in an air strike on your friends. Dive into the shuttle, leaving their charred corpses behind. Purchase upgrades. Pick a mission.
I lose sight of myself playing Red Dead Redemption 2. I can’t forget I’m playing a game in Helldivers 2. The game of it is always in your face, including the intricate control schemes necessary to call in aid. Like Destiny, the story of Helldivers 2 is a thin veneer over the gameplay. You don’t really care why you need to enable an ICBM on a random planet. You only care about shooting bugs. (The game includes 3 unique antagonists, but I’ve only fought giant bugs because shooting giant bugs is awesome.)
Despite the lack of a narrative, I can’t stop thinking about this game.
Part of that is clearly the gamified elements, which has its fingers on my dopamine controls. Even though the game of it is so very obvious, I find myself compelled to play just one more mission. I’ve attempted to play the game by myself more than once just to scratch the itch. It’s not very satisfying, but I also keep doing it.
But it’s more than just my monkey brain fiending for bananas.
The game makes token attempts to establish the world it inhabits, mostly through NPC dialogue. But even after nearly 20 hours of gameplay, I couldn’t tell you why we’re fighting bugs (or other non-humans). Helldivers 2 is far more successful at establishing tone. It’s a hyperrealistic world in which life is cheap and no sacrifice too great for the cause. It’s also nakedly jingoistic. Context is supplied by your character, who shouts about democracy while invading foreign planets and slaughtering the natives. It’s so ridiculously satirical. And yet, also not.
The characters in Helldivers 2 wage a blind, seemingly one-sided galactic war in the name of democracy. From contextual clues, you quickly realize the word has lost all meaning. It’s become a rallying cry, a new kind of Alamo. Which is perfectly in keeping with present day America, where the current administration talks about freedom and democracy while stripping rights and wielding agencies like blunt force objects.
Just yesterday, Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show was put on indefinite hiatus—network speak for quietly cancelled—after Kimmel asked about possible ties between Charlie Kirk’s killer and MAGA. Kimmel is the second late night host to fall to the Trump administration; from our dear leader’s posts on social media, he won’t be satisfied until the skins of all 4 late night hosts hang in his trophy room. As in the case of Stephen Colbert, Kimmel’s head was down payment to ensure the FCC approved a billion dollar media acquisition. It’s bad enough that two legacy networks were part of two separate corporate mergers in as many months, but the blatant corruption is staggering.
It feels like a special kind of madness to see this happening, here in America, and to know roughly half the country stands behind it. You start to realize the truths you’ve always taken to be universal—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—mean different things to different people. That freedom is no longer an inalienable right but something assigned based on the color of your skin, the size of your pocketbook, or, increasingly, the flavor of your rhetoric. It was maybe always this way, in certain places and to different degrees, but never before has it been championed as the new status quo. A new kind of democracy, which is no kind at all.
Helldivers 2 holds the advantage here because it’s not real. It can poke fun at a militarized world where any action can be justified because it serves democracy. The fiction of the game has twisted all meaning out of the word. It’s 1984 doublespeak. I laugh every time my character yells at a field of dead bugs: “How’d you like the taste of freedom?” It’s so over the top. Who could ever believe this is what democracy and freedom look like?
The game’s lingo has also escaped containment. My friends and I don’t ask if anyone wants to play Helldivers. We ask if anyone wants to spread democracy. It’s a silly joke I love making. It’s a joke I can make, because despite everything I somehow believe democracy still exists in America.
Or maybe this is my version of the musicians playing while the Titanic slid toward its watery grave.
Helldivers 2 is a chilling glimpse into America’s future. Not horrifyingly large bugs that hunger for flesh. Not a forever war amid the stars. Instead, the complete bastardization of what America once stood for, and in its place, a dummy named democracy, upon which any injustice can be hung.