There is one currency – Super Credits – which can be bought with real money, but developer Arrowhead Game Studios has insisted that the stuff this buys (mostly body armour and helmets) isn’t necessary for progression, and you can earn Super Credits in the game anyway. I’ve certainly not felt the need to buy anything while levelling up over many, many hours of play.

Of course, once the action really picks up, get used to dying. Not only are the enemy hordes relentless, but you might run into some stray bullets from your fellow Helldivers.

Using voice communication is strongly recommended, though you'll get by just fine with pings and a decent awareness of your surroundings.

The game improved on a lot of things that I personally had gripes with the previous game. There are some crashes here and there regarding the in-game Armory and some concerns with the anti-cheat that the game uses, but if you look past those cons, I don’t think there’s too many negatives to write about.

Blow the doors off! Things can be destroyed in Helldivers 2, and some of the optional objectives will encourage you to blow places to bits. Sometimes when you find points of interest, you'll see crates or doors nearby. Throw a grenade and open them up to find even more loot.

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

PvE games are generally single-player, but Helldivers 2 is an exception to that trend. You can play it solo if you'd like to, but it's designed for four players to team up and play it cooperatively.

In fact, the best kit comes from the standard Warbond, so the game is hardly pay-to-win — especially since you can't use money to buy medals.

If you don't manage to make it out alive, you can also earn the Job's done! trophy, where you complete the main objective but fail to extract.

"And I say 'probably' as in: 'It's not a promise, not a guarantee, not something to place bets on, not something to blah blah blah legal,' he continued in a follow-up comment. "The same way as when you say 'I am probably gonna go to that event next weekend.'"

While Helldivers 2 strongly encourages playing with friends and even comes with a built-in code-based friends list, it also has a quickplay matchmaking option that helps random players quickly squad up.

Those small details contrast against the environment especially nicely because of the game's use of relatively high-resolution shadowmaps. Other elements of the lighting perhaps don't fare as well. The worlds are generally lit convincingly enough, but when you get up close you can spot some light leak in places, and shadowed regions tend to have a bit of a flat look. I'm not sure we're looking at pre-calculated, 'baked' lighting. I think instead we're seeing the typical mix of screen-space ambient occlusion and shadowmaps to shade in some of those finer details, which works well for the big picture stuff but doesn't hold up quite as well on close examination. The same can be said for reflections, which exhibit typical screen-space reflection 'skirting'. After surveying the game's graphical tech, I wasn't quite sure what we were looking at. UE4 seemed like an obvious choice, but it didn't seem well-suited for this kind of big multiplayer game with open-world environments.

) to shoot and kill the alien threats. Players can also aim down the sights for a more accurate 1st person camera view. Combat is accompanied by frequent sprays of blood and dismemberment as players exterminate the alien forces or players and squad mates are hit by environmental explosions Helldivers 2 Gameplay or friendly fire. Enemy encampments and battlefield environments depict bloodstains and dismembered corpses.”

This time around, you’ll be closer to the action, which helps to make the experience more immersive and also more intense.