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Helldivers 2 is the secret long-lost cousin of Metal Gear Solid 5Solo play reveals a stealth sim with a playful side
Solo play reveals a stealth sim with a playful side
Image credit:PlayStation
Image credit:PlayStation
Helldivers 2 - “The Fight for Freedom Begins " Launch Trailer | PS5 & PC GamesWatch on YouTube
Helldivers 2 - “The Fight for Freedom Begins " Launch Trailer | PS5 & PC Games
If you’re minded to join their ranks, be prepared to not have much fun, at first. Even at lower difficulties, Helldivers 2 is built for parties, with overwhelming enemy numbers cropping up unpredictably across large-ish, procedurally generated maps. During my own solo runs, I’ve had a particularly tough time against the bugs, who are nimble and melee-focussed and very hard to escape once they have you surrounded - there’s a definite art to diving prone to avoid their claws. The Automatons, at least, favour ranged combat, and are less trouble to deal with providing you remember to bring at least one weapon or stratagem that can punch through vehicle armour.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/PlayStation
As you’d expect from a game that encourages teamwork, many of the weapons and stratagems that support lone wolf play are found higher up the unlocks ladder. The most useful in terms of upping your firepower and resilience include personal energy shields, over-chargeable railguns, more powerful autoturrets, and drone escorts. But having access to juicier gear only gets you so far. The real trick to solo play is to treat Helldivers 2 as an open world stealth sim, a mixture of reconnaissance, cover usage, rudimentary decoy tactics and knowing how to play around with systems that aren’t quite designed for this purpose.
Which is, of course, where the MGS5 comparison comes in. With no other players around to distract you/frag you/land on you, Helldivers 2 really does feel like it began life as a tactical sneak ‘em up, full of embryonic stealth simulation fixtures that seem a couple of development passes away from being shippable.
The MGS5 connections don’t just lie in how solo encourages stealth, however. There’s aMetal Gearenergy to how Helldivers 2 characters move, and especially how they throw themselves prone, tumbling into the crevices of those procgen maps with all their back-mounted gadgets, like Punished Snake beating a “tactical” retreat from an alerted base. In general, Helldivers 2’s character handling and physics seem more in keeping with the work of certain Japanese studios than, say, the creators of Ghost Recon orGears of War. The game rewards finesse - fire from a crouch, and your aim sharpens up noticeably - but it’s also enjoyably imprecise. Characters feel satisfyingly hefty, but that heft also makes them just a touch unwieldy when you’re trying to, say, back-peddle out of a crossfire: it makes me think of Capcom’s creations and especially the sadly forgotten Lost Planet series.
Image credit:Konami
That element of whimsy is perhaps the real common thread, here. As Senior Ed wrote in a recentRPS Supporters post, Helldivers 2 is a wonderful source of comedy, and so isMetal Gear Solid5 – it might reward you for being surgical and leaving no trace, but it’s not just about being a skilled infiltrator. The point of being sneaky in Konami’s game is partly that it creates space and time for experimenting with the tools, and playing clownish tricks on NPCs who make the perfect fallguys. Long may these parallels continue: Arrowhead are still updating Helldivers 2, of course, and it feels like both the solo play and stealth sandbox aspects have plenty of room to grow.
