“Helldivers 2” is a phenomenal video game experience — the controls are tight, the action intense, and the customization for your uniform and weapon loadouts truly let you play the way you want to play. While playing with random folks is fun, it’s at its best when you team up with three other friends, with headsets, and really try to tackle each mission like a proper squad. You’ll watch in real time as your best planned strategies collapse into screaming, running, and calls for giant bombs that misfire and kill your allies instead of the enemies. It’s awesome.
And it’s the whole “strategies collapse” element that has won my heart through and through. While the game’s actual writing is very funny and clever (I can’t get enough of the bombastic propaganda that plays in the spaceship hub between missions), most of the comedy emerges during the course of actual gameplay. You accidentally call an airstrike down on your allies. You talk a big game about your new grenade launcher, only to blow yourself to pieces with it seconds later. You march into an area with an air of confidence, only to find yourself on the run, surrounded by hundreds of enemies, panicking and screaming. It’s one thing for characters to say funny things, but it’s another, more special thing for a game to be inherently hilarious in how it plays, to keep the laughs coming because your best laid plans have gone so awry.
That’s what connects “Helldivers 2” to “Starship Troopers” at the DNA level, rather than just a cosmetic one. Verhoeven’s film plays its satire with a straight face, its actors treating the material like it’s not the most ridiculous, goofy stuff in the world. One can imagine certain viewers watching it and not getting the joke at all. “Helldivers 2” operates on the same level. You can play it as a straightforward shooter, and try to maximize your character build and construct a perfect meta, but you should really lean into the chaos and embrace the comedy that lurks beneath every single encounter. What better way to send up fascism than to send you into a never-ending meat grinder?
I spoke about “Helldivers 2,” as well as a number of other topics, on a recent episode of the /Film Daily Podcast, which you can listen to below: