Helldivers 2 has "performed well ahead of expectations" and topped more than 8m sales

Goronmon@lemmy.world to Games@lemmy.world – 211 points –
eurogamer.net
45

You are viewing a single comment

The only real complaint I have with helldivers is the controls are a little muggy. They put out a polished product with good options that isn’t so paywalled as to be difficult to make progress with but still gives them a revenue stream to keep the live service, which actually adds value beyond “play the game”, running.

What do you mean about the controls? I have no complaints in that realm but maybe I'm overlooking something.

It's possible people could interpret the way that the reticle follows the actual barrel position of the gun as "muggy" because it can be quite unwieldy if you're not being careful about it, but it's a very deliberate choice and makes the chaos more chaotic and really accentuates how controlled you need to be even when shit gets wild

I didn't realize it was happening until I used machine gun where it's slow. I actually like it but if you didn't realize I could see it being confusing.

Also the key binds aren't super. There's a lot of overlap and weird finger positioning for some stuff. The stratagems especially. I'm running, holding L1 and using my right hand to dial in the d pad like I'm hacking the matrix. It's kinda fun and stressful but I could see complaints about it.

The rebinding options are amazing, though. Being able to choose between tap, double tap, press, long press and hold for every input is fantastic. Two seconds after discovering this, press ctrl was crouch while double tap was prone and hold shift was dash while double tap was dive, and it feels so good.

Idk about controller, but keyboard support is amazing.

I play on PC so it's hard to say how that stuff feels comparatively. Can you move and use stratagems at the same time?! For me, WASD is both my movement and the stratagems, so if I press CTRL to pull up the menu I can't walk anymore.

And yeah, different guns have different aim speeds to balance them. That's where you may find the machine gun too unwieldy and want to try the stalwart LMG instead

Edit: by default on PC stratagems are done with WASD like the first game, and I just stuck with that. If I rebind to arrow keys then I can move and input stratagems at the same time, but I'll have to relearn all my Helldivers 1 muscle memory haha

Yes, pro tip is to bind the strategem controls to arrow keys or something on your mouse so you can keep moving.

I've done it, I'll get to practicing, moving and inputting is extremely clutch, I wish they informed you in-game that that's a thing

I wonder, did they change the defaults at some point? Mine was already bound to the arrow keys, I never had to explicitly set that.

I had it maybe a week after it came out, so I'm not sure, that was default for me.

Personally there are a few UX issues with the controls. Like getting stuck after diving into prone (I believe it's because you have to press run after you land to get back up, there's no action queueing), climbing over stuff you didn't want to climb over because of auto-climb, and a few other similar things. Both of the above have resulted in me and friends dying during intense moments, and because it's caused by the game not listening to what you want to do, it doesn't feel good to die that way.

Also not being able to jump over things you think you should be able to jump over because it's a few pixels too tall. So you just run up against it and stop.

Also the trees are rigid so if you run into a tree it's like a brick wall it doesn't brush out of the way or snap like it obviously should when you're charging at it.

The cross platform friend requests bugs mean I still havent been able to play with the friends who convinced me to buy the game in the first place. But yeah, otherwise quite fun.

Its 100x better of a starship troopers game than the actual starship troopers game that came out last year