Recent reviews by Jarl

Fun game, but between the problems with bugfixes and their insistence to push forward with monthly paid content despite the growing tech debt, the disjointed communication from the dev team, some of the bewildering decisions the team has made regarding things like armor perks, and now this new controversy with mandatory PSN account linking, I feel like this game is going to get mismanaged into the ground.
Check back in a few months. It's a game worth keeping your eye on, but right now is not the best time to be buying. Especially if you live in a country that has no ability to make a PSN account.

EDIT: As of May 5th, Sony has stated that they will not be going forward with the mandatory PSN account linking for PC players in order to play Helldivers 2. My criticisms of the game remain and I will keep everything else for posterity, but I believe despite these criticisms, the game is worth a positive review.

Performance is poor even with a good setup, and despite the graphical fidelity, the stylization is, to me at least, uninspired.

It's a different game than Vermintide, so you can't compare them 1 to 1, but they're close enough. And compared to Vermintide, the scenery lacks color, a handful of the specials are indistinct and difficult to make out from normal enemies or the crowd (this isn't the case for all of them, thankfully), and the customization of the characters I think leads to the characters and story being less interesting.

I didn't play it long, but from what I've played and what I've seen it doesn't look like a bad game. But if you're looking for a co-op horde survival game, you should look to either Vermintide 2 if you want a focus on melee combat or Deep Rock Galactic if you want a focus on ranged combat. They'll give you a better value for your money at this point in time. Maybe that will change after a couple years

It's a fun concept and appropriately priced; unless you're really hooked there's not a ton of replayability but there's some there; you might pick it up for short intervals when there's nothing else to do.
It needs some work in its current state; the upgrades are not so evenly balanced with each other, nor are the downgrades, and since which ones you get are completely random, there can be a bit of stress involved with getting a build going.

boring story; it could have been better, but honestly it's a borderlands game so idc that much. you find multiple vaults throughout the story and you might as well not even waste the time looting them, and that's what i care about more.

VERY cringe and annoying comedy, it's excessively bad. the only enjoyment to be had from the comedy is when the writers fumble so hard and are unintentionally funny. It's the equivalent of laughing at someone who trips and falls into a pool of mud. the person who tripped wasn't trying to be funny, but you're still laughing

and that's to say nothing about the political agenda of the writers. I won't get into it but you know what I'm talking about. It was in the previous games, which is whatever, but the dial is cranked up to 11 here; even if you're down with that sort of thing, I can only imagine it comes off as shameless pandering in this game.

most guns feel crappy to use, the ones that don't are just okay. a lot of the stuff they added to the guns to try to flesh out the identity of the companies just feel perfunctory (Vladof comes to mind)

the characters are either annoying, annoying, annoying or forgettable

no more Slag; take that as you will, but I enjoyed using Slag. Instead, there's a new Cryo element, which I'm still not even sure what it does. It feels like it doesn't do anything and you might even forget a weapon has it, easily the worst element.

The game's User Experience (UX) is horrible; When a teammate goes down, there's hardly any indication in either audio or visual format, leading to you not even noticing your teammates are dying, and then they lose 10% of their cash. The floating name-tags of your teammates fade out after a very small distance, and often disappear randomly, making it hard to tell sometimes where your allies even are. The map is just horrible; multiple interactable icons overlaid on each other, strange buttons for navigating already unintuitive travel interfaces, very little feedback when there's an error trying to fast travel, and they can't even handle certain fast travel cases that they did in previous games, like trying to fast travel when a player is in a vehicle going into a zone that doesn't allow vehicles. All of this combined (and more that I'm probably forgetting) leads to an experience where you're constantly fighting and trying to decipher the interfaces. The only thing that is intuitive and actually helpful is that you can refill all your ammo at a vending machine without opening it. That's it.

The game is littered with game-breaking bugs - nothing quite like release where it would delete your save data, but there are a load of quests where an NPC will regularly get stuck on terrain or clip into the floor while they're navigating from one place to another, completely halting your quest progression and forcing you to restart. There are probably a number of other minor bugs that I'm forgetting, but this one is what stuck out to me, and you WILL experience something like this at least once playing this game. It's honestly egregious that the game was released in this state; the fact that it's still a problem 3 years later tells you something about the competency of the developers.

tl;dr almost all the dialogue is annoying, the gunplay is lackluster at best, the characters and their abilities are forgettable, the interfaces and HUD are horrible, and it's a buggy mess. Not worth your money, even on sale, unless you and your friends can get a kick out of hating on the game.

it will make your life miserable if you're an achivement ♥♥♥♥♥ but it's a fun game otherwise. a bit short (my playtime comes from two playthroughs, one on normal and then one on hard once it was unlocked, most of the time was spent getting the War achivement). the atmosphere is very nice and the music helps that immensely. i'd say it's worth it at the base price but if you're a real stickler then wait for a sale

It's a decent game, with somewhat interesting characters. The developers do seem to be better than most I've seen in a long time, so I'll be keeping an eye on this game. It is a lot like left for dead, but there are some differences, and the developers claim they'll be adding more to make it a different experience from it in the future. It's hard to get into if you can't succeed early, because loot actually means something on the difficulties that most people play on. At the price, I'd reccommend getting it if you're really interested in the game. The biggest sale you'll probably see on the game within the next few years is probably a 25-33% discount, so if you want to wait for a sale, just keep in mind how much you'll be saving.
It's not too dead of a game, and they're releasing DLC in such a way that it's trying to not harm the community by making the host able to share any DLC they have with their party memebers. I think the community is only going to grow in the near future, and finding a game hasn't been that hard.

it's trash
I was at least expecting something better than civ 5 release, since they were familiar with the engine now, but they managed to make it worse than vanilla civ 5. I don't even think expansions can fix this piece of broken garbage.
This is probably due to the fact that they were trying as hard as they possibly could to not make this game Alpha Centauri 2, and in the process, that made it total trash.