"And come he slow, or come he fast, It is but death who comes at last."

Watching Helldivers 2 since May is like watching a close friend slowly wither and fade. Words cannot begin to express the genuine sadness and disappointment I've experienced with this game in the last few months. When Helldivers 2 first released, it crashed upon us like a Tsunami. The game was unique, it had an incredibly fun gameplay loop. It was nothing we have ever seen before in the gaming industry. And even with all the issues and bugs it had on release, people did not care. The game was so fun that people just straight up ignored it because we were having so much fun. I've stated previously on both the Reddits, Discords, and even in my old steam review that when I played Helldivers 2, it brought me back to a kid again, excitingly waiting for school to finish just so I can head home and procrastinate on all my homework just so I could play this game.

But then, the nerfs started to come. Everyone remembers the railgun nerf. Though, we eventually grew to surpass the railgun, and utilize other builds and weapons to fight enemies of Super Earth. But the issue only continued. It felt as if Arrowhead would purposefully nerf weapons that were being used extensively, reducing the fun that players had while keeping underperforming guns... underperforming.

The issue with Arrowhead's balancing strategy is that they don't tell us ahead of time what they plan to nerf. And when they do, it seems as if they do it without any sort of playtesting at all before releasing it. They keep nerfing guns that are overused (think the railgun, eruptor, flamethrower, quaser cannon, etc) and then proceed to not buff anything else. This makes the game unfun as players continue to lose weaponry to fight against our enemies, while the enemies only get stronger.

I'm going to be honest I don't know if they can recover from this, as we can see in dev statements that they don't seem to want to revert the weapons back to their original states, and instead continue to try and "balance" everything. Now of course I understand that they don't want to make everything OP, but everything right now just feels so underpowered that its just not fun. I don't understand why they nerf weapons, and then make the enemy spawns harder. I can recall recently that I was being chased by 3 chargers, 2 brood commanders, a bile titan. Now normally in the past I could deal with it with my strong weaponry, but they were nerfed. Whatever, I will just strategically move myself and kite the enemies until I can drop more weapons, but no I also have to deal with seemingly endless mob/ad units on top of all the heavy enemy units. It's not a matter of "Just get good", its just the game in it's current state is just not fair or fun at all.

I cannot in good faith recommend this game anymore. It went from being the love child of the gaming industry, to a balancing nightmare of a prodigal son. Hopefully the devs will fix the game, but as it stands, this Helldiver is now inactive.