Honestly, this game is absolutely fantastic. The gunplay is crisp and crunchy, there's a careful and intentional balance between personal vulnerability and superpowered weapons, and the atmosphere of the universe is beautifully campy. All the levels of gameplay are intentionally grafted together in a way that makes each of them fun and complete by themselves AND makes the whole experience more than the sum of its parts.

The piece I want to laser in on is the death/respawn mechanics. In most co-op games, when you go down, you crawl around waiting for someone to get you back up, or you wait until a checkpoint to get respawned. It teaches you that death is to be avoided. In Helldivers, death is quick, frequent, funny, and cheap.

It's quick: You are made of paper mache and die fast, basically every enemy is a threat and can (and will) mulch you if you (or your teammates...) make a mistake.

It is frequent: You will die a lot. Your teammates will die a lot. You will be able to punch in the code for calling in teammates in under a second after your first day of playing.

Those things WOULD get frustrating quickly, but it is carefully balanced by the following:

It is funny: You will laugh when you die. You will laugh when your team dies. You will laugh when your team kills you with an air strike and the other way around. The game is purposely designed to not be taken too seriously and there has clearly been a lot of thought put into making death a big part of the game.

It is cheap: You will not be out of the fight long. This is the piece that ties the rest together. With a good team you will only really be out of the fight for 10 seconds at a time, and 3 of those seconds will be you frantically trying to steer a drop pod onto the big enemy that is chasing the teammate that called you back. You also get five respawn tickets per teammate and you can get more in a mission, which helps each death feel like a natural part of gameplay rather than a setback.

My tip for anyone playing: Don't sleep on the starting strategems. The precision orbital strike may not be the flashiest, but it is great for destroying a particularly troubled building. The starting machine gun is very efficient at clearing small enemies quickly and for putting the hurt on medium targets even when they have some armor. The trick is to fire it crouched or prone to control the recoil and to aim for weak spots on larger enemies.

If you like co-op shooters, do yourself a favor and pick this game up. You won't regret it.