Last week I was: experiencing Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater for the first time.
This week I've been: getting murdered by swarms of cave bugs in Helldivers 2 because I forgot to bring a flashlight.
It's easy to forget, but Helldivers 2 is supposed to be a difficult game. Beset on all sides by terrifying bugs, bots, and aliens who want nothing more than to destroy Super Earth, it's a galactic war of attrition—a Warhammer 40K-esque meat grinder that sees you firing clone after clone into enemy-infested planets to meet bloody and, often rather explosive, ends. It doesn't always feel like that, though.
I myself have spent *checks watch* 300 hours fostering galactic peace and freedom through hot lead, and I've certainly hit a point where the game isn't really tough anymore. You drop into a Super Helldive with a bunch of max level comrades, you maybe lose a couple of lives, but total failure is almost entirely a thing of the past. It all feels pretty controlled, manageable, and not at all like you're fighting a desperate war for your very right to exist.
Enter Into the Unjust. The September 2 update that sees us drop into Terminid hive worlds for the first time, exploring their expansive insect-infested burrows. It's hard, and it's hard in the best possible way. It punishes players who bring the same loadout to pretty much everything, and as one of those players, I appreciate the hive worlds kicking my ass and reminding me what this game is really about.
Let me explain: a big part of the new update is cave exploration, i.e. venturing into a bug filled subterranea where your stratagems usually can't reach you. During my first mission on the planet Oshaune, we charged into the caverns like it was that landing scene in Starship Troopers, before realising we were totally unequipped to deal with the threats we faced. "Look out, there's a Bile Titan in this cave! Don't worry, I'll use my Orbital… oh wait *gets impaled*."
You can't use stratagems or even reinforce allies without heading outside (unless you find a convenient spot with a hole in the ceiling), meaning it's all down to the versatility of your loadout and what you bring—essentially, bang for your buck. Taking on our first underground mega nest, it took us a while to figure out that we needed to bring a portable hellbomb into the cave to destroy its biggest hole spewing out Bile Titans. When attempting to nuke the Spore Lung at the heart of a Terminid hive, the bridges to the chamber collapsed, meaning we had to search through perilous dark tunnels to find another route in.
Into the Unjust puts emphasis on problem-solving, teamwork, and coordination.
Funnily enough, it feels a bit similar to Deep Rock Galactic. As opposed to the repeat location events we're all used to now, Into the Unjust puts emphasis on problem-solving, teamwork, and coordination.
Another example of this problem-solving is one of the new missions that sees you driving an oil tanker around the hive world's surface, drilling in different spots. Honestly, I had more failures here than anywhere else as I attempted to coordinate with randos who often wouldn't protect the tanker, or in one case, drove it straight into a tiny cave and got it stuck because it was the most direct path across the map.
I'm in favour of anything that shakes up the so-called 'meta' of games like these, especially in a game like Helldivers 2 which should centre around loadout versatility and bringing a setup that can cope with whatever problem you have to face. Players are switching to Heavy Machine Guns, Arc Throwers, Flamers, Eruptors, Grenade Pistols, and Grenade Launchers to deal with both the compact bug swarms and bug holes they face in the tunnels.
My personal solution has been to bring an Exosuit (a stratagem I would basically never take otherwise), stomping along passages behind my fireteam and unloading missiles into any chargers or Bile Titans we come across as we fight to the hive's heart. Similar to the incredible inclusion of the hard-to-kill Illuminate Levithians in the Omens of Tyranny update, we now have the Hive Lord—a new towering worm that's pretty much impossible to kill without the right tools (a lot of hellbombs) and a coordinated team.
Though Into the Unjust has been plagued with new crashes and is somewhat buggy—one bug that reinforces me on top of the cave system to fall to my death is particularly irksome—I think this is the best update Arrowhead has put out. It emphasises loadout-based problem-solving, which is the central concept of Helldivers 2, and most of all, it's good that it's tough.
Helldivers 2 shouldn't be breezing through Super Helldives with the same loadout for the 100th time; it should be getting devoured by bugs in a cave because you forgot to bring a flashlight. Adapting to overcome the challenge and triumphing is, in many ways, the biggest part of the fun.
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