You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games here
If you buy a game and don’t like it, there are a couple of things you can do. You can get a refund, providing you haven’t played through a majority of it or had it for a while, or you can leave a negative review. In the case of the latter, if it’s done the right way it can help the developers shape and craft meaningful improvements, which, in the case of Helldivers 2, an always-on title, can have a huge impact. However, as is the case with many games these days, the ability to leave reviews on popular platforms such as Steam can sometimes cause issues with ‘review bombing’ becoming a way of forcing changes through.
Helldivesrs 2 is no stranger to review bombing – it has an active and vocal community who want to make sure they continue to enjoy the game. Following the PSN account linking controversy, Helldivers 2 received over 300,000 negative reviews, driving the score down to just 19% and an ‘Overwhelmingly Negative’ tag. For a brief moment in time, Helldivers 2 became the most negatively reviewed non-free to play game of all time.
Eventually, many players changed their reviews back to positive and the score increased again. However, history looks to be repeating itself as it is being review bombed once again. While not at the scale we saw last time, recent reviews have dropped to just 46% positive for a ‘Mixed’ rating. When we delve into the reasons why, the general consensus is a frustration towards Arrowhead for ‘not listening’.
This comes after the Escalation of Freedom update was received negatively by the Helldivers 2 community due to the nerfs and other changes that led to backlash. In response, Arrowhead Game Studios have laid out of a roadmap detailing the changes and fixes they’re going to make. If this isn’t evidence they are actually taking player feedback into account, I don’t know what is. Still, day by day, and despite the news, genuine players, some who claim to have spent hundreds of hours on the game are not pleased.
I have a huge amount of respect for Arrowhead to come out and say they got something wrong. Much has been made about the declining player count, and looking at some of the recent reviews, and my own experience of the game, there are valid concerns about some of the gameplay fundamentals. However, should they get these sorted, we all know that Helldivers 2 could really thrive.
“The developers don’t really seem to have any ability to listen to the player base as every update that comes out makes the game less fun,” reads one recent review. “Way too many bugs and disconnections,” says another. It does seem that Helldivers 2, at the moment at least, is plagued with what many would consider basic errors. The roadmap goes someway to address these, and I’m particularly hopeful about the balancing updates, however Arrowhead must not forget about the basics; making a fun game without performance issues.
Hopefully Arrowhead will stick to the roadmap, but by making it public it seems that it was done to be held accountable so I do suspect they will ensure it is met. However, only time will tell, and all we can do now is believe that the state of Helldivers 2 will improve. But for now, the best thing we can do is optimise our loadout so we can continue serving Liber-tea to the Automatons and Terminids. To do this, I highly recommend checking out our Helldivers 2 best weapons and best armor guides.
About the Author
