You could accurately call me a fan of mechs. I’ve sunk more hours into Titanfall than any other multiplayer game, and Armored Core 6 was my personal game of the year. Big robots, tactical war games, plastic models, I enjoy them all. So when I say that the Helldivers 2 mech is a piece of shit, I say that with love, because it’s absolutely perfect for this game.
Helldivers 2 takes place in a fictional galactic war between alien bugs, autonomous robots, and the idiotic fascist humans of Super Earth. The game’s tone is satirical in essentially the same way the Starship Troopers movie was: that is, showing the many ways war horrifyingly warps a society and how propaganda is used to hide that.
What’s impressive about Helldivers 2 is how that satire extends into the gameplay itself. You quickly learn individual Helldiver’s lives are hardly valued at all during the tutorial, when your character is unceremoniously mulched during training to make a point. Unless you change the settings, your Helldiver’s voice changes every time you respawn to make clear you are a different person each time. Super Earth literally views its Helldivers to be as expendable as bullets, which is exactly what their “Hellpods” look like. My personal headcannon for why the Helldivers use video game style cheat codes when interacting with computers is because they’re illiterate. Why teach a bullet to read?
That’s why it makes perfect sense that the new Patriot Mech Suit would be a complete piece of shit. There’s no way to reload its weapons, it can get shot down while it’s being airdropped, there’s no health indicator to know when you’ve taken too much damage, and it feels like it goes from being on fire to exploding in about half a second. At launch, the mechs even appear to hit their own hitbox when they launch a missile if they are also turning at the same time.
Perhaps many of the things aren’t intentional and will be patched out soon, but they fit narratively into the world of Helldivers 2. This is a game where your auto-turrets and drones have such poor targeting that you cut down your allies (or yourself) on a regular, hilarious basis. You’re telling me Super Earth has a great R&D department working out all the kinks of its big robot? NO! This hunk of junk is going to be piloted by some kid who’s lucky to live 37 seconds! What’s the point of reloading it? So what if the missiles can clip the carriage, waa waa waa, just stand still when you shoot, soldier! You already know you need to be prepared to dive out of the way of an orbital strike, what’s the problem with ejecting out of your flaming mech manually?
This satirical take on an inept fascist government gives Helldivers 2 a lot of leeway in how “bad” it can make Super Earth’s arsenal. A rule of thumb in the game is the more powerful weapons and stratagems you unlock later in the game are also a lot more dangerous to you and your fellow Helldivers. It’s the perfect way to balance a coop squad shooter and make the obvious point that fascism would also make a really crappy robot.
