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The Steam review bomb that tanked Helldivers 2's once-sterling user rating with over 200,000 negative responses prompted by Sony's now-canceled PSN mandate will seemingly be immortalized in-game through a new cape emblazoned with three red spikes inspired by the game's Steam review bar graph.
There's a lot to unpack here, but let's start with this recent image from CEO and creative director Johan Pilestedt of Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Game Studios:
pic.twitter.com/cA8uMpzqTzMay 11, 2024
This looks to be an in-game screenshot, presumably using a build running an upcoming patch, and the spikes on the new cape perfectly mirror the community-submitted idea that cropped up after the review bombing. For reference, here's what Helldivers 2's review history looks like, as visualized by Steam data:
See the resemblance? Pilestedt, who admitted the review bombing was arguably "warranted" and praised the "willpower of the community," has been pretty on board with the cape idea ever since it was first proposed. This looks like the real deal, folks. I can almost feel its glory on my shoulders now.
Given that the whole PSN firestorm was Sony's brilliant idea and Arrowhead was just trapped in the bus with the publisher, I'd imagine some devs – and approximately 100% of players – would be happy to wear this cape as a badge of honor. Will Sony be happy to have a permanent reminder of the egg on its face added to the massively popular game that it owns the IP for? Possibly not, but it's not like Arrowhead is trying to sneak this by the company, and who cares anyway – it's funny and Sony could clearly use a little humbling.
The good news for everyone, and which even Sony should be happy to hear, is that the player effort to restore the game's Steam reviews, dubbed "Operation Clean-Up," is going pretty well. At the time of writing, Helldivers 2 has bounced back to "Mostly Positive" Steam reviews with a score of 74% – still a few notches below its previous record, but still a lot better than the fiery red "Overwhelmingly Negative" which branded its recent reviews less than two weeks ago.
