An abrupt and sizeable spike in negative Steam reviews of Helldivers 2 may have been sparked by crossed wires in the Chinese version of the game, fueling accusations that developer Arrowhead is forging the Galactic War numbers to steer the narrative toward a pre-destined finale – but some folks also seem to have forgotten how war works.
At the time of writing, Helldivers 2 has received 2,630 negative reviews on Steam today, May 29. That's a lot more than the 301 negative reviews that users unloaded on May 28 as this trend started to pick up – and it's about 40 times more than what the game had been averaging for the past few weeks. Just 62 negative reviews were posted on May 27 before all this kicked off.
If you scan the current reviews, and especially if you disable Steam's "Your Languages" tag (assuming you default to English like I do), you'll see that a whole lot of them are from Chinese users. Among these, and even in several English reviews, a number comes up repeatedly: 99.9783%.
This has become the battlecry of these would-be review bombers. And this is extremely gray territory for a review bomb. It was clearly coordinated, with some reviews coming from users with very little play time, or has at least snowballed into a movement operating under one banner. But this player behavior was seemingly, technically motivated by in-game content, not the kind of external action by the developer or publisher that would normally ignite a review bomb in protest. Yet there's still more to it than that.
In the ongoing defense of Super Earth, Helldivers 2 players have been challenged to defend a few key cities. So far, they have generally failed. There are now just two cities left, as Arrowhead said in an emergency broadcast: Equality-On-Sea, dubbed "Super China" by the Helldivers 2 community for its nod to China's Shanghai (which can be translated as "upon the sea"), and the all-important Prosperity City itself.
Equality-On-Sea has been under siege for a while, but players, seemingly including a big contingent of Chinese players, successfully rallied to fend off the Illuminate forces for now. The city is, or was, sitting pretty at, you guessed it, 99.9783% defended.
The thing is, the for now part of this defense seems to have gotten lost in translation one way or another.
Helldivers 2's war efforts can play out in a few ways. Sometimes you're just running out the clock, and sometimes you can land a decisive blow by completely taking a planet. The defense of Equality-On-Sea is part of the bigger Illuminate push for Super Earth, so as long as that invasion is ongoing – and it very much is – it will remain contested no matter how tightly our grip on the planet becomes. That is how war, or at least this war, works. The Illuminate basically broke into our house and we pushed them outside, but they're still ringing the doorbell.
Here's where it gets a little tricky. According to reports from multiple players, including a lengthy assessment from the self-described level 150 Chinese Helldiver Valkyri_Yukikaze, the mission goal for the Equality-On-Sea defense was partially mistranslated in the Chinese version of Helldivers 2.
"I am posting this because I am tired of seeing the Reddit turning into a wave of hatred against the Chinese helldiver community in general," they wrote.
Instead of being presented as an ongoing tug-of-war, it was reportedly suggested that the city could be reclaimed outright with enough effort. Hence the 99.9783% chants: players were evidently mad that, no matter what they did, they couldn't get the city to be 100% free and safe. But again, this is because the war ain't over, and really, neither is this particular fight.
On top of this, the continued fall of Super Earth cities has rekindled old accusations of Arrowhead cooking the books to make certain Galactic War outcomes much more likely, or all but impossible, to shape the broader narrative and set up plot twists.
One current conspiracy theory reckons this arc was always going to end with a Prosperity City showdown no matter what players did, which doesn't really track with what's actually been happening, but conspiracies aren't known for their ironclad reasoning.
This complaint has always felt like misinterpretation to me; I still don't know how or why people are surprised or annoyed that the game's literal Game Master is acting like a Game Master and throwing some curveballs. But the fact that reaching 100% on Equality-On-Sea is impossible, not due to GM Joel's invisible hand but rather due to the (apparently missed) circumstances of the Illuminate invasion, may have given this disgruntled crowd a new axe to grind.
Other reports are mixed and messy, with a lot of "illiterate" name-calling going around between nationalist analogies and theories about unwitting new players getting lost in this flood. The important thing is that the narrative that "this game is being review bombed for not letting players liberate EoS" has been spreading around the Helldivers 2 community, especially on Reddit. When I saw the big red line on Steam, I wanted to find out where it came from.
In fairness, that doesn't seem to be the entire story here. But it all feels incredibly needless no matter the cause, even if we charitably assume that everything was just an honest misunderstanding born of mistranslation. We quite provably have better things to do with our time: there's a galactic war on.
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