The Steam rating for Helldivers 2 is taking a bit of a hammering at the minute. As of now, the sci-fi shooter's recent rating has gone down to Mostly Negative on Valve's store, due at least in part to reactions to the most recent wave of patches and updates.
The current Helldivers 2 theme is Machinery of Oppression, based around Super Earth taking on the mechanized forces of Cyberstan. This 'season' has had a number of incremental updates since it began, a set of hotfixes rolling out as recently as on May 6. But players are not happy, and they're voicing their distaste on Steam.
"I absolutely love this game," reads one review. "But I'm just so tired with Arrowhead with their infinite warbonds and zero balancing if is something not in the warbond just to make it more appealing for people to buy."
Three Warbonds have arrived since Machinery of Oppression started: Siege Breakers, Entrenched Division, and Exo Experts. Among the usual armor and weapons, the latter brought special exosuits that required buffs post-release. The emphasis on Warbonds over annoying bugs is a theme of current feedback on Steam.
"Heavily focused more on warbonds and pay to play updates, while ignoring core aspects of the game's basic functionality," a player writes. "This is a paid game yet they lock most progression behind lackluster expansion packs that you need many hours of grinding to unlock," another Steam reviewer states. "Most disappointing is that most of all development over these years is only these expansion packs."
Helldivers 2's been plagued by performance problems and issues for months now. Developer Arrowhead's previously been candid about 'feature decay,' wherein stacked patches have contributed to structural damage, and worked towards remedying the recurring flaws. Sadly, it seems members of the community feel the seesaw is now back the other way.
Data from SteamDB shows that Helldivers 2 saw a spike of over 14,700 negative reviews at the end of April, right on the heels of the Exosuit rebalance and the 6.2.2 patch. "Keep making the game unbearable with your buffs to the enemies. Meanwhile we get a $10 warbond that gives us a peashooter that does nothing to any of the enemies past level six," another Steam player writes.
Arrowhead has yet to comment on the recent Steam review drop, although creative lead Shams Jorjani recently promised improvements after a Reddit 'ask me anything' session that quickly filled with "painful to read" feedback.
