Helldivers is a 3rd person twin-stick action shooter with upgrades, co-op and medium sized maps with missions. One interesting element is the online players help each other overcome enemy solar systems by completing objectives on each planet. If you play co-op with 3 friends and complete all the planets in the solar system, then online players no longer get to play these maps until all of them are complete. If your team dies and you quit the game, other players can try the objectives themselves. So the war continues as long as players are online beating maps.



Helldivers is made by the same developer who brought us Magicka and Magicka 2. Unfortunately there is no native Linux port so we have to play with Proton. As expected it runs beautifully on 3 of my computers as I've been playing co-op with my daughters. I was unable to grab screenshots due to the game engine capturing the mouse so operating system keyboard shortcuts didn't work. At least in my experience.

Unfortunately I keep comparing this game to Magicka and Helldivers isn't anything like it. In fact its more like Alien Swarm with open maps instead of linear. I'm sad to report that there are 3 different races of enemies to fight and in most cases they just run into view and attack with mostly melee and some with projectile. There is no clever enemies like in Magicka where you have to find their weakness or cancel their attacks. I'm happy to report there are a LOT of upgrades that you can use to slow down enemies, drop sky attacks, use mechs and much more... but it requires a lot of gaming to gain these upgrades. Not to mention you have to hold a button and then use WASD keys combinations to enable ability by throwing a sensor down and waiting for space crews to drop it. I find this very frustrating, but at the same time Magicka was very frustrating until I got the hang of my favorite spells.

Either way, if you pick up Helldivers, it runs great and take the time to learn the game tools and play with friends.

Specs:
Mint 20.3 64-bit
GeForce GTX 1650
Nvidia 515
Proton Experimental-7.0