Helldivers 2’s mech is a piece of shit, which makes perfect sense

polygon.com:

You could accurately call me a fan of mechs. I’ve sunk more hours into Titanfallthan 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 2takes 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