Review
Helldivers 2
The best pure co-op shooter in years, and proof that a premium price and a fair battle pass can coexist.
No. 36 in The Noteworthy 50 · Co-op Shooter
Deep Rock Galactic
Four dwarves, a fully destructible cave, and the most genuinely pleasant community in online gaming. Rock and stone.
Deep Rock Galactic understood something most co-op shooters miss: the environment should be a shared problem, not a corridor. Every cave is procedurally generated and fully destructible, so the team's route through it is something they carve themselves. The Driller tunnels a shortcut, the Engineer platforms a route to an unreachable mineral, the Gunner zip-lines across a chasm, the Scout grapples to the ceiling with a flare. Four classes, four verbs, and traversal is a genuine group puzzle.
The class design is the strongest part. Each of the four is required for something the others cannot do, without any of them being a support-role afterthought. A team without an Engineer struggles with defence; a team without a Scout struggles with light and reach. That interdependence produces real co-operation without a single tutorial telling anyone to co-operate.
The community
Deep Rock Galactic has, by consensus, the most welcoming playerbase of any online game. New players are helped rather than kicked. The 'Rock and Stone' call-and-response is genuine culture, not a meme imposed from outside. The reasons are structural — PvE only, no competitive ranking, no scoreboard to blame anyone with — but the result is that this is the one game on this list where joining a random lobby is reliably pleasant.
The limits are honest: mission types are fewer than the hundreds of hours the game invites, and the overclock progression leans on randomness more than it should. At thirty dollars with six years of free seasonal content, it is the best value on this entire list, and a standing rebuke to every publisher charging seventy plus a battle pass.
What works
- Fully destructible procedural caves — you can dig anywhere, always
- Four classes with genuinely complementary, non-overlapping roles
- Seasonal content has been free since launch, every single time
- The friendliest community in multiplayer gaming, by a wide margin
What doesn't
- Mission variety is narrower than the hour count it invites
- Difficulty scaling for two players is imperfect
- The progression grind for weapon overclocks is heavily RNG-based
- Visual clarity suffers in the darkest, busiest cave sections
The Catch — what it will cost you
Almost none, which is why it scores where it does. A one-off purchase, every season of content free, and a cosmetics DLC model that is entirely optional and modestly priced. Ghost Ship has been explicit that seasons will not be paywalled. Six years of holding to that is a record worth rewarding.
Who it's for: Anyone who wants four-player PvE with no toxicity and no monetisation nonsense.
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