All the nominees for 2024’s iteration of The Game Awards have been finalized and the final waves of votes are now coming in, with Geoff Keighley’s highly anticipated awards show now just a short two days away from airing live. As you’d expect, gaming circles are abuzz with debates about which of the nominees should take home the prestigious Game of the Year (GOTY) title and other awards. Here, though, I’d like to discuss a game I feel got absolutely snubbed this year — a game that delivers one of the best and most creative multiplayer experiences I’ve enjoyed in years.
That game is Helldivers 2, and frankly, I’m astounded that it isn’t in the GOTY running. Arrowhead Game Studios’ third-person co-op shooter exploded onto the scene in early February and was an instant hit with PS5 and especially PC players, with hundreds of thousands of fans playing consistently for the entire spring and well into the summer. An entire two months of my work this year were spent writing about Helldivers 2 and only Helldivers 2, as thousands of players were frequently searching for and ravenously consuming news about Major Orders, patch note details, guides, and other content on publications and social media networks.
Unquestionably, the hold the shooter had on the gaming community was as tight as it was lasting, and it reminded me of how thoroughly hooked people were on Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring for months when those games came out. Even now, Helldivers 2 enjoys a smaller, but fiercely dedicated player base, with many often coming back to it en masse to check out major updates and content additions.
But what makes Helldivers 2 so good, and why do I think it deserves a nomination for GOTY? Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that there’s simply nothing else like it in the co-op shooter space. Games like Warhammer 40,000: Darktide or this year’s Space Marine 2 are great, but Helldivers sets itself apart with unparalleled dynamism — a blend of gameplay mechanics, sandbox, and encounter design that makes every mission feel like an unpredictable adventure.
From the diverse unit makeup and varied behaviors of the Terminid and Automaton factions to wild physics interactions and randomized map terrain, objective locations, and environmental conditions, everything in Helldivers is designed to keep you on your toes while encouraging on-the-fly strategies and tactics. In one moment, you’ll be opening fire on a fortified base from cover and high ground, but in the next, a wave of reinforcements might come in from a flank, or a meteor shower might begin that forces you out of position.
Trying to effectively respond and make “the right call” when sudden surprises like these happen is a huge part of what makes Helldivers 2 so engaging, and thanks to the many variables at play — incoming enemy types, cover, terrain, weather, your equipment, and your objectives — its gameplay feels endlessly fresh and exciting. Even now, hundreds of hours later, my friends and I still regularly jump back into the Galactic War because of this.
Another reason I fell in love with the game is its emphasis on teamwork; no individual player in a four-man squad can bring strong solutions to every threat you’ll face, so planning loadouts to cover each other’s weaknesses, communicating, and leaning on your fellow Helldivers for support is important. That makes getting through a tough operation with your buddies immensely satisfying, and even if you fail, Helldivers 2’s hilarious voice acting and satirical Starship Troopers vibe makes it a game you’re far more likely to laugh at than get angry or frustrated with. Indeed, whenever I accidentally blow someone up with stratagem air support or get my head taken off by a careless friend on machine gun duty, our Discord call tends to erupt in laughter.
All in all, it’s a fantastic co-op shooter (and I didn’t even get into its awesome cinematic presentation or its nifty player-driven Galactic War metagame), and it’s a real shame it didn’t get a nod for GOTY voting. The fact it got passed over is especially disappointing to me since both Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree and Black Myth: Wukong got nominated, with the former being a DLC expansion for 2022’s winner of the award.
Don’t get me wrong, Shadow of the Erdtree is phenomenal — my review of it was the easiest 10/10 score I’ve ever given — but even though it’s a tremendous 40-hour experience that’s basically the size of a standalone game, it’s still technically an expansion, and I don’t like the precedent that nominating a DLC sets for future The Game Awards shows. Black Myth: Wukong, meanwhile, is…solid, but not GOTY-worthy, if you ask me. The game was pretty popular overall and completely blew up in the Chinese market, but its spectacle-heavy boss encounters and gorgeous audio/visual quality was offset by extremely bland level design, a boring and frankly unnecessary gear system, and somewhat poor enemy variety.
It’s crazy to me that both of these beat out Helldivers for a nomination, though I do acknowledge that the shooter’s reputation was damaged by Sony’s decision to try and force its players to use the PlayStation Network (PSN) post-launch (the firm soon backpedaled this, but delisted the game from sale in countries without PSN availability). Many players were also dissatisfied with the game’s balancing and Arrowhead’s nerf-heavy approach to it for a while (though I’d argue it’s been in a pretty great state for the past several months). Even so, the game is nevertheless a unique and amazingly fun co-op experience, and it absolutely deserved to be a GOTY contender.
A silver lining is that it at least got nominations for the Best Ongoing, Best Community Support, Best Action Game, and Best Multiplayer awards; I’d give Best Ongoing to Final Fantasy XIV and Best Community Support to Baldur’s Gate 3 after all the amazing updates Larian Studios has been making to the RPG since launch, but Helldivers 2 definitely deserves the latter two. We’ll see if it wins them come Thursday, December 12, as The Game Awards show streams that evening at 4:30 p.m. PT / 7:30 p.m. PT / 12:30 a.m. GMT on The Game Awards’ website, YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and Instagram.
