Helldivers 2’s terrible, no-good, very bad week was meant to be over by now, but instead the game and its developer are taking yet another hard knock. First there was the debacle last week that saw Helldivers 2 a) pulled from Steam in various countries over a PSN login requirement, b) get review-bombed by its own fans, and c) fire its own community manager. After extending well into the weekend, PlayStation finally amended things by rescinding the inflammatory requirement, quelling most of the game’s fans and prompting them to try and restore the game’s good standing, at least on Steam where its reviews had tanked dramatically. Now, rather than take a celebratory lap, the community has once again turned on Helldivers 2’s latest Warbond and one of its seemingly inferior weapons.
About once a month since launching in February, Helldivers 2 has released a Warbond, which are premium battle passes that cost players real or in-game money. Though Helldivers 2 is actually really good about providing in-game currency just by playing the game—meaning some players haven’t had to spend a dime on the game’s microtransactions—it stands to reason that the thing you’re being sold should probably be better, or at least equivalent, to what you already have. This is unfortunately not the case with the Tenderizer assault rifle included in today’s Polar Patriots Warbond, which has been getting unilaterally piled on for its noticeably worse stats.
Helldivers 2 community members took to forums almost immediately to take turns shitting on the Tenderizer. One Reddit user called it “quite literally a direct downgrade to the Liberator,” which is a similar assault rifle already featured in the game. Another posted a side-by-side picture of the aforementioned weapons and their stats and said, “I aint wasting 1000 [Super Credits] on this shit, dawg.” The top post on the game’s subreddit as of this writing seems to call into question whether or not it’s just an old gun with inferior stats that was repurposed for premium DLC. Some folks are joking that the guns came “pre-nerfed,” and one post even suggests that the next Warbond will be made up of actual Nerf guns.
For a brief period, the Tenderizer didn’t even have its promised color scheme, which was soon addressed by Arrowhead and fixed. Otherwise though, it’s taken a pummeling, which is ironic because another gun featured in the set called the Pummeler is getting near-universal praise.
Not that this moment was going to be the slam dunk Helldivers 2 needed after a tense week, but it really is bookending a shitty time for Arrowhead, which was enjoying an extended period of success and praise until fairly recently. Here’s hoping that the team can weather this immediate storm and get to the other side mostly intact.
