My criticism of Helldivers 2 isn’t just that it doesn’t say it to your face that the things it depicts and represents are bad. It’s just that if it is a satire (and I don’t really have any reason to doubt that given a lot of context), I don’t know that it’s that effective at conveying its message.
I think one of the biggest problems with Helldivers 2 is actually the same one with Star Wars. For a fan that doesn’t really care about thinking through the implications of the lore of a game/movie, and wants to identify themselves with the game/movie franchise what is the coolest looking imagery from that game/movie that they can slap on their car as a bumper sticker and associate themselves with? The fascists.
That is actually a pretty serious problem, and saying “but the text of the art clearly points out the fascists are the baddies” doesn’t matter because fascism is a content devoid political ideology that is obsessed with the superficial aesthetics of power without any desire to examine anything past a surface level.
Great point about the bugs, though I think gamers are really dumb as fuck, and tend to have a hard time examining the political implications of games. Most really can’t understand how saying orcs or bugs are inherently Evil and deserve to die is clearly problematic, even if it is done in a lighthearted way.
The whole concept of space bugs itself is interesting in that they are a creature designed to be so aesthetically repulsive and threatening that we don’t extend empathy to it. Take for example my pet peeve with factorio, the game never examines for even one tiny nano second how fucked up it is to trash an entire planet and slaughter countless wildlife trying to stop you, just so you a single individual can go home. The wildlife are creepy space bugs, ewwww, kill them!!
None of the factory survival genre of games do and it is honestly pretty disturbing in the context of the insane amounts of damage being done in real life to our planet in the name of more and more resource extraction. It is like Helldivers without the layer of self awareness.