Helldivers 2
Up to four players drop onto hostile planets as Helldivers, Super Earth's shock troops, in this cooperative third-person shooter. Missions are short and procedurally generated: land, finish the objectives and get out alive. Air strikes, supply drops and vehicles come down from orbit whenever you call for them, and the opposition spans three factions: Terminid bug swarms, Automaton robot armies and the alien Illuminate. The game released on 8 February 2024 for PC and PlayStation 5, and arrived on Xbox Series X|S on 26 August 2025.
Top 3 Reasons to Play
- Calling in firepower means typing it. Every Stratagem, whether a 500 kg bomb, an orbital laser or a resupply pod, has its own arrow sequence you enter on the D-pad or keyboard while the fight carries on around you, then throw a beacon to mark where it lands. You take up to four into each mission plus one squad-wide Booster, and a badly placed beacon can flatten your own team as easily as a Charger.
- The war keeps a real scoreboard. Completed operations add liberation progress to planets on a shared galactic map, and Major Orders hand the whole community a single objective at a time while developers steer the campaign live. Some orders force a choice: in June 2024 players had to pick between earning a new anti-tank mine Stratagem and rescuing children trapped on Vernen Wells, and they went for the children.
- Squads that coordinate get far more out of each drop. Heavy weapons like the Recoilless Rifle and Autocannon can be reloaded by a teammate carrying the ammo backpack, everyone draws from one limited pool of reinforcements, and vehicles such as the FRV buggy and the Bastion tank seat all four players at once. Friendly fire stays on at every difficulty, which makes a careless flamethrower sweep as dangerous as anything the enemy fields.
Story and Lore
The setting is the 22nd century, a hundred years after Super Earth won the First Galactic War against the Bugs, the Cyborgs and the Illuminate in the original Helldivers. Humanity lives under a self-described Managed Democracy, and its ministries, propaganda broadcasts and loyalty rituals are all played for satire. Critics have widely compared the tone to Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (1997), with the joke aimed at the regime rather than its enemies.
Peace ends in 2184. For decades, Super Earth had farmed the Bugs and bred them into Terminids, because their decomposing bodies yield Element-710, the fuel behind faster-than-light travel. When containment fails, Terminids spill across the eastern sectors just as the Automatons, a machine army built by the defeated Cyborgs, strike from the west. By December the Illuminate, officially extinct, are raiding human colonies again.
From there the plot has no fixed script. It unfolds in real time, shaped by Major Orders and by whether the community wins or loses them. A few of the turning points so far:
- Malevelon Creek: two months of grinding jungle warfare against the Automatons, now marked by its own in-universe memorial day.
- Meridia: a Terminid supercolony that Helldivers collapsed into a wormhole using an experimental substance called Dark Fluid.
- The Battle of Super Earth: an Illuminate fleet emerged from that wormhole and invaded humanity's homeworld, leaving only two of its Mega Cities standing.
- The Star of Peace: a planet-killing superweapon the community voted to fire at the Automaton world Penta, turning it into a black hole.
- Cyberstan: the February 2186 invasion of the Automaton homeworld, abandoned after the allocated reinforcements ran out.
- The Void: a spacetime rift that swallowed the planet Seasse after Illuminate Exospires were activated there, and the target of the Devoid of Liberty campaign.
Plenty of the world-building also sits in the field, in logs, notes and broadcasts you can pick up during missions.
Gameplay and Mechanics
Each deployment starts aboard your Super Destroyer. Pick an operation on the galactic map, set a difficulty from 1 (Trivial) to 10 (Super Helldive), and assemble a loadout of weapons, grenades, armor and Stratagems. An operation strings together one to three procedurally generated missions, each with a main objective such as launching an ICBM or evacuating civilians, plus optional side objectives and points of interest worth searching.
You land by Hellpod, and the hardest part often comes at the end. Once the objectives are done, someone calls the extraction shuttle and the squad has to hold the landing zone until it touches down.
Progression runs on four currencies:
- Requisition Slips: buy new Stratagems and Ship Modules.
- Medals: unlock items inside a Warbond you own, with a cap of 250.
- Samples (Common, Rare and Super): upgrade Ship Modules, and only count if you extract with them.
- Super Credits: open premium Warbonds and buy armor from the rotating Superstore. They turn up as loot in missions and can also be bought with real money.
Vehicles are Stratagems too. Exosuits such as the Patriot and Emancipator put one pilot in a walking mech, while the TD-220 Bastion, added in February 2026, needs 35,000 Requisition Slips to unlock. Since the Devoid of Liberty update in August 2026, SEAF squads can also fight alongside you and take orders from your Helldiver.
Characters and Factions
Your Helldiver has no name or backstory beyond the armor, helmet and cape you choose. The speaking roles belong to the people around you. On the Super Destroyer's bridge, the Democracy Officer, a liaison from the Ministry of Truth, delivers war updates and guards the crew against undemocratic thoughts, and the Ship Master waits by the elevator you ride after extraction. General Brasch, self-proclaimed as Super Earth's oldest and most grizzled war hero, runs the training course and hosts Brasch Tactics, a tips segment on the ship's TV.
Four sides are fighting the war:
- Super Earth: humanity's government and the Super Earth Armed Forces (SEAF), with the Helldivers as its elite shock troops.
- Terminids: engineered insectoid swarms ranging from small Scavengers to Chargers and towering Bile Titans.
- Automatons: a mechanized army created by the Cyborgs, who resurfaced in person as the Cyborg Legion in February 2186.
- Illuminate: the returning squid-like aliens, backed by the Voteless, human colonists turned into mindless foot soldiers.
Editions
Two editions are available, and both give you the same game and the same free updates.
- Standard Edition: the base game.
- Super Citizen Edition: the base game plus the DP-53 Savior of the Free armor set, Will of the People cape, MP-98 Knight weapon, Super Citizen status, the Stratagem Hero ship game and a Premium Warbond Token.
That token unlocks one premium Warbond of your choice. It replaced the Steeled Veterans Warbond the edition originally included on 26 August 2025, and it can't be redeemed for Legendary Warbonds such as the Halo: ODST and Warhammer 40,000 crossovers.