Helldivers 2

• 1. Falling Into Super Earth

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  Helldivers 2 begins with a fall. Players drop onto hostile planets inside a metal pod called a Hellpod, launched from a starship known as a Super Destroyer. Once on the ground, they call down bombardments by tapping out sequences of directional inputs. The game is a cooperative shooter from Arrowhead Game Studios, published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. It follows Helldivers from 2015 and arrived on the 8th of February 2024 for PlayStation 5 and Windows. Its story is set in the 22nd century, among soldiers who serve a government that calls itself a managed democracy. Why would a game ask its players to be loyal, expendable troops for a regime that is obviously absurd? How can a story be steered by the people playing it? And what happens behind the scenes when thousands of strangers decide a war together?

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• 2. Stratagems And Friendly Fire

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  Up to four players can team up for a mission, and the game has no dedicated single-player campaign. Optional cross-play lets friends on different systems join the same squad.

  A run is called an operation, and it consists of one to three procedurally generated missions. Each mission hands the squad objectives to complete while hordes of enemies close in. Players pick the difficulty themselves, from level 1, labelled "Trivial", up to level 10, labelled "Super Helldive".

  The signature mechanic carries over from the first game. Stratagems are powerful pieces of equipment called in from the Super Destroyer, and each one is summoned by entering a specific sequence of arrow keys or directional buttons. Before a mission, players choose up to four stratagems to bring along, plus a Booster that benefits the whole team. Friendly fire is always switched on, so a careless bombardment can wipe out your own squad.

  In the first days after release, studio staff watched players and nudged the action in real time. Progress rewards play in the usual ways. Currency turns up in the environment or comes from finishing objectives, missions and operations, and experience opens up new weapons and stratagems. Samples gathered in the field pay for upgrades to the player's Super Destroyer.

  The game also sells battle passes called Warbonds, and these never expire. They are bought with Super Credits, which players can earn in some missions, purchase with real money, or find inside the Warbonds themselves.

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• 3. Managed Democracy

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  A hundred years before the game begins, the Federation of Super Earth defeated three enemies in the First Galactic War, shown in the original Helldivers. The losers were the Bugs, the Cyborgs and the Illuminate. From the Illuminate, humanity took faster-than-light travel, and it used the technology to spread across the galaxy in a period called the Great Democratization.

  The Bugs turned out to be valuable in death. Their decomposing bodies contain a resource called Element-710, or E-710, which is used for faster-than-light travel. Humans therefore built Bug farms on colonized worlds. After decades of genetic engineering and accelerated evolution, the creatures became known as Terminids.

  Much of the world-building is delivered sideways. Players can find logs, notes, in-game broadcasts and propaganda messages while they fight, and these tell the story of Super Earth without a single cutscene.

  Critics read the tone as satire. Helldivers 2 has been compared to the 1997 film Starship Troopers, since both mock a militaristic regime fighting giant insectoids. U.S. Army veteran and journalist Clay Beyersdorfer put it this way: "That's the trick: Helldivers 2 works because it doesn't glamorize war. It pokes fun at it." He added that it makes you feel "like a cog in a machine that only half works and is pointed in the wrong direction".

  Arrowhead's founder, Johan Pilestedt, shared a surprising consequence at the Game Developers Conference in March 2025. The United Nations had contacted the team about giving a talk on psychological defense against manipulation. Pilestedt said the studio does it "in fun and good spirits", while trying to get people to recognize what a totalitarian state looks like.

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• 4. Three Enemies

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  The war proper starts in the year 2184, when the Super Earth Armed Forces fail to contain Terminids that have escaped their farms. At the same time, the Automatons appear. These are machines built by the defeated Cyborgs, and they want revenge. Super Earth declares war and mobilizes the Helldivers. The first Automaton push led to two months of fighting on Malevelon Creek, with heavy Helldiver losses, before the planet fell.

  An effort to wipe out the Terminids on several worlds then failed, and the planet Meridia became a Terminid Supercolony. Using a substance called Dark Fluid, the Helldivers made Meridia collapse and turned it into a wormhole. Soon after, an interstellar spore cloud called the Gloom rose deep in Terminid space. It terraformed the planets it touched and gave birth to new Terminid variants. After so many costly battles, humanity began building the Democracy Space Station, a vast orbital base able to support Helldiver campaigns with ordnance and soldier optimization.

  On the 12th of December 2184, the Illuminate returned. Humanity had believed this ancient, technologically advanced alien race to be extinct. The Helldivers beat them back in the bloody Battle of Calypso. Then the wormhole from Meridia, now called the Meridian Singularity, began drifting toward Super Earth and destroyed several planets on its way. The Helldivers stopped it, but an Illuminate invasion fleet emerged from inside it and attacked Super Earth itself. Humanity won, yet all but two of Super Earth's Mega Cities were destroyed.

  The survivors of that fleet retreated south and dug in on several planets, while Super Earth started building a new Super Destroyer fleet. In the summer of 2185, all three factions attacked together and pushed the Helldivers to the brink. The new fleet arrived on the 26th of August 2185. Helldivers then entered the Gloom to reach Terminid hive worlds rich in E-710. The first expedition, on the hive world Oshaune, produced the highest casualty rate of the war to that point. After the station received an anti-Gloom shield coating, they took the planet in a grueling battle.

  In December 2185, Super Earth found the Automatons mining volcanic planets on a large scale, and ordered the Helldivers to seize those worlds and the resources. Super Earth also declared a "War on Dissidence". In January 2186, it built the Star of Peace, a planet-destroying superweapon. Its test shot turned the Automaton world Penta into a black hole, but the blast knocked the Democracy Space Station offline. The weapon's plans had also been accessed by an unknown enemy. Helldivers went behind Automaton lines as commandos with reduced support, and the thief was revealed to be the Automatons. Super Earth then pushed toward Cyberstan, the Automaton home world.

  On the way, the Automatons hacked Super Earth's communications and ran a campaign of demoralizing propaganda. On the 9th of February 2186, the Cyborgs revealed they had survived the First Galactic War and were behind the hack. A massive invasion of Cyberstan began the next day. By the 20th of February, the Helldivers had used up all the reinforcements assigned to it. They withdrew, and the operation was judged a failure.

  In March 2186, signals from the planet Seasse, home to ancient Illuminate ruins, drew the Helldivers in on the 20th of March. They found towering structures called Exospires, which cause severe weather when active. The Helldivers were ordered to destroy them, but the storms kept worsening until spacetime fractured around the system. Seasse was swallowed by a Void, and the planet could no longer be seen or reached. In the months after, Super Earth cleared other planets to build housing for its wealthiest citizens.

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• 5. The Community Decides

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  The plot of Helldivers 2 unfolds in real time, shaped by Major Orders and by choices the whole player community makes together. A Major Order is a mass-collaborative mission. When players complete operations, they all feed a shared tally that decides how the Galactic War turns out.

  Votes also steer the story. Once the Democracy Space Station was finished, Helldivers could vote on where to deploy it next. They also voted to test the Star of Peace on Penta.

  On the 11th of June 2024, a Major Order offered a stark choice. Players could liberate the planet Marfark and earn a new anti-tank mine stratagem. Or they could free the planet Vernen Wells and rescue children trapped by the Automatons. Arrowhead expected the players to take the mines. The community chose the children instead. Pilestedt, then the CEO, responded by donating $4,311 to Save The Children in honor of that effort.

  The studio also built real-world puzzles. On the 9th of May 2025, Arrowhead added a channel called S81-Satcom to the game's Discord server, in the form of an alternate reality game. Its first message linked to a YouTube livestream showing four satellites orbiting Super Earth, with Station-81 offline. Players worked together to recalibrate datablocks and bring it back. Station-81's cameras then caught the Illuminate assault emerging from the Meridian Singularity, just before the station was destroyed.

  On the 5th of February 2026, the game's accounts on X, Instagram, YouTube and Discord were "hacked" by the Automatons. The posts spread binary code, and the banners showed a parody of the cover art, with Automaton units standing in for Helldivers. In-game dispatches urged players to defect and issued fake orders. Propaganda posters hid a QR code leading to a secret website with a hidden message and a countdown timer. When it reached zero, a trailer appeared for the "Machinery of Oppression" update.

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• 6. An Orphaned Engine

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  On the 3rd of December 2020, Arrowhead Game Studios revealed that work had begun on a PlayStation 5 project. It would be a third-person shooter. Like the first game, it ran on the Autodesk Stingray engine, originally called Bitsquid, which Autodesk later discontinued. Pilestedt explained on social media, "The project started before Stingray was discontinued." He added, "Our crazy engineers had to do everything, with no support to build the game to parity with other engines."

  The game leaked before it was officially shown. In September 2021, a GeForce Now leak mentioned Helldivers 2. Arrowhead's social media manager then teased fans with a TikTok post showing the start of their workday, and fans replied by demanding a release. On the 18th of August 2022, a 12-second gameplay clip appeared on Twitter, though it was later taken down.

  The official reveal came on the 24th of May 2023 during the PlayStation Showcase, with a release slated for sometime that year. A gameplay trailer followed on the 6th of July 2023. The Entertainment Software Rating Board gave the game an M rating at the end of that month, citing "blood and gore" and "intense violence". At a State of Play event on the 14th of September 2023, gameplay was shown and the release date was set for February 2024. Pre-orders opened eight days later, on the 22nd of September 2023.

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• 7. Boom And Backlash

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  At launch, so many players arrived that servers and logins struggled for the first two weeks. By the third week, the player cap had been raised to what IGN's Wesley Yin-Poole called "a whopping 700,000 concurrent users". Reviews were "generally favorable" according to Metacritic, and four critics at Famitsu in Japan gave a combined score of 30 out of 40. Aaron Bayne of Push Square called it "a riotous affair, offering up best-in-class gunplay", while criticizing the post-release server issues and crashes.

  The sales kept climbing. On the 11th of February 2024, Pilestedt, then Arrowhead's CEO, announced about 1 million copies sold. By the 24th of February the estimate passed 3 million, and the game became the most actively played on the PlayStation Network, ahead of Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 and Fortnite. By the 15th of March it had reached an estimated 8 million, with 450,000 concurrent players on Steam. By the 5th of May, 12 million copies had sold, making it PlayStation's fastest-selling game and Sony's most successful Windows title. It passed 15 million by November 2024. It was the best-selling game of February 2024 in Europe, the United Kingdom and Canada, and the third highest-selling game of 2024 in the United States. By the 23rd of October 2025, it had sold over 19 million copies: 12.6 million on Steam, 5.4 million on PlayStation 5 and 1.4 million on Xbox Series X/S. In January 2026, reports put sales above 20 million copies and revenue above $700 million. Pilestedt said he hoped Helldivers would one day be seen as iconic as Uncharted, God of War and Horizon.

  The biggest crisis came on the 3rd of May 2024. Sony announced that Steam players would have to sign in with a PlayStation Network account, even though the game had launched without enforcing that rule. The requirement would apply to new players from the 6th of May and to existing players by the 4th of June. Sony blamed technical issues for not enforcing it at launch. Players were angry, and they pointed out that Sony's own documentation had called such accounts optional on PC. On the 4th of May, Steam sales were shut off in 177 territories where the network is not available.

  Pilestedt apologized, writing, "I hope we will make it up and regain the trust by providing a continued great game experience". One community manager urged players to leave negative reviews, and by the 4th of May nearly 53 percent of posted reviews were negative, with over 84,000 negative reviews on Steam. On the 5th of May 2024, Sony dropped the requirement and promised to work with Arrowhead on other ways to protect players. The regional restrictions were finally lifted on the 14th of June 2025, alongside those on God of War Ragnarok, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered and The Last of Us Part II Remastered.

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• 8. Beyond PlayStation

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  On the 3rd of July 2025, Arrowhead and Sony announced that Helldivers 2 would reach Xbox Series X/S on the 26th of August 2025. Nixxes Software, a PlayStation Studios team known for porting games, built the Xbox version. It supports full cross-play among Xbox, PlayStation and Windows. It was only the second PlayStation Studios game on Xbox. The same day, Gears of War: Reloaded launched on PlayStation 5, even though the Gears of War series had been a Microsoft exclusive since 2006. Some publications saw the pair as more proof that the "console wars" were ending. To mark the Xbox launch, Arrowhead introduced a Warbond Token that lets players buy any one Warbond they choose. Before that, it had only come with the deluxe Super Citizen Edition.

  Crossovers have followed. On the 18th of December 2024, a Killzone event added downloadable items that players bought with in-game currency. They returned on the 18th of December 2025 as the Helldivers 2 x Killzone Legendary Warbond, and earlier buyers received it free. An Xbox launch trailer on the 12th of August 2025 teased a Halo 3: ODST crossover, and that Legendary Warbond arrived on the 26th of August. On the 21st of May 2026, a trailer announced another Legendary Warbond featuring Warhammer 40,000. Helldivers also appear in season one, episode 15 of the animated anthology series Secret Level on Amazon Prime Video.

  The awards list is long. It includes the Golden Joystick Awards, The Game Awards, the D.I.C.E. Awards, the British Academy Games Awards and the Game Developers Choice Awards. The sound work drew attention too, with entries at the Game Audio Network Guild Awards, including for the "Super Earth National Anthem", and at the Grammy Awards in the game soundtrack category. Craig Lee Thomas, who voices the Super Earth Spokesperson, was recognized in the performer categories at the NAVGTR Awards and the British Academy Games Awards.

  The story is now moving to cinema. Sony Pictures announced a Helldivers film in January 2025 at its CES conference. In December 2025, Justin Lin was named as director, working from a script by Gary Dauberman. Jason Momoa joined the cast in February 2026, and the film is scheduled for release on the 10th of November 2027.

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