Defending democracy has never been so fear-inducing.
- The Automatons are a good source of this.
- The Automatons are creepy and skeletal looking robots of red and black color with a skull-like piece where the head is supposed to be. The Automatons are creations of the Cyborgs from the previous game out for the blood of the Helldivers to avenge their creators. And they will stop at nothing to do this, even turning other people into more Automatons to replenish their loses.
- Unlike the Terminids (which, while intimidating in their own way, are just big alien bugs), the Automatons demonstrate several times that they are intelligent machines with their own ideals and hopes worth singing about, despite the insistence of Super Earth propaganda and even the people on your dropship that they're just senseless killing machines. They are driven by thoughts of misanthropy and vengeance against Super Earth for what was done to Cyberstan and their Cyborg creators, and they're more than willing to carry out brutal vengeance against their sworn enemy. Players usually call their battle against the Automatons in Malevelon Creek their equivalent to the War of Vietnam jokingly but for the Helldiver in that situation, it must have been Hell on Earth, with unflinching machines gutting their comrades and turning them into red mist, them being the next victim.
- It is also worthy to note that while the Terminids’ are all savage and mindless aliens who just charge against anything they see, the Automatons are different. They absolutely hate mankind for the slavery they have done against their Cyborg creators in Cyberstan and are willing to do anything to liberate them. You can see their hate for humans when they insult the Helldivers, calling them scum. It really shows that the Automatons aren’t just machines like Super Earth is trying to tell, the Automatons are indeed sentient. And they want revenge.
- Some of their units are truly menacing opponents in the battlefield. Hulks are menacing juggernauts of death that come in three variants, one of them will burn you into crisps while Devastators are massive Automatons who have massive cannons to turn even the strongest of the Helldivers into red splatter with a well aimed shot. Then there is the Berserkers who are more terrifying looking Automatons than the previous one mentioned who use two massive chainsaws to gut and slice their foes. The Automatons aren’t fucking around with their objective to liberate Cyberstan.
- How they use the crucified bodies of Helldivers for intimidation factor.
- Their creepy Battle Chant that can be heard as they are marching around
:HEART - STEEL
WE - KILL
IRON - WILL
ON TO WAR!
CYBERSTAN!
CAN'T KEEP HER DOWN!
WE COUNT DOWN!
THE NEW DAWN!
DIVER SCUM!
CAN'T KEEP HER DOWN!
WE COUNT DOWN!
THE NEW DAWN!
- Even if the Automatons are reasonably evil in their own right, the haste with which Super Earth changed its war aims from pushing them out of the galaxy to outright wiping them out after the Reclamation is immensely disturbing, especially with the language used closely paralleling real-world genocidal rhetoric.President of Super Earth: This attack occurred as we were nearing a permanent end to conflict with the Automatons. Now, it is clear that there can be no peace until every Automaton is utterly destroyed.
- The in-universe clock seems to run faster then out, approximately 25%, in fact. However, that still only ups the time between “war begins” and “genocide completed” to 73 days.
- You can sometimes find Hive Lord corpses as part of the landscape in Terminid missions. A neat call-back to the first game or ominous foreshadowing of threats to be later added into the second? Not helping matters is that Hive Lords are unequivocally That One Boss of Helldivers, leaving many OG players biting their nails and praying that Arrowhead doesn't force them to relive the nightmarish trauma they've already incurred fighting them. Plus, with the shift in perspective from a distant top-down camera to Always Over the Shoulder, many players have expressed outright dread at the prospect of being forced to fight a creature of such great a size at actual eye level and how terrifying that would be given how easy it is to die in this game series.
