History VideoGame / Helldivers

** Helldivers that have their arms damaged will be unable to aim properly, and will be unable to throw their stratagem beacons (and grenades) as far. Should their legs be crippled, they will move slower and lose the ability to sprint. If their chest is hemorrhaging, they will suffer DamageOverTime till they die or use a stim.
** Terminids that have their legs destroyed will be forced to hobble on their remaining legs (except for Chargers, who ''die'' if a leg gets destroyed). For heavier armored Terminids such as the Charger or Bile Titan, a Recoilless round can destroy their armor and expose the fleshy bits to shoot at with regular bullets.
** Automatons can have their arms blasted off, preventing them from firing their weapons, throwing grenades, slashing at you with melee blades, or signaling in a dropship. Beware that they can still kick or stomp you. Cyborg and Automaton tanks can have their treads blown up, immobilizing them, but beware; their turrets are still fully functional and capable of killing you. There's even an achievement in ''II'' for leaving a mission whilst an armless Hulk is still alive.

* {{Cooldown}}: Eagle stratagems put a spin on the standard cooldown-between-uses formula in the sequel. All Eagle stratagems have a limited number of charges loaded onto a single fighter, and these charges can be used in fairly quick succession - but once all of the charges are depleted, the fighter needs to return to the Super Destroyer to rearm on a longer cooldown. Alternately you can manually order it to rearm at any time.
* CoolStarship: Your ship - a Super Destroyer - plays a bigger role in the sequel. Your ship is your primary source of supplies and heavy firepower (either directly or via its Eagle fighter-bombers) and can be upgraded through gameplay to enhance its ability to support you on the ground. When you join up with a party of fellow Helldivers, your Super Destroyer joins their formation (or vice versa), and any movement is then done as a group. You can also see fleets of Super Destroyers around embattled worlds. Oh, and you also get to name your ship, from a preapproved set of prefixes and suffixes.
* CranialProcessingUnit: A surefire way kill an Automaton is to aim for the head. Even Hulks can go down in a single hit from a railgun right to the head. While tricky to aim at, especially during hectic firefights, all that armor Automatons wear tend to not matter if you can reliably hit them in the head.

* DeathFromAbove: Anything that has the misfortune of standing under a Hellpod will suffer an instant death. ''[[CollateralDamage This includes you and your fellow Helldivers]]''. Toned down in the sequel, where certain units are too tough to be instantly crushed by hellpods in this fashion (it can still kill them, but you may need to hit them a couple of times) - though it's still utterly lethal to most smaller enemies (and there's an achievement for managing to kill a Charger with a Resupply Pod).

* EmergencyWeapon: One of the possible weapons to get in the field is a humble double barrel shotgun, with its natural low capacity and slow reload. Emphasis is "in the field," as these weapons can only be found in Super Earth colony sites, implying the colonists were expected to fight against the Terminids and Automatons with these things.

** Escorting a group of four survivors to a facility on the map (the objective is complete even if only one of them arrives). A player walks up to the them, and from them on the survivors will follow that player until they reach the objective, the players tell them to stop or they're all dead. The scrappiness of those missions is noted by the achievement unlocked for escorting the four survivors to the facility, named "Who likes escort missions anyway?" Completely reworked in the sequel, with players now having to herd groups of three survivors to a central depot until enough total are able to get inside. Accidentally killing survivors costs Requisition though!
** Protecting a train on a rail. The train will move forward as long as neither an enemy or a player touches it.

* ExplosiveOverclocking: By default, Railguns are set to "Safe" firing, which charges it up to about half of its power for respectable, but modest damage. Switching it to "Unsafe" firing allows the Railgun to build up more power to dole out even more damage, but if the Railgun charges too much, it will explode in the user's hands, killing them instantly.

* FriendlyFireproof: Averted, friendly fire is always on and there is no way to disable the feature. This requires the players to carefully plan their actions during the games many chaotic combat sequences. Of special note is the fact that you can get squished by your [[TheCavalry reinforcements']] Drop Pods, and your [[GunshipRescue extraction]].

* GlassCannon: Helldivers themselves can dish out alot of firepower, both from their weapons and stratagem calldowns, but cannot take much damage in turn.

* HoldTheLine: Retaliatory Strikes in ''1'' and Extermination missions in ''2'' have no objective other than "Survive" and "Kill them all!". These missions take place in small arena like areas, where movement is heavily limited.

* ImmuneToBullets: Armored enemies cannot be hurt with normal firearms (shown as a faint blue impact flash), and require anti-tank weaponry. Made a little more distinct in the sequel, where weapons are noted as having Light/Medium/etc. Armour Penetration capabilities and the deflection effects are more noticeable.

** As of the "A New Hell" update, Cyborg Legionnaires. Essentially, they are the Cyborg's normal grenade launcher-wielding scout unit carrying a smaller version of the Hulk's shield. They only appear on Level 13+ planets.

** The Anti-Armor weapons can take out heavily armored enemies in a single shot, but only ''have'' a single shot before they need to be reloaded. And reloading them takes either an inordinate amount of time (for a single user) or requires another person to work with you (which takes up their backpack slot and makes your powerful gun useless if they die). The Quasar, being a hybrid Anti-Armor Energy Weapon, instead has a moderately long cooldown cycle between shots - which it can do whilst slung on your back, making it a popular choice for more mobility-minded Helldivers.

** Railguns have two firing modes: "Safe" and "Unsafe". Safe deals respectable damage against most weaker mooks, but struggles against tougher enemies since its output is capped at around 50%. Unsafe, conversely, is capable of dealing much more damage and damaging armored parts of enemies, but to do so, you'll basically need to play games of chicken with your weapon to get as much damage out of them as possible per shot without overcharging it to the point that [[ExplosiveOverclocking it explodes in your hands and kills you instantly]].

** Averted in the sequel; Shotguns are highly effective at realistic ranges and have decent pellet spread to kill a small enemy at a hundred yards. They instead suffer an entirely realistic shotgun drawback in that the pellet-based shotguns have no armour penetration whatsoever -- so whilst they can rapidly reduce ''unarmoured'' enemies to nothing more than a pile of mulch, they can't do a damn thing to heavily armoured enemies unless you can find (or create) an exploitable weak spot.

* SmokeOut: One perk replaces your standard grenades with smoke grenades. They do no damage, but the smoke they release blocks enemy line of sight. This prevents enemy scouts from sounding the alarm if the smoke is between them and the Helldivers. There is also a stratagem version -- or two, in the sequel.
** This is especially powerful against the Automatons in the sequel, as smoke screens will prevent them from tracking and firing on your location. While it won't prevent the occasional lucky hit, it will still dramatically reduce their accuracy, and can cause them to stop firing and start advancing towards the smoke in an attempt to find any Helldivers.

* SubsystemDamage: In ''2'', both Helldivers and their enemies can suffer from this.

* SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome:
** A key component of the series's emergent-gameplay BlackComedy is averting AcceptableBreaksFromReality to let you kill yourself in really stupid ways that are, in hindsight, extremely predictable. No, you don't want to stand near your Pelican transport's thrusters when it's coming down to evacuate you, why do you ask?

** More explicit satire in the sequel that the utopia is really only a veneer for all but a select few, as children as young as 7 are enlisted into the war effort.

* AntiFrustrationFeatures: Should the last player alive die before they can throw their reinforcement stratagem, it will still activate and allow all of the dead players (including the one who was about to throw the beacon) to come back. Only counts if the last player has the reinforcement stratagem beacon in their hand when they die, though.

* ArmorIsUseless: Your armour/helmet choices were purely cosmetic; only by taking the Heavy Armour perk did you actually get increased survivability.
* AscendedMeme:
** ''Webcomic/PennyArcade'' had a [[https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2015/03/30/what-lies-beneath comic]] about the extraction shuttle pilot, which they named "Frank", and his complete indifference about crushing Helldivers with his ship. In the next update, Arrowhead added an achievement "Make Frank Crush a Tank", which was earned by having the extraction shuttle land on top of a Bug tank. Sadly no longer possible in the sequel; the dropship will lift up again if something too large/durable would block its landing.

** Smoke grenades and smoke stratagems. In ''1'' they can prevent the enemy from sounding the alarm while helldivers are inside or behind a smoke cloud, and stop enemy ranged attacks from firing if the smoke cloud blocks line of sight. In ''2'', they are very powerful against Automatons, who rely on line of sight to shoot at any Helldivers they spot. A single smoke grenade or smoke stratagem can easily increase a Helldiver's odds of surviving the onslaught of Automaton fire.
** The basic Eagle Bombing Run and Orbital Precision Strike. You can quickly access the former and begin with the latter. Sure there are ''flashier'' stratagems (such as the memetic 500-kilo bomb), but they alone can solve most problems a Helldiver will ever encounter, and the Bombing Run in particular requires less precise placement and timing to do so. When fully upgraded you get three bombing runs with a five second delay between each on a two-minute rearm (assuming no mission conditions modify them) and the precision strike takes just under two minutes to recharge.

* LaughingMad: Helldivers will start laughing maniacally if you fire off a sustained burst from your support weapon, or from mounted guns (such as those found around Automaton outposts).

* MiniMecha: The EXO-44 Walker mech in the first game, along with its variants the EXO-48 Obsidian and EXO-51 Lumberer. Slower than Helldivers on foot, but more heavily armored and equipped with ''much'' heavier firepower.

* UnexpectedlyRealisticGameplay: In most co-op horde shooters, you don't have to take things into account like teamkilling (at least not to the IJustShotMarvinInTheFace extreme this game presents), shooting armor-piercing rounds at the right angle so an enemy's armor doesn't deflect them, aiming for enemies' center of mass to deal the most damage, etc.

* VideoGameRaids: Essentially how Assaults work. After a Helldiver builds up enough Influence in a sector to unlock the local Master fight, they have around two-and-a-half hours to defeat the Master inside the Assault mission before it closes again. These missions are basically impossible without a well-coordinated full squad of competent Helldivers to back you up, but they pay massive dividends of Influence if you succeed.

* EverythingTryingToKillYou: In addition to the hordes upon hordes of baddies you'll be fending off, almost every single other game mechanic has the potential to kill you. Fat-fingered disarming an explosive? Dead. Accidentally jump into a 50-foot pit? Dead. Exit an APC a little too quickly so that it does a little collision damage? Dead. mistkenly call down a Stratagem ''on top of yourself''? Dead. And the less said about all the ways your [[SurroundedByIdiots idiot teammates can get you killed]], the better.

** The Arc Thrower is a potentially powerful weapon that can chain its shots on tightly packed enemies. However, its main drawback is very poor performance at short ranges, as well as the chance for the Arc Thrower's shots to chain onto friendly Helldivers. Whilst the ''Cutting Edge'' Premium Warbond includes 3 new armors with the Electrical Conduit perk which supposedly reduces Arc damage by 95% (in reality moving it down from "immediate oneshot" to "survivable twice, or three times if you're lucky", this necessitates sacrificing other ''highly'' useful armour perks as a bandaid fix for poor coordination/situational awareness - no enemies inflict electrical/Arc damage (at present, certain Illuminate units might), so it offers no protection against anything but friendly fire.
** The [=SPEAR=] is supposed to be an upgrade over the Recoilless Rifle, being the handheld weapon with the most power per shot. However, the [=SPEAR=] can only lock on to large targets and cannot be used to combat swarms, has an extremely long reload time, only comes with a measly four missiles, and can only be restocked by a resupply stratagem. Oh, and it's incredibly fussy about when and what it ''does'' want to lock onto, making it a potential liability over the simple point-and-shoot recoilless rifle or expendable anti-tank weapons.
** Both the Orbital 120mm and 380mm HE Barrages are potentially powerful, but their low accuracy over a wide area makes them inconsistent to use, especially if you're trying to aim for a specific facility or mobile units. The 380 might as well be addressed 'Dear Grid Square'; for all of its power, it's not something you want to rely on. Both have received accuracy buffs since launch and are now more usable, but remain rather unpredictable and inaccurate, and therefore unreliable, compared to most other fire support options.
** The Rocket Sentry is the most powerful sentry on a per shot basis, but it often refuses to attack enemies that get too close to it, and the relatively slow speed of the rockets it fires means that it is prone to outright completely missing particularly fast moving targets. Plus it has splash damage, so if it tries to 'help' you it may just end up blasting you to bits; at least the machinegun or gatling sentries won't.
** InUniverse, just about everything about the Helldivers qualifies, being a military force given almost zero training before deployment and expected to suffer 80% combat losses[[note]]After already suffering an 80% casualty rate in training[[/note]], yet being given ridiculous amounts of gear and weapons including a midsized starship that seems to have a standard crew of around a ''dozen'' personnel not counting the flash-frozen Helldivers aboard the ship. While they still are [[ElitesAreMoreGlamorous the elite of Super Earth]] and qualify quite well as [[OneManArmy One Man Armies]], the amount of resources being spent on them could definitely be assigned far more efficiently by a more competent faction. And that's not even getting into things like turret drops using ''springs'' to reduce fall damage and Super Destroyer cannons being externally loaded '''''muzzle loaders''''' until upgraded.
*** One NPC notes that a single Helldiver mission typically costs more than a ''Liberty''-class Cruiser, and considering how many Helldiver missions are run daily, it's likely Super Earth would have won long ago if even a fraction of that had gone into ship construction.
* AwesomePersonnelCarrier: The M5 APC and its more heavily armed sibling, the M5-32 HAV.

* SnowballFight: Stand still for a few moments in the snow on a suitably frosty world in ''II'' and you may get a prompt to make or pick up a snowball, which you can then throw. There's not really any situations in which this is particularly ''useful'', but hey, it's there.

* SuperDrowningSkills: Any water deeper than a helldiver's height will cause them to tread water for a few seconds, before spontaneously drowning. Even if the water level is a literal centimeter taller than them.
* SuperWristGadget: Helldiver armour has a wrist-mounted computer that serves as the dialling interface for stratagems, conveys situation information whilst on the Destroyer, and for the map whilst in missions. Automaton infantry units also seem to have a similar wrist-mounted interface that they sometimes pause and refer to. As an added bonus, if you mess around with the camera angles and your character position (easiest on the Super Destroyer), you can position the camera in someone else's model in such a way that you can see that the display reads 'Personal Hellpad System'.

* TakeCover: One "Brasch Tactics" video in ''II'' advises this, providing a very clear indication that Helldivers are woefully undertrained despite [[ElitesAreMoreGlamorous their supposed elite status]]. Players should probably still do it, though.

* TakingYouWithMe:
** Assault Raiders have jetpacks that tend to explode on death, taking out any Helldivers near them. This is exacerbated by the Assault Raider's tendency to JumpJetPack into close range with the Helldivers to perform melee attacks.
** Shriekers are AirborneMook Terminids with a decently-damaging swooping attack, but their most dangerous trait comes when they're killed while doing so, as the momentum turns their entire body into a deadly projectile that can one-shot any Helldiver it hits.
* TechTree: A very simplified version, where weapons and stratagems could be upgraded by collecting Samples.

** The sequel replays a slightly more bombastic remix of A Cup of Liber-Tea upon victory of a mission.

* WeWillSpendCreditsInTheFuture: The primary currency is Super Credits, given out for completing missions and spent on equipment. Also mentioned in NPC dialogue where it is made clear it is also used as currency by the populace to buy things.

* StrawmanNewsMedia: Appears repeatedly in the sequel amongst other propaganda shorts viewable aboard the player's Super Destroyer. Appropriately, the news organization in question is [[PunnyName even called "Strohmann News."]]

--> --'''Broadcast Narrator'''

* RewardsPass: The sequel's Warbonds, which are unlocked with Super Credits and progressed with Medals (acquired by completing missions, and through semi-rare in-mission pickups). All players start with the ''Helldivers Mobilize'' Warbond for free, and Warbonds don't go away once unlocked, offering various rewards split across several tiers that are unlocked by spending a sufficient number of medals in the prior tiers in that Warbond, allowing players to progress through them however they like.
* RidiculouslyFastConstruction: Even if they're actively invading a planet, Automatons have generally already made a good amount of buildings and encampments by the time the Helldivers show up, and their already built foundries [[WeHaveReserves are churning out new soldiers]] ready to defend them.
* RobotWar: Subverted. The Automatons definitely have this thematic, being inhuman socialist machines who hate everything the fine organics of Super Earth stand for... ''specifically'' Super Earth. They are actually out to save their creators, the Cyborgs from the first game, they don't hate life as a concept and it's mostly Super Earth refusing to acknowledge their demands that prolongs the ForeverWar.

* OutsideTheBoxTactic: The fastest way to defeat a Terminid Charger isn't to shoot the less-armored, glowing rear spot, but to break the armor off one of their legs and then shoot that leg. Doing so will kill the Charger faster than shooting it in the rear.

* OneBulletClips: Entirely averted - not only are the remaining bullets in a magazine discarded when you reload, they are discarded at the very start of the reload, so if you interrupt it before finishing (by, say, dodging, meleeing, or bringing up the map), your gun will be empty.
** Rendered moot by the Punisher and Slugger shotguns, which reload one shell at a time. Given how long it would take to reload 16 shells into two empty tubes, it's more practical to top them off as often as you can unlike the detachable magazine-based firearms. Likewise the Senator revolver reloads one bullet at a time, making it ''painfully'' slow -- offsetting its otherwise fairly high accuracy and power when used correctly.