A page for the characters, factions, and unit types in the Helldivers franchise, including Helldivers and Helldivers II.
open/close all folders
Federation of Super Earth
Citizens rise, Liberty rise, Super Earth rise up to the skies! Stay free!
—Super Earth national anthem
Us! Prosperity, Liberty, and Democracy is our way of life, and we will spread it to the rest of the galaxy's inhabitants, whether they like it or not. Deploying the elite Helldivers to the various war fronts, Super Earth and her colonies will fight on, until managed democracy is installed on every habitable planet.
In General
The faction we play as, the Federation of Super Earth is a "democratic" government that are in a war with different alien species for not being democratic and loving freedom. The truth is deeper than that actually, since Super Earth is actually a authoritarian and warmongering government that sends people into the war for meaningless reasons.
- Airstrip One: As revealed in the Super Earth world map, all the old nations and cities of Earth have been done away with, and instead the planet has been reorganized into seven numbered Sectors, each with a Mega City of the same number acting as a capital. The one exception is Prosperity City, which used to be Stockholm. Even monuments and great geographic features have been renamed, with the "Pyramids of Super Earth," the "Great Wall of Democracy," "Superstone Park," and the "Liberty Ocean" all being highlighted.
- America Takes Over the World: Subverted, actually. Despite being a Boorish Eagle Land that spouts "Liberty" and "Democracy" constantly, Super Earth was actually founded by Sweden of all countries.
- Better Living Through Evil: Super Earth has a two-tier citizenship system, with first-class citizenship granting access to perks such as better healthcare and general improvements in the quality of life. Citizens are encouraged to boost their Citizenship Score through contributions to the war effort, including service in the SEAF and reporting signs of possible dissent or treason.
- Capitalism Is Bad: Or rather, "Corporatism is bad", combining it with the games' anti-Fascist satire. Along with LIBERTY! and DEMOCRACY!, Super Earth's propaganda machine loves to constantly extoll the virtues of capitalism to its citizens and military alike, encouraging them to buy new gear and supplies to keep their war effort going, as well as advertising various corporations which apparently manufacture the products. All of this would play the trope straight due to Super Earth not being as heroic as they made out to be...except that most of those corporations are pretty much run by the Super Earth government, which micromanages every other aspect of its citizens' lives as well, including some rather...shady practices such as "donations" from citizens which are implied to not be as voluntary as they sound, and investigating citizens for treason for so much as leaving a negative review on a product sold by a government-run corporation. All in all, while the "capitalism" Super Earth practices is indeed not at all good, at the same time, it's barely a free market economy to begin with, being a Corporatist command economy masquerading as pseudo-capitalism which more resembles the economy of something like Fascist Italy or Imperial Japan.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: While it’s likely that Super Earth is no stranger to doing this, they’ve somehow managed to figure out a way to torture Automaton POWs through "Unpleasant Sensory Experience Simulations" (despite the official party line being that Automatons are soulless machines incapable of true feelings — don't think too hard about it), the information relinquished by them giving way to a massive Automaton invasion plan dubbed "The Reclamation" being prepared and giving reason for Super Earth to enact Operation Swift Disassembly.
- The Complainer Is Always Wrong: Pretty expected since Super Earth is blatantly fascist, but a message from the ship's TV in II just puts in plain English:No one likes a complainer — if your living conditions aren't to your liking, remember — aliens could kill us all at any moment.
- The Computer Is Your Friend: The public believe the leaders are elected by algorithms, which the ideal citizen thinks is the only sensible method. Though it's just as likely a cover for whatever humans actually pick the results.
- Concepts Are Cheap: One of Super Earth's propaganda tactics employs a sort of circular reasoning — Super Earth stands for liberty, democracy, and prosperity for all humankind, and thus anyone who opposes them or doesn't toe the party line must obviously hate things like liberty, democracy, and prosperity. Democracy Officers and others in positions of authority use this logic to shut down anything they see as critical of or deviant from the status quo, while the majority of the populace is effectively brainwashed into taking the government's claims at face-value without reflecting on what these values actually mean.
- Crapsaccharine World: On the surface, Super Earth is a democratic federation that has successfully colonized the stars while spreading values of liberty and democracy across the galaxy. In truth, it is an authoritarian government underneath a sham democracy that wages wars of territorial expansion while brainwashing its citizens through copious amounts of propaganda, sending them to die in droves because overpopulation seems to be a serious enough issue that failures to Liberate worlds for expansion result in the suspension of C-01 permits across the Federation.
- Doublethink:
- The Super Earth government's preferred tactic in communications. Any Major Order or alert given to the Helldivers will always say a development was expected or foreseeable, no matter how much it contradicts their party line or earlier statements.
- "Managed Democracy" is an explicit contradiction in terms, particularly as actually implemented by Super Earth. On the one hand, citizens are encouraged to "vote" via preferences ballots and to engage in other forms of political-civic theater to give them affirmation that their choices matter and that Super Earth's policies are the result of some sort of common consensus; on the other hand, the justification given for the preference ballots and the voting algorithm that supposedly aggregates this "consensus" is that ordinary people cannot and should not be expected to make informed decisions in their own interests, and the idea that people should be able to vote directly on candidates and policies is explicitly considered treasonous dissent.
- Eagle Land: A Boorish example wearing a Beautiful mask. Words like "liberty" and "justice" are thrown out like candy despite the people being very far from free, Everyone Is Armed, wars are declared for pure expansionism and touted as "spreading democracy," and so on.
- Earth That Used to Be Better: Super Earth is still around, but environmental collapse and the Last Great War have clearly taken their toll. The British Isles are gone, much of the northern hemisphere is covered in radiation zones, and only two small rainforests remain intact (both are listed as no trespassing zones, along with the Svalbard Seed Vault).
- Equal-Opportunity Evil: For all their flaws, Super Earth seems to have at least eliminated discrimination based on race, sex, and gender — the family shown in the opening propaganda short is explicitly mixed-race, and Helldivers themselves are a diverse bunch, with multiple options for voice and body types and no explicit references to gender in in-game dialogue.
- Everyone Has Standards: As outright crazy as Super Earth's government is, even they know when to bow to reason (sometimes) - the title for the upgrade to reload Eagle Fighters inflight is Pit Crew Hazard Pay Authorization, implying they felt it better/easier to just pay the crew extra rather than brainwash them into complying.
- Everyone Is Armed: A government mandated version. To encourage people to join the military, all citizens are given an M2016 Constitution bolt-action riflenote when they turn 16. Helldivers II also has standardized double barrel shotguns scattered around fallen Super Earth colonies, and advertisements for military grade weapons being sold for hunting and home defense.
- Expy: The Government of Super Earth is meant to be a parody of the Terran Federation as portrayed in the film adaptation of Starship Troopers as a highly-militarized Guided Democracy that sends its people to their deaths and is constantly blaring out cartoonish propaganda espousing the virtues of the government while constantly demonizing the enemies.
- False Utopia: The government of Super Earth is blatantly fascist, arrests hundreds of thousands of its own citizens each year on suspicion of wavering patriotism, uses even the most loyal citizens effectively as slave labor starting at age seven, and can't run an efficient war to save itself. The citizens are sold on the idea that it's actually "democratic" and the only bastion of liberty in the galaxy.
- Fascist, but Inefficient: Parodied. Quite a lot of attention is put on how Super Earth runs the Galactic War with the basic overall stategy of "throw barely-trained Cannon Fodder overequipped with planet-decimating weaponry into zones swarming with hostiles until whatever current objective is achieved", and how there don't appear to be any kind of coordinated planetary offensives beyond broad Major Orders, which don't even force Super Destroyers to deploy at certain locations, as was famously seen in II during the Malevelon Creek fiasco. A variety of ship upgrades in II are shockingly simplistic or even available late in the list (such as equipping logistics personnel with...hand carts) to make it obvious Super Earth's decision-making process isn't the most practical.
- The Federation: Subverted and parodied by way of Blatant Lies. The Federation of Super Earth is about as much a "federation" as any of the autocratic governments it's perpetually fighting against, and will forcefully bring the galaxy's planets into hegemony with itself whether they like it or not. However, Super Earth's Propaganda Machine is perpetually tapping into the image of the played-straight "heroic Democratic Federation fighting against Scary Dogmatic Aliens" trope, meaning it still resembles this to the average unsuspecting Helldiver who bought the propaganda.
- Galactic Conqueror: From the Super Earth national anthem: "Freedom must reign over every last star." Considering that Super Earth doesn't recognize "freedom" as capable of existing outside their own control, that's a pretty clear declaration of intent.
- Human Resources: Among other pieces of evidence that Super Earth really enjoys culling its own population, Super Earth broadcasts encourage citizens to volunteer themselves for an early trip to the "bio-repurposer vats".
- I Resemble That Remark!: They regularly warn Super Earth citizens that the Automatons are kidnapping humans to send to forced labor camps. That Super Earth sends hundreds of thousands of dissidents to labor in "Freedom Camps" every year has no correlation whatsoever, and is purely a rumour spread by said dissidents.
- Mega City: Most of Super Earth's population lives within a series of these, each acting as the capitol of the planet's sectors. All are given the same number designation as the sector they control, with the exception of Prosperity City. It does seem that plenty of people live in normal cities as well, as well as farmsteads and smaller outposts on newly-Liberated worlds.
- Mirroring Factions: It doesn't get more obvious than a faction of Cyborgs/Automatons that have Commissars against a faction which has "Democracy Officers" who fulfill an identical purpose. The only real difference between the governments of Super Earth and Cyberstan is that Cyberstan is an authoritarian-left collective while Super Earth is a blatantly undemocratic Democracy.
- Oh, My Gods!: Super Earth seems to have successfully phased out all examples of religious blasphemy-based swearing and replaced them with phrases like "Sweet Liberty" and "Democracy be damned".
- Patriotic Fervor: The government's Propaganda Machine keeps churning day in and day out, fostering a government-encouraged version of this in Super Earth's populace which only assists with the recruitment of new Helldivers for the war effort.
- People's Republic of Tyranny: Downplayed — the government of Super Earth isn't quite so boorish as to name themselves in such a way to run afoul of this, but their fondness of words such as democracy, justice, liberty (they even celebrate Liberty Day), prosperity and others rather bring this trope to mind. Their retitling of Earth as Super Earth can also qualify for this — they just avoided attaching any other nouns or adjectives to the government of Super Earth because there's only one government for it anyway.
- Population Control: Implied. Citizens of Super Earth are required to fill in a C-01 permit before any act that could result in a child. Permit authorization can be suspended in the event of insufficiently rapid Liberation of new worlds for the Federation, further suggesting that overpopulation is a serious issue. It would certainly explain the Federation's We Have Reserves attitude.
- Psychological Projection: Crewmembers on your Super Destroyer claim that the problem with the Terminids is that they are relentless expansionists and express concern that if the "mindless reproduction" of the Terminids is not stopped in time, then the burden will be on their children, and their children's children to do so.
- Skeleton Government: While it's clear that Super Earth is a totalitarian Police State hiding behind the thin veneer of a "managed" democracy, the exact question of who is actually in charge is left open. It's equally plausible that the much-vaunted voting algorithm the government uses to "guarantee" a consensus is either 1.) a smokescreen being manipulated by a human Shadow Government for its own ends, or 2.) an actual sentient AI that is itself manipulating an unsuspecting humanity for some inscrutable purpose. Either way, we'd have no way of knowing, and the results are functionally indistinguishable.
- Socially Scored Society: Super Earth has a two-tier citizenship structure, with citizens being able to earn Class A Citizenship and the additional benefits that come with it by accumulating Citizenship Score points. Citizenship Score can be boosted through a variety of civic services, such as contributing work toward the war effort, service in the SEAF, or reporting thoughtcrimes and suspicious activity to the authorities.
- Think of the Children!: A common justification used in Super Earth's propaganda — everything they do is in the name of "building a brighter future" for the next generation, and their enemies are painted as wanting to kidnap, corrupt, or otherwise harm good, innocent human children alongside their many other alleged crimes. One of the messages on the ship in II claims that the Terminids were responsible of the deaths of one-hundred and eighty-nine million citizens of Super Earth, many of them babies.
- Underestimating Badassery: Zig-zagged, as Super Earth will very, very frequently raise skepticism over the capabilities and intelligence of all of their adversaries. The only trait they’ll lend credence to is the mindless savagery of their opponents rampage across their settlements, which serves to rally recruits to face what are painted to be idiot communist marauders and their creations, mindless bugs, and an irresponsible alien empire. Said underestimation costs thousands of lives daily and occasionally leads to failed operations and sudden developments in their opponents favor.
- United Space of America: Super Earth is what would happen if America the Boorish took over Earth and spread to the stars, taking "managed democracy" with it. Amusingly, the developers have revealed that the founding nation that built Super Earth was actually Sweden.
- Unreliable Expositor: Much of the information on the state of Super Earth and the intent and natures of the enemies they have made are seen through the eyes of madmen controlling the government and military and propagandized youth sent to war, leaving much of what's actually going on left to being unraveled through the cracks in the facade.
- Villain Protagonist: They are an imperialist, authoritarian state seeking to conquer the galaxy that serves as the player faction.
- You Keep Using That Word: Given how completely contrary the government of Super Earth is to the concepts of "Democracy", "Liberty" and even "Freedom" that its citizens fling around so often, it's entirely possible that the average citizen of Super Earth has no idea what any of those concepts actually mean and are just parroting them as buzzwords designed to instill Patriotic Fervor.
Helldivers
Helldiver Corps (AKA Helldivers)
- Voiced by:
Helldivers 1: EvaMarie Orie (Female Helldiver), Kola Krauze (Male Helldiver)
Helldivers 2: Erica Lindbeck (Voice 1), Yuri Lowenthal (Voice 2), Julie Nathanson (Voice 3), Robbie Daymond (Voice 4)
YOU are the tip of the spear — one of the elite chosen few, specially selected and trained to be at the very forefront of Super Earth's heroic campaign to defend humanity, liberty, and managed democracy against the mindless masses of hateful alien enemies seeking to undermine our very way of life. Every Helldiver has a truly withering amount of firepower at their fingertips, from the finest and most advanced firearms the Super Earth Armed Forces can provide to the unbridled might of a Super Destroyer's orbital cannons, and they are expected to use their wits and skills to bring the hammer down where it hurts humanity's foes the most — or die trying.
- A Space Marine Is You: You play as not just one nameless, faceless Helldiver, but all of the collective Helldivers on board your personal Super Destroyer, who just so happen to share the same armor, cape and Strategems to not cause any confusion when reinforcing their teammates.
- Badass Cape: The signature item of Helldivers is a cape, which is earned upon completing training.
- Badass Crew: A full squad of Helldivers is a team of elite, highly trained professional killers with ludicrous amounts of firepower at their disposal and the guts and brains to use it to put down humanity's toughest threats. Or at least that's the ideal shown in the propaganda reels — actual results may vary.
- Battle Cry: Helldivers aren't exactly quiet when it comes to killing the enemies of democracy. They'll yell and shout out various things related to democracy while blasting their enemies. note
- Elites Are More Glamorous: They're the closest thing Super Earth has to "elite," and are given flashy outfits and ridiculous amounts of ordnance. That said, their training is laughable, their operations are insanely expensive (a single operation costs, on average, more than a Liberty-class cruiser), and it's heavily implied by lore that the only reason they're given such preferential treatment and constant honors over the SEAF or Navy is politics, as their founders were pre-Super Earth State Sec. To their credit, considering their training in the tutorial level, it's frankly a miracle that the average Helldiver can even properly call down strategems (even if it really is as simple as pressing the buttons for a sequence of symbols as it's portrayed in-game) as well as load and use any weapon they pick up considering the total lack of weapon proficiency, unit cohesion, psychological indoctrination, physical fitness, fieldcraft, tactical drilling, and other forms of training that the standard modern military infantryman goes through for months before graduating and Helldivers appear to only spend minutes on before being cryogenically frozen and kept on stand-by until Super Earth demands their service.
- Expy: If Super Earth is an expy of Starship Troopers' Terran Federation, then the Helldivers are expies of the Terran Mobile Infantry, being highly-trained Space Marines who fight with excessive amounts of force but are also on-the-nose parodies of Elite Mooks who get wiped out in droves. However, they do also share some similarities with how the Mobile Infantry is depicted in the book, such as how a squad of four of them are able to enact and lock down large-scale combat operations and slaughter hundreds of enemies without breaking a sweat.
- For Great Justice: You can expect to hear a Helldiver shout something along the lines of "FOR FREEDOM!", "FOR DEMOCRACY!" "LIBERTY FOR ALL!", etc. about 400 times in a single mission. Of course, since Concepts Are Cheap in Super Earth, all of these terms are meaningless when actually applied to what the Helldivers are generally doing.
- Glass Cannon: A Helldiver is a comparatively fragile soldier given access to heavy anti-tank weapons and orbital strike beacons.
- Heal Thyself: We have no idea what's in II's stims, but they're apparently at least capable of making Helldivers ignore broken bones, lactic acid build-up and shock, force them to immediately take a full breath of air, and slow lethal blood loss by over a half-hour after they're injected into their necks, considering they fully restore both health and stamina during their duration, cure all Subsystem Damage, and can basically make players ignore attacks that don't invoke the Chunky Salsa Rule for their duration. The game implies (by way of Suspiciously Specific Denial) that they're some variety of Psycho Serum.Training Manual Tips: Don't worry - stims have zero addictive properties!note
- Human Popsicle: Helldivers are cryogenically frozen after graduating and kept as such, thawing only to set an FTL course for their ship or report to a hellpod to live up to their job title. Should they survive, it's back to the freezer for them. II has missions where you specifically send up Helldivers that managed to survive the first galactic war in I, visible inside cryopods strapped to a rocket.
- Instant Expert: Despite their "training" (or rather, the lack of it), Helldivers can pick up and use any weapons made by Super Earth, and swap between them fluidly. They can handle an assault rifle just as easily as a crossbow. Heavy weapons that usually require team loading can be done by themselves as well, such as a rocket launcher or personal auto-cannon.
- Large Ham: Whether it be bombastically proclaiming patriotic slogans upon exiting the drop pod or shrieking in panicked horror after suffering crippling injuries, expect your typical Helldiver's speech to be intense and melodramatic throughout the mission. Even their animations for falling through the air in II are downright hammy as it has them rapidly flail all of their limbs.Helldiver: FOR SUPER EAAAAAAAAAAARTH!!!
- Laughing Mad: Using certain weapons like the flamethrower and machine gun, or using a heavy machine gun emplacement may cause the Helldivers in II to start laughing maniacally, with a mix of fear, genuine glee, and a touch of insanity. Considering how much shit they go through, and their survival rate, it might be a coping mechanism.
- Oh, Crap!: Helldivers in II that have been heavily injured while out of stims can reason out how good that is to their survival odds, verbally.
- One-Man Army: Potentially. If a Helldiver manages to use their Stratagems and equipment competently, they can walk away with decimating small armies of Automatons or Terminids. As disposable as Helldivers are, they can expect to take out a dozen or more enemies before being cut down.
- One Riot, One Ranger: Downplayed. Full-scale planetary operations obviously require thousands of Helldivers deploying to make any significant progress, and they have all kinds of orbital assets at their disposal thanks to the Super Destroyers, but at the individual level, it's standard to deploy small teams of one to four Helldivers (not counting reinforcements on standby) into dropzones that have hundreds of enemies and/or Giant Mooks that would tie up entire battalions of lesser soldiers.
- Primary-Color Champion: The Helldiver's uniform and equipment color scheme is a bright yellow and black. The yellow parts pop out much more in the first game's artstyle.
- Propaganda Hero: The Helldivers are an entire organization of Propaganda Heroes, with Super Earth building them up to be a legion of nigh-unstoppable elite supermen and exploiting their heroics to bolster morale and foster recruitment on the home front. While individual teams of Helldivers are indeed capable of some impressive heroics with the right support, they are really closer to heavily-armed fanatics with minimal training literally dropped straight into hellish warzones with the hope that they'll do enough damage before their nigh-inevitable death to justify the cost of outfitting and supplying them.
- Screams Like a Little Girl: Helldivers in II let out rather undignified cries of fear when enemies get very close to them. They might not even been hit, they'll just belt them out when enemies get too close or a shot narrowly misses them.Helldiver: LIBERTY SAAAAAVE ME!!!
- Sigil Spam: You can expect to see the Helldiver Corps' skull insignia plastered somewhere on everything a Helldiver owns or uses at some point.
- Space Marine: The classic kind, being an elite spacefaring military organization which pacifies enemy planets using tons of powerful weaponry, complete with classic space marine gear like Drop Pods, Powered Armor, Kill Sats, etc.
- Suicide Mission: Just about every mission the Helldivers partake in is implicitly a suicide mission — accomplishing the mission objectives is the only thing essential to success, while surviving to extraction is merely a nice bonus. One of the higher difficulty levels in II is explicitly labeled "Suicide Mission" to further drive this home... and there's still two harder ones from there!
- Surprisingly Elite Cannon Fodder: Downplayed — despite their exceptionally-sparse training, Helldivers...well, still die in droves, but they do somehow manage to succeed in their objectives and along with the support of their Super Destroyers, the demise of each one is still generally accompanied by deaths or destructions of far more of their enemies.
- Target Spotter: Part of every Helldiver's arsenal is a set of stratagem beacons that can be used to designate targets for airstrikes, orbital artillery, defensive emplacements, or reinforcement and resupply drops.
- Training from Hell:
- Parodied. The Helldivers tutorial level touts itself as making you an "expert" in all the fields it teaches, but it really just teaches you very basic combat and tactical skills (how to shoot, how to dive, how to call Stratagems, etc.). It's also mentioned to have an 11% casualty rate thanks to the live ammunition during certain parts.
- Parodied much more heavily in II. The beginning of the tutorial level reveals that only 21.3 % of Helldiver trainees are expected to survive their training, much less pass it, and said survival rate is considered to be within the training quota. However, much of it really isn't that difficult, it's just that most of said trainees are 18 to 20 year-olds that fell for the propaganda and have little to no combat ability, and the training goes from fairly basic things like obstacle courses and learning to shoot to fighting captured Terminids in under ten minutes.
- Vocal Evolution: In Helldivers, the Helldiver voices sound exactly like the grizzled, badass Space Marines you'd expect them to from Super Earth's propaganda. In II, they sound a lot more like sociopathic teenagers with very little training or experience, which is what they really are.
- We Have Reserves: Despite the propaganda portraying them as a crack military force, the casualty rate for Helldivers is astronomical due to their operations being classic "forlorn hope
" tactics, aggravated by friendly fire being a mechanic. Around 10,000 Helldivers complete training every day, which is how they can afford to lose so many, and the only reason so many complete training is because around 48,000 citizens enter training every day, with 80% of them dying, meaning this trope applies even to their training program. Further reinforced by the mission scoring mechanics: Surviving the mission is optional, and the number of reinforcements your squad burns through on a mission doesn't matter for the extraction bonus — only that four Helldivers went down, and four Helldivers came back.
Super Destroyer Crew
- Voiced by:
Helldivers 1: Tim Earle (Admiral), Indy Neidell (Radio Operator, Engineer), Ingela Lundh (Science Officer, Announcer)
Helldivers 2: Ike Amadi (Democracy Officer), Michelle Wong (Ship Master), Robin Reed (Onboard PA), Roger Craig Smith (Mission Control), Sarah Elmaleh (Service Technician)
As unmistakably badass as the Helldivers are, even they can't be expected to fight the enemies of Managed Democracy alone and without support. Every Helldiver has a Super Destroyer assigned to them to carry them into battle and support them with well-placed orbital artillery and supply drops, and these are the people who make that happen.
- And Mission Control Rejoiced: Completing a mission in II and successfully extracting earns your Helldivers a suitably bombastic congratulatory message from your Democracy Officer as the Pelican lifts off.
- Ascended Fangirl: The Service Technician is a downplayed example — she grew up idolizing the Helldivers and is extremely grateful to serve alongside them on the same Super Destroyer.
- Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: Spend a little too long idling in the Galactic War screen in II, and the Democracy Officer will politely yet firmly remind you that there's a war on and every second counts.
- Developer's Foresight: The quartermaster in II will commentate on your mission's success if you and your squad perform extremely well. She has lines for not committing any friendly fire, nobody dying, and finishing the mission extremely fast.
- Eyepatch of Power: A possible physical trait of your friendly local Democracy Officer.
- Large Ham: Downplayed with the Democracy Officer — while his delivery isn't quite as loud as the Helldivers, he compensates with his language always being unrelentingly grandiose whenever he says pretty much anything.
- Mission Control: Helpfully informs you of when you've arrived at an objective location, the mission timer, going out of bounds, and when you're in range of enemy artillery.
- Moral Myopia: Your Ship Master angrily says that a lot of patriots died in the Automaton's invasion of Cyberstan, and that they will be avenged. However, all those "patriots" were taking part in the enslavement of the Cyborgs, who the Automatons came to free.
- Mr. Exposition: The crew mostly serves to shed a little light on the background material. The crew in I mostly stuck to a few, borderline generic lines, but in II, they are much more diverse in their lines.
- New Technology Is Evil: After the Automatons' main invasion arrives in force, the Service Technician says she's not taking any chance with any technology that could even remotely have the possibility of being self-aware and she's replaced with her tablet with a notepad, her microwave with a gas stove, and her watch with a pendulum.
- The Political Officer: The Democracy Officer is mostly there to shout slogans to motivate Helldivers to fight for Managed Democracy. Unlike the Helldivers themselves, he reports to the Ministry of Truth, not the Ministry of Defense.
- Rugged Scar: Despite being The Political Officer that's never seen on the field or really ever being implied as having any real inkling of tactics or strategy (emphasizing the importance of missions or operations you choose with overwrought wording aside), the Democracy Officers' random appearance may have some significant laceration scars on their face.
- Wide-Eyed Idealist: The Service Technician in II is implied to be drawn from the lower class of Super Earth citizenry, and the incidental revelations about her personal life and opinions she offers on the war effort indicate that she trusts the Super Earth government with blind optimism and patriotic fervor. Among other things, at one point she reminisces wistfully on how she used to get treats for reporting on her parents' and neighbors' activities to the local Democracy Officer, and one of her long-term goals is earning a high enough Citizenship Score to get the privilege of owning a pet.
SEAF
Or in full, the Super Earth Armed Forces. They're the rank-and-file of Super Earth's, well, Armed Forces, and do the bulk of the off-screen fighting, as well as taking over more permanent security duties over liberated planets.
- Late to the Tragedy: Most of the time, the only thing Helldivers see of the rank and file SEAF is the remnants of their failed efforts to contain whatever crisis the Helldivers themselves are being sent to clean up.
- Nuke 'em: From what we do see of the SEAF's planetary defenses, nuclear weapons appear to be commonplace. One mission sees Helldivers refueling and launching ICBMs from abandoned siloes trapped behind enemy lines, and artillery emplacements sometimes feature shells with mini-nuke warheads.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: While the Helldivers are dropping deep into enemy territory to cripple key objectives, the SEAF wage their war directly from the frontlines, presumably enduring the full might of enemy forces while also likely being the main reason why enemy factions can’t simply just make a beeline straight to Super Earth. In the sequel, once can see gigantic clouds of smog rising from their explosive battles in the distance, which appear to use liberal amounts of nuclear armaments.
- Redshirt Army: We don't see the SEAF getting into fights, but they can't be doing well from what we do see. On the one hand, since the Helldivers almost exclusively deploy deep behind enemy lines, the only SEAF forces they would see are the corpses of those who were overrun during the initial defense against surprise invasions, rather than any unit actually in combat. On the other, considering how the "elite" and better equipped Helldivers operate, and the fact that their success or failure is almost entirely dependent on whether the Helldivers succeed, it is unlikely they are much better.
General Brasch
- Voiced by: Todd Haberkorn
A veteran Helldiver who oversees the training program and personally presents each and every newly-minted Helldiver with their first cape. Also the voice behind Brasch Tactics, a series of shorts created to encourage all Helldivers to think tactically while slaughtering the enemies of managed democracy.
- Canned Orders over Loudspeaker: The training course that serves as the tutorial of the second game seems to be using prerecorded messages from him piped in through a PA system since whenever you do something that breaks script, the person who tries to coach you back on track isn't Brasch himself, but rather a nameless facility operator who is very obviously uncomfortable to be talking to you.
- Captain Obvious: His "tactical insight" consists of advice so basic one would expect a soldier to know them before starting basic training. The only reason he's taken seriously is that Super Earth is so dysfunctional that his advice seems like profound insight.
- Catchphrase: All of his instructional messages end with "BRASCH TACTICS! Use 'em, or die trying!"
- Colonel Kilgore: He's definitely in love with some good old-fashioned Helldivers-brand carnage, with most of his instructional methods centered around ways Helldivers can increase their survivability... and thus continue killing the enemies of Super Earth as violently as possible.General Brasch: (after some Helldivers fry a Terminid crispy) Oh yeah... smells good!
- Only Sane by Comparison: General Brasch, the officer in charge of Helldiver training, appears to be an authentically Older and Wiser Four-Star Badass, and his advice is worth paying attention to... by the standards of the Super Earth Armed Forces, which appear to be locked in a fierce internal competition to discover the stupidest possible ways to fight a war. By the standards of any competent military, he's a bloodthirsty meathead Captain Obvious who's too high on his own supply of propaganda to offer any particularly deep insight.
- Propaganda Hero: Just as the Helldivers are Propaganda Heroes for Super Earth in general, General Brasch is one for the Helldiver Corps. He is the "grizzled war veteran" spouting obvious truths that inexperienced newbies take as profound insight, and his real past is so Shrouded in Myth that the real person at the core of it all (if there indeed is one) is effectively a cipher.
- Pun: His name is a homophone for 'brash', aka bold, showy, or aggressive. It fits with his hammy persona.
Air Support
Super Destroyer Air Support and Extraction Shuttle (AKA Frank)
Your guys in the sky, who will drop as many Stratagems as you need and always be there with the shuttle to extract you when the mission's done. Due to an Ascended Meme, the Extraction Shuttle pilot is semi-canonically named Frank.- Death from Above: Air Support can unleash untold loads of offensive firepower on your enemies at your command.
- Gunship Rescue: Very severely downplayed; the Extraction Shuttle has no weapons, but anything underneath it is going to get completely crushed, including you and any hapless enemies you may or may not have tricked into standing there. This is the basis for the "Make Frank Crush a Tank!" achievement, gained by turning a Heavily Armored Mook into paste with the shuttle.
Eagle- 1
- Voiced by: Rachel Kimsey
A veteran SEAF pilot in Helldivers II who assists Helldivers by raining down unholy amounts of explosive ordnance onto the battlefield on command.
- Ace Pilot: It doesn't matter if the sky's filled with Terminid spores, or Automaton anti-air fire. She'll deliver her payload on a stratagem beacon with deadly precision (most of the time, as long as your beacon was accurate). The maneuvers she pulls as well could give even modern day pilots black outs.
- Armored Coffins: The base fighter averts it, but it becomes one with the "XXL Weapons Bay" upgrade, which involves increasing the size of its bomb bay by removing "unnecessary systems" like the ejector seat, the fire suppression system, and the air bags.
- Breathable Liquid: The first upgrade in the Eagle line fills the fighter's cockpit with "breathable liquid perfluorocarbons" (which is an actual proposed but not well-developed application of them) that help absorb g-forces and allow the Eagle to make tighter turns. In practice, it halves the cooldown time between attack runs, allowing you to use them more frequently. This isn't a big deal by itself, but if you're running multiple Eagle stratagems they all have a shared cooldown so it can add up quickly.
- Cool Plane: The Eagle fighter craft she pilots is capable of handling re-entry and exit, and delivers all sorts of payloads to the battlefield, be they strafing runs, mundane smoke screens, missiles, or the infamous 500 kilogram bomb. It has a very distinctive T-shaped profile with its folding wings in attack position, a pair of large turbine engines, and a massive rotary Gatling gun in the nose, all in all making it loosely reminiscent of original-trilogy Star Wars fighters combined with the A-10 Warthog.
- Danger Deadpan: She's got the trademark "Chuck Yeager twang" down pat, announcing the delivery of a 500 kilogram high-explosive warhead about as casually as you might order a drink.
Pelican- 1
- Voiced by: Ray Chase
The voice every Helldiver wants to hear at the end of a mission. Pilots the Pelican extraction shuttle, the Helldivers' ride home at the end of a busy day in II.
- Danger Deadpan: His voice remains calm even in the hottest of evacs.
- Drop Ship: The extraction shuttle he pilots qualifies as one, though in practice it's mainly used for evacuations rather than combat drops.
- Gunship Rescue: His arrival also comes with the heavy autocannon turret he has slung under the nose. While it won't completely clear an LZ, it can be a welcome short boost in firepower to make a hot LZ a little bit cooler for Helldivers looking to embark.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: If you stray too far from the extraction zone during the evac sequence, he makes a slightly irritated comment about the lack of Helldivers at his LZ and aborts the extraction, forcing you to start it all over again. Suffice to say, it's recommended you stay on station while he's coming in.
Helldivers Enemy Factions
The Bugs
Mindless, relentless and aggressive beasts, the Bugs are but one of the many major threats to managed democracy that Helldivers face off against. What they lack in ranged attacks, they more than make up for in heavy armor and large swarms to bog Helldivers down with. It also happens to be quite the coincidence that upon death, their bodies decay into unimaginably valuable oil. In General
- Achilles' Heel: All Bugs bar the Hive Lord, even the mighty Behemoth, are weak to the TOX-13 Avenger. The toxic mix can seep into a Bug regardless of its armor and kill it in short order. As a bonus, they're also drastically slowed down.
- Allegorical Character: The Bugs as an enemy represent a satirical critique of nations fighting invasive and expansionist wars for resource acquisition while demonizing those they're invading as inhuman monsters, not unlike much of modern history concerning the Middle East, terrorist movements arising from there and the massive amount of islamophobia demonstrated by the U.S. during its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, which have frequently been criticized for using anti-terrorism and dehumanization as smokescreens for maintaining access to cheap oil in the region.
- Atrocious Arthropods: They all resemble arthropodal creatures like insects and crustaceans (though some do have features resembling types of molluscs).
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: Even their smallest unit, the Scout is as large as a dog. Warriors and Elites are the size of a small car, Behemoths are larger than tanks, and the Hive lord is bigger than a house!
- Close-Range Combatant: The only bugs able to attack at range are the Impaler, and the Hive Lord. And even then, the Impaler could still be considered "melee" technically, and the Hive Lord will more often try to snatch Helldivers in its jaws, rather than spit acid at them.
- Determinator: Warriors, Elites and Brood Commanders have a constitution mechanic similar to Helldivers where they will bleed out over time. During this constitution period, they will move and attack much faster in an attempt to kill Helldivers.
- Expy: With Super Earth taking large inspiration from the Terran Federation, the Bugs are a rough equivalent to the Arachnids, an alien species of sentient, insectoid aliens who operate under a rigid caste system that wage war against humanity.
- Heavily Armored Mook: Of the three Helldivers I factions, the Bugs have the most heavy armor to throw around, necessitating copious amounts of anti-tank stratagems or weapons.
- It Can Think: Much like the creatures they take direct inspiration from, there are hints that the Bugs may be just as much of a developed and civilized society in their own way as any of the other galactic factions rather than mere mindless killing machines, such as how Hive Lords have unique names and titles.
- Horde of Alien Locusts: There's certainly a lot of them, and they will battle their way to Super Earth if they're not stopped by the Helldivers.
- Riddle for the Ages: Just how in the hell are the Bugs capable of interplanetary travel when they have no developed technology? Super Earth intelligence has no real answer and the best hypothesis they can come up with is that the Bugs lay eggs/plant microbes in meteoroids and launch them into space at nearby planets. Ultimately no definitive solution is ever given, and it's something they still haven't solved with the Bugs' descendants, the Terminids, in II.
- Unskilled, but Strong: There's no real gimmicks with the Bugs, other than their Stalkers and Shadows being able to literally get the jump on you. The Bugs simply have high health, absurdly heavy armor, and lots of it to charge into the meatgrinder.
- Zerg Rush: The general combat doctrine of the Bugs is "Are there Helldivers detected? Throw increasingly larger amounts of bugs at them till they die or go away." It's no exaggeration to say you'll be killing over hundreds of them on medium level missions or higher.
Scout
- The Goomba: Probably the weakest enemy in the game, if you don't count the non attacking Illuminate Watchers and Observers. They may as well be tickling you whenever they mange to hit you, and will go down in a single hit from almost any weapon.
- Patrolling Mook: The only real danger they pose is if they manage to sound the alarm and alert their larger bug brethren to your presence.
Vanguard
- The Goomba: Only slightly more dangerous than Scouts, which isn't saying much. While their leap may catch you off guard, it also puts them at point blank range to get killed with melee strikes.
- In a Single Bound: They can jump very high, over cliffs in fact, to reach any Helldivers that they detect.
Warrior
- Giant Enemy Crab: They look the most crablike out of any Bug with their big and intimidating pincers as well as their thick carapaces (although their facial features more resemble lobsters or crayfish).
- Mooks: One of the most straightforward enemies in the game. They have moderate amounts of health, damage and their only tactic is swarming Helldivers in the open.
Elite
- Elite Mooks: Exactly What It Says on the Tin. They're stronger and more durable versions of Warriors who start replacing them entirely on higher difficulties.
Stalker
- Healing Factor: They can regenerate their health over time, letting them perform Hit-and-Run Tactics if they're not killed.
- Poisoned Weapons: Their claws are tipped with a neurotoxin that deals very light damage over time, but also drastically slows down afflicted Helldivers.
- Slaying Mantis: They resemble very large and aggressive mantids.
- Support Party Member: Despite their rather menacing appearance, they're not really that big of a deal on their own. While certainly annoying, they will only do 16 damage + some very minor Damage Over Time to a Helldiver's 100 health. Where they shine however is supporting other bugs by crippling the move speed of a Helldiver, isolating them from their squad and blocking bullets for more dangerous targets, letting other bugs close the distance.
- Stealthy Mook: Their job is to try and sneak up on you while you're dealing with loads of other Bugs and hit you with an incapacitating sneak attack.
- Visible Invisibility: They are slightly transparent, but are quite visible while moving. The planet's background color can also help or hinder their camouflaged state, ranging from blatantly obvious, to legitimately well hidden.
Impaler
- Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: The Impaler is the only Bug besides the Hive Lord that doesn't receive a Terminid variant of itself in Helldivers II.
- Combat Tentacles: The Impaler fights by burrowing its face tentacles over to where nearby Helldivers are located and swiping at them while they're otherwise occupied.
- Dig Attack: They can burrow their face tentacles through quite a bit of earth to strike out at faraway enemies.
- Expy: Of Zerg Lurkers. They're both members of a Horde of Alien Locusts who primarily fight by burrowing an appendage underground to strike out at a nearby foe. The primary difference Impalers have from Lurkers is that they are much more heavily armored and don't need to wholly submerge themselves underground in order to attack.
- Long-Range Fighter: In comparison to the rest of its kind. The Impaler sends its 3 tentacles out underground to strike at a distance, but it has no qualms about simply crushing anybody nearby it when its tentacles are retracted.
- Tactical Suicide Boss: In order to attack, it needs to deploy its tentacles that guard its head into the ground. While the tentacles are out, the Impaler is immobile and its soft unarmored head is exposed.
Tank
- Attack Its Weakpoint: If you don't have any stratagems or weapons that can deal with heavy armor, you can attempt to blast its exposed rear to kill it.
- Tough Beetles: They're the Bugs which most closely resemble coleoptera, being burly six-legged creatures with a tremendously resistant shell and the strength to crush a Helldiver effortlessly beneath their legs.
Behemoth
- Elite Mooks: Behemoths are just slightly bigger Tanks with no weak point on their behind, forcing you to hit them with a heavy ordnance to kill them.
- Foe-Tossing Charge: Their specialty. When they engage Helldivers from a distance, they'll wind up and begin sprinting towards them in an attempt to crush them underneath their bodies, and clear a path for other bugs behind them.
- Heavily Armored Mook: They're impervious to anything short of Anti-Tank weapons, and even then they may survive and keep coming at the Helldivers.
Brood Commander
- The Berserker: Brood Commanders literally will not stop coming at you until their bodies physically won't allow it any more, and as a last-ditch attempt to kill you they can furiously charge at you with a frightening speed even if parts of their body are wholly missing.
- Degraded Boss: They show up as assassination targets at low level planets. When you start getting to difficulty 9 and above, they can spawn regularly. At difficulty 15, they can spawn in groups of 10 or greater.
- Elite Mooks: Brood Commanders are the next step up from Elites in terms of difficulty. Not only is their armor tougher to break through than an Elite, but they can perform a Last Ditch Move where they charge directly at the Helldiver shooting at them when they're low on health. Their claw attacks also inflict slowing venom similar to Stalkers and Shadows.
- Non-Indicative Name: While the Monster Compendium mentions that they're believed to be similar to Super Earth Generals, in game, they don't function as a Mook Commander. They're an Elite Mook that just has high health and can enter a berserker like state when close to death.
Shadow
- Elite Mooks: Shadows are basically just slightly stronger versions of Stalkers.
- Patrolling Mook: While they take over the duties of Stalkers on Level 13+ missions, they also have the ability to sound the alarm like Scouts and Vanguards.
Hive Lord
- Dig Attack: Constantly throughout their fight they'll be tunnelling beneath you and your squad before erupting out of the earth and either cleaving you in half with their mandibles or launching spit at you.
- "Get Back Here!" Boss: The windows where the Hive Lord is exposed to attack when it emerges from beneath the ground are few and far between, and with all the other chaos going on in the fight you'll need to pick your shots very carefully lest you waste precious Stratagems.
- Immune to Bullets: In a big way. Anything short of an anti-tank round won't even leave a scratch on a Hive Lord due to its thick and heavy armor. And it's not a Broken Armor Boss Battle, either—either you and your squad come fully prepared with tons of AT weaponry to finish the job or you die watching all your bullets tink pitifully off the creature's hide.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: Hive Lords look and act like a cross between a myriapod and a Sand Worm.
- Super Spit: One of its primary moves is to hork up gobs of acidic green spit that both slows and damages you.
- Tunnel King: Their Encyclopedia entry states that they're capable of hollowing the crusts of entire worlds from the inside out to enable Bug occupation, which is why Super Earth considers them such high-priority targets.
The Cyborgs
These Communist scum mutilate their own bodies to perverse degrees, with their leader casts being almost entirely machine and no man. When they send a terrorist to bomb one of our planets, Super Earth declares war on them to both prevent another incident, and forcefully install voting booths for managed democracy to remove their communist ways. While they have many ranged attacks that can kill an unaware Helldiver, they also have a few melee options to provide distractions for their ranged units. In General
- Anti-Air: They stand out as the only faction to actively employ Anti-Air guns. These emplacements will jam your stratagems, so you'll have no support from orbit or aircraft to destroy these emplacements.
- Artificial Stupidity: Unlike the scouts of the Bugs or Illuminates, Cyborg patrols will not home in on Helldivers, and instead will patrol at random. While this does make it easier to avoid fighting them, they can also catch you off guard if one of their patrols takes a turn you weren't expecting.
- Catchphrase Insult: They're quite partial to calling Helldivers "scum".
- Countrystan: Parodied. The Cyborg homeworld is called "Cyberstan" for seemingly no reason other than to draw a parallel between them and Marxist Soviet-era Central Asian countries.
- Dirty Communists: They committed a terrorist bombing against Super Earth which claimed a few victims, sure. They also mutilate themselves and even dogs so that they can become relentless killing machines that slaughter innocent Super Earth citizens. They even live in the cold planet of Cyberstan. But even worse than both of that? THEY'RE COMMUNISTS AND NOT DEMOCRATIC!
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: If the "democratic" and capitalistic Super Earth fighting against the communist Cyborgs reminds you of anything, it will probably be the Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union — two sides locked in a fierce ideological struggle where each claims moral superiority over the other, but are both willing to resort to the same brutal and underhanded methods to win.
- Flare Gun: How they signal in reinforcements. Whenever one of their scouts spots Helldivers, they'll fire off a red signal flare, and seconds later troops will begin dropping in from the sky.
- Full-Conversion Cyborg: The higher the rank among Cyborgkind, the less of their original flesh and blood they have left to the point where some of them are quite possibly just brains in robotic exoskeletons. It's also ambiguous as to whether the Automatons that descend from them in II are a wholly new species of artificial life or the next stage in Cyborg posthumanistic supposition.
- It's Raining Men: Unlike the Bugs who surface from the ground, or the Illuminates that directly teleport in, the Cyborgs drop in from the sky. Even their IFVs!
- More Dakka: The Cyborgs rely a good bit on traditional gunfire and explosives, compared to the melee centric Bugs and the exotic weaponry of the Illuminates. Their Hulks have miniguns on their right arm, while their Warlords use gauss cannons. Siege Mechs can equip two different weapons from a pool of four.
- Penal Colony: Super Earth seems to have turned Cyberstan into one following the defeat of the Cyborgs in the First Galactic War, with the remaining Cyborgs being forced to work in its mines. The Automatons are fighting in II to liberate Cyberstan from Super Earth.
- Predecessor Villain: It is heavily implied that they created the Automatons in order to continue the war against Super Earth in the sequel.
- Red and Black and Evil All Over: Downplayed. Their primary color is black or dark grey, with red highlights. They also happen to be mass murderers of Super Earth's loyal citizens but given the fact that they are rebelling and declaring independence from the totalitarian Super Earth, them being violent is a given.
- The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: While wanting to declare independence from a totalitarian state like Super Earth is a noble goal, the Cyborgs are also entirely willing to slaughter non-combatants and turn civilians into Immolators at the very least to bolster their war effort in their pursuit of said independence.
- Speaking Simlish: They communicate only in a harsh, foreign Communist barking language with a lot of hard consonants which sounds like gibberish. A few worlds can be made out, though; most obviously "Helldiver" juxtaposed next to what are probably Cyborg swear words, as well as "alarm" and "scum". Sometimes they'll say an entire intelligible (though heavily accented) sentence, "Super Earth will fall".
Initiate
- Cannon Fodder: They are equipped with a weak assault rifle integrated into their right arm. They also have a very small health pool, and only really serve to block shots for Squadleader Soldiers to fire off a flare.
- Long-Range Fighter: They can fire off a burst at a decent range, but only have a pathetically weak punch to defend themselves in melee that does less damage than the Bug ''scout''. This bears repeating: Their punch does less damage than the Bug scout's ankle bite.
Squadleader Soldier
"LUK'HARAT! ALAAARM!!!"
A Cyborg with better cybernetic enhancements than the rest of the Initiates, they act as field officers and lead a small group of Initiates.- Grenade Launcher: Their Flare Gun pulls double duty and launches out frag grenades. The grenades themselves have a pretty small damage radius.
- Patrolling Mook: They actually do surprisingly little fighting; instead the main danger comes from their Flare Guns sounding the alarm and instantly raining four IFVs on your position.
Immolator
- Ambiguous Situation: Their encyclopedia entry states that they are Super Earth soldiers converted to Cyborgs. However, the exact wording makes the nature of this conversion a bit unclear. Are they Helldiver corpses turned into bionic puppets, or are they Helldivers who have defected to Cyberstan and are now dead in the eyes of Super Earth?
- Close-Range Combatant: Compared to other weapon wielding Cyborgs, the Immolator has to close into knife fighting distance to use its flamethrower.
- Unfriendly Fire: They have no qualms about torching Hounds or Grotesque that rush ahead of them.
- Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: While their flamethrower can down a Helldivers quickly, it's extremely short range and long wind up time gives Helldivers plenty of time to back up and shoot the bastard. Their health is also very low, meaning it's rare that they'll even get a chance to use their flamethrower before getting killed.
Comrade
- Mooks: Comrades have just enough health to not be Cannon Fodder and can do a bit of damage when they're in range, but are otherwise a non-threat.
- Sword and Gun: They combine a short-range Arm Cannon with a Blade Below the Shoulder.
Berserker
- The Berserker: Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Berserkers furiously charge at any Helldivers in their immediate vicinity with no regards to their own safety.
- Chainsaw Good: One of their arms has been replaced with a deadly chainsaw blade.
- Creepy Long Fingers: Their sinister finger blades give off this effect, making their fingers appear much longer than they're supposed to.
Butcher
- The Butcher: Exactly What It Says on the Tin. They certainly look the part of this epithet with their frightening saw-blade augmentations.
- Elite Mooks: Butchers are essentially just far more durable versions of Berserkers, charging at their foes in the exact same manner.
- Maker of Monsters: The Encyclopedia tells that they are the ones who do all the surgery necessary to create more cyborgs.
Hound
- Beware of Vicious Dog: Cyborg Hounds don't do a lot of damage by themselves, but they can provide nightmarish levels of harassment to your squad by knocking you over repeatedly.
- Deadly Lunge: This is their primary attack, to jump directly at you and momentarily knock you prone. Multiple Hounds doing this at once can quite easily stunlock you to death.
Grotesque
- Glass Cannon: It doesn't take alot to put down a Grotesque, but let them get into melee range and they'll tear you apart faster than a Butcher.
- The Grotesque: Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Their encyclopedia entry describes them as somewhat pitiable runts of Cyborg society who are believed to be Initiates that were so severely injured in battle that they were unable to recover, even with cybernetic augmentation. It's even mentioned that killing them is probably putting them out of agonizing misery.
- Zerg Rush: There's never a lone Grotesque. They'll usually come at you in groups of 5 minimum, and upwards of 12 at high difficulty planets.
Hulk
- Gatling Good: Their Arm Cannon is a powerful chaingun.
- Shield-Bearing Mook: The arm opposite their Arm Cannon holds a durable shield which protects them from damage; by "durable", it's capable of deflecting R-112 rounds if you shoot it at too wide of an angle.
Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV)
- Car Fu: If any Helldivers try to get close to it to exploit its blind spot, it may opt to simply try and crush them under its treads.
- Crosshair Aware: It projects a laser sight wherever it's aiming. This can help distinguish which member of a Helldiver squad is about to have a bad day.
- Jack of All Trades: In addition to its Lightning Bruiser properties, it also acts as a scout. If it spots the Helldivers, it will shoot off a signal flare so its buddies can join the fight. And if that wasn't enough, it can also release Grotesque onto the field, serving as a troop transport.
- Lightning Bruiser: Don't be fooled by its cumbersome appearance. The IFV can move fast when it wants to, and is perfectly capable of engaging in Car Fu if Helldivers dare to stand near it. Its turret is also capable of instantly killing any Helldiver that takes a direct hit, and it can fire at a decent rate. And of course, it's a freakin' tank, so you'll need some high explosives or anti-tank weapons to take these down.
- Tank Goodness: It's a powerful, heavily-armored tank which can One-Hit Kill an unarmored Helldiver with its main turret and deploy more Cyborg units onto the battlefield. The worst part? This is a mechanized infantry vehicle. The Cyborgs' actual Armor units are fully-fledged bosses.
Warlord
- Arm Cannon: They boast a powerful anti-tank cannon which is capable of tearing your Stratagems to smithereens in seconds.
- Bad Boss: Implied. The Encyclopedia tells that the Warlords treat bad to their troops, but since this is Super Earth who is providing this information, this should be taken with a grain of salt.
- Elite Mooks: They're essentially stronger Hulks, swapping out carrying a shield for dense full-body armor.
- Frontline General: Their Encyclopedia entry describes them as the Cyborgs strongest leaders, and they can be found deployed right alongside their lesser brethren.
- Heavily Armored Mook: They are the strongest regular Cyborg units and have no armorless weak spots, necessitating the use of Armor Piercing Attacks to take them down.
- Smash Mook: Warlords have no dangerous gimmick; they just charge at Helldivers and blow them to bits while shrugging off anything that isn't anti-tank fire.
Legionnaire
- Boring, but Practical: Compared to the assassin like Bug Shadow, or the mind controlling Illuminate Obsidian Observer, the Legionnaire just gets a simple metal shield. This makes it harder to kill than the other factions' elite scouts by virtue of requiring anti-tank weapons or splash damage to kill them.
- Elite Mooks: They're explicitly described as stronger versions of Squadleader Soldiers wielding Hulk shields.
- Shield-Bearing Mook: They carry shields with properties identical to those of Hulks, meaning they completely deflect small-arms fire and require a more heavy ordnance to penetrate. This makes it really tricky to kill them before they can sound the alarm.
Siege Mech
The Master of the Cyborgs.
- Arm Cannon: The Siege Mech can spawn with one of two different guns on its right arm; either a deadly gatling gun or a powerful rapid-fire grenade launcher.
- Full-Conversion Cyborg: Its Encyclopedia entry makes a note of pointing out how it seems unlikely that there's any meaningful organic material left in a Cyborg of such a size as the Siege Mech.
- Gatling Good: One of its two Arm Cannons is a huge minigun, and one of its primary attacks is to spray bullets in a direction with it.
- Grenade Spam: One of its Arm Cannon attacks is to unleash a volley of grenades at any nearby Helldivers.
- Humongous Mecha: Siege Mechs are absolutely colossal in comparison to a Helldiver and even other Cyborg units, looming menacingly over the battlefield.
- Immune to Bullets: Due to its heavy armor, a Siege Mech can only be damaged with heavy ordnances, which the anti-tank mines that you can deploy just so happen to fall into the category of and work great at dealing damage to it due its wide treads.
- Mighty Glacier: Especially compared to the other Masters, the Siege Mech is a slow, cumbersome foe weighed down tremendously by the buttload of weaponry it's carrying that it can use to horrific effect if not avoided.
- Power Nullifier: Throughout the fight it will constantly be deploying miniature Anti-Aircraft Batteries which disable Stratagems in a small radius around themselves in an effort to hamper your squad from calling in the equipment needed to damage it. Luckily, these batteries can be destroyed with simple small arms.
- Tank-Tread Mecha: The lower half of its body is nothing but gigantic tank treads which can grind hapless Helldivers into dust.
- Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Averted. The Siege Mech boasts a powerful flamer much stronger than those carried by Immolators capable of instantly frying a Helldiver at the same speed as volcanic lava, if not faster.
The Illuminates
The Illuminates (known in their own language as the Squ'ith) hide weapons of mass destruction, forcing Super Earth's hand into neutralizing them before they can unleash them upon our citizens. Their nanotech and technology is just a nice little bonus. They may be the weakest faction in terms of health and armor, but they more than make up for it with their various gimmicks, like regenerating shields, cloaking and mind control. By the time of Helldivers II, Super Earth has managed to completely exterminate the Illuminates from the galaxy, ending their reign of terror across Super Earth's borders. They are very very definitely gone for good, and never coming back. In General
- Crystal Spires and Togas: They deliberately fall into this classic alien archetype, with very long and floating garments and similarly floating technology.
- Deflector Shields: While their relative health pools are low, many Illuminate forces come with a shield to block damage. More importantly, these Shields can block overkill damage from explosive weapons, which means explosive crowd control weapons like the Obliterator Grenade Launcher or REC-6 Demolisher will require 2 explolsives to destroy any shielded unit.
- Destructible Projectiles: Both the Apprentice's paralysis orbs and various enemies' control inversion orbs can be shot out of the air before they hit anything.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Super Earth launching a pre-emptive strike against them in the First Galactic War due to their supposed stockpiling of WMDs is very obviously meant to draw a parallel between the casus belli cited as the reasoning behind the United States' invasion of Iraq in the Turn of the Millennium. Considering that in real life the claim that there were WMDs in Iraq was completely wrong, it also lends credence to the idea that Super Earth just wanted to give itself any justification, no matter how flimsy, to wage war on the Illuminate.
- Flash Step: Some of their units can execute a rapid shift from one position to another, complete with Speed Echoes.
- High-Tech Hexagons: While teleporting in, their units arrive with a blue, hexagonal outline. Obelisk walls also have hexagons coursing through them.
- A Lighter Shade of Black: While they have a sympathetic motivation of defending themselves from Super Earth's transparent attempt at stealing their technology under the pretense of them supposedly stockpiling WMDs and they may potentially have a more genuinely Democratic political system than Super Earth'snote , the Illuminates are also a heavily Darwinistic society who relegate those with less intelligence to undesirable positions and willingly supplicate themselves to the wills of hyper-intelligent supercomputers that they themselves created to run their society at maximum efficiency.
- Meaningful Name: "Illuminate" is an anglicized version of "Illuminatus", meaning "Enlightened One"note , reflecting how the Illuminates are a Proud Scholar Race with impossibly advanced nanotechnology who also look down upon the unintelligent in their ranks.
- Power Floats: The only units that don't explicitly levitate above the ground are the Tripods and Striders. Every other Illuminate touches the ground only when they're attacking or when they're dead.
- Punctuation Shaker: The name they use for themselves is "Squ'ith". Is it pronounced "Squith", "Squh-ith", "Skith", or something else entirely? Super Earth doesn't care and neither should you.
- Proud Scholar Race: Squ'ith culture prides itself heavily on its science and technology, especially its development of nanotechnology, and intelligence is held in very high regard amongst their people.
- Regenerating Shield, Static Health: Many of their units come equipped with an energy shield that will regenerate over time if the unit does not take damage for a certain amount of time. They range from a long thirty seconds for their beacons, to a real quick one second for their Council Members.
- The Social Darwinist: While the Illuminates don't believe that Might Makes Right, they do believe that mind does. As such, those with lower levels of intelligence who are unable to prove themselves as deserving to be a member of the higher echelons of Squ'ith society are labeled as Outcasts and given the dishonorable job of stealthily attacking enemies from melee.
- Space Elves: The Illuminates are an intentional composition of and throwback to numerous alien species across fiction that fit this mold, including the Eldar and the Protoss. They're a Proud Scholar Race with regenerating shields, nanotechnology which borders on magic, the ability to teleport directly onto the battlefield, etc.
- Weak, but Skilled: Of three Helldivers I factions, the Illuminates have the lowest stats, and none of their units require explicit Anti-Tank weapons or stratagems (even the Great Eye can be defeated with conventional bullets, if you have the skill and time.). However they also have the greatest amount of gimmicks and tricks to mess with Helldivers.
Observer
- Expy: They're basically Protoss Observers. They're used to detect enemies and come with personal cloaking. They're also lacking in any method of directly harming the enemy.
- Harmless Enemy: If they weren't able to call in Illuminate forces, they would possess absolutely zero danger to Helldivers. They can't attack at all, and will go down in a few bullets from even the peacemaker pistol.
- Patrolling Mook: Observers quickly patrol the field, and when they spot any Helldivers, they'll decloak, spin their fins for bit and sound the alarm.
Watcher
- Elite Mooks: They are essentially slightly stronger and more durable Observers.
Hunter
- Instakill Mook: Their electro-pulse gauntlets they wield are basically sniper rifles that can deliver an instant death to any Helldiver or lesser Illuminates in the way. The attack itself however is very clearly telegraphed and takes a while to charge up.
Apprentice
- Flash Step: If sufficiently damaged, Apprentices will pause very briefly, then rapidly shift to a different location, leaving behind Speed Echoes of themselves.
- The Paralyzer: They can charge up a purple orb and send it straightforward. Whatever the orb connects with will be slowed to basically a stop, but can still attack back. This orb can't slow down anything with a shield up, Helldiver or Illuminate.
Tripod
- Expy: Fittingly, the the main body of the Tripods and their spindly limbs take after a similar design to the war machines used by the Martians in War of the Worlds, particularly the 2005 film incarnation with its large optic and squid/mollusk-like design, albeit with a pearly-white chassis.
- Shock and Awe: They are equipped with short range lightning blasts. Multiple Tripods attacking a Helldiver can quickly shock them to death.
- Zerg Rush: What they lack in gimmicks, they make up for in bulk and numbers. Tripods will usually come at you in groups of 3-9 which seems small by the standards of the game, but due to coming with shields, they are deceptively beefier than they may first appear.
Strider
- Elite Mooks: They are stronger versions of Tripods
- Shock and Awe: Just like their lesser Tripod cousins, Striders attack with a short range lightning blast.
- Zerg Rush: Just like the Tripod in that they spawn in groups to overwhelm Helldivers. They can come in even greater numbers at high difficulty planets.
Outcast
- Expy: They're Protoss Dark Templars in all but name, being the resident melee-focused Stealthy Mooks of the resident Space Elves faction who are looked down upon by the elevated parts of their society.
- Klingon Scientists Get No Respect: Their Encyclopedia entry describes them as Squ'ith who tried and failed to become Apprentices, and as such are now treated with disdain by their own people for their lack of intelligence and nanotechnology acumen despite their competent fighting skill.
- Stealthy Mook: They're pretty hard to see until they're already too close and start tearing you to shreds.
- Zerg Rush: While they usually only spawn in small amounts to either catch you off guard, or present an immediate threat over more dangerous targets that take time to get into place, max difficulty planets may send a seemingly never ending stream of these guys at you whenever the alarm is raised. Due to how fast they move, you either hold your ground and cut them all down with gunfire, or they'll cut you down.
Obelisk
- Barrier Warrior: The Obelisk will attempt to target any Helldivers it has line of sight on by projecting a Nano-Wall that intersects with the Helldiver. When the wall fully materializes, it will Tele-Frag anything that is inside the wall. While harmless to touch afterwards, the Nano-Wall will block all weapons fire (including Illuminate Hunters) as well as Helldivers, but will let Illuminates (including the Illusionist and Council Member's deadly orbs) through.
- Heavily Armored Mook: A standout in the Illuminate forces for being the only one to actually have tank grade armor. Its armor is so heavy, that even anti-tank weapons don't even scratch its paint (for reference, the Bug Behemoth has an armor rating of 1,000-1,500 and the Cyborg IFV has an armor rating of 1,000-2,250. The Obelisk while closed has an armor rating of 8,000). In order to attack however, it must lower its armor, exposing the core within.
- Instakill Mook: Its Nano-Wall is capable of killing a Helldiver instantly if they're caught inside it when it fully solidifies.
Illusionist
- Cool Chair: They appear in a very nice chair to sit on.
- Elite Mooks: They are the higher echelons of the Illuminates and are stronger units, with homing orbs and very dense and hard to break shields.
- Interface Screw: They can confuse the Helldivers by reversing the controls of the player.
Council Member
- Boss in Mook Clothing: Council Members can tank a surprising amount of bullets on top of their quickly-regenerating shield, and they can invert everyone's control in a radius around themselves as opposed to just a projectile. If a Council Member appears during a mission, it's going to require your full attention for a few seconds, which can be pretty dangerous at the wrong moment (e.g. you're being swarmed by Striders and are cut off by Obelisk walls).
- Cool Chair: If you thought the Illusionists sat on some pretty nifty chairs, then the Council Member's chair makes theirs look pretty mundane. It'd be more accurate to say it's more of a Cool Throne.
- Elite Mooks: Council Members are even more elite versions of Illusionists with an even stronger and faster-regenerating shield.
- Front Line General: If the Monster Compendium is taken at face value and isn't propaganda, Council Members are high ranking politicians, if not outright the leaders of the Illuminate. Yet you can see groups of over 5 of them fighting Helldivers on the highest difficulties.
- Instakill Mook: Their orbs are much more deadly than an Illusionist's. They can instantly gib a Helldiver if direct contact is made.
- Interface Screw: They can release a mind control pulse that inverts your controls and aim.
Obsidian Observer
- Interface Screw: They have a mind control pulse similar to the Council Member, but it only lasts a mere three seconds to the Council Member's ten. It's notable in that it will cause you to aim opposite of its current position, so you have to aim behind yourself to kill them before they can sound the alarm. Even more threatening however is when you encounter them while you're fighting or running away from other Illuminates. Their mind control pulse can easily disrupt you at the worst times.
Great Eye
The Master of the Illuminates.
- The Computer Is Your Friend: Their Encyclopedia entry describes Great Eyes as powerful artificial intelligences created by the Illuminate to ensure maximum efficiency and co-operation amongst the Squ'ith populace. And it's definitely not A.I. Is a Crapshoot, as this appears to have been the intended outcome of placing the Great Eyes in charge. Super Earth intelligence also believes that they're in control of activating the Illuminates' WMDs, but that should probably be taken with a grain of salt.
- Bullet Hell: Especially compared to the other two Enemy Masters, the Great Eye relies less on area-of-effect attacks and wide bullet spreads and instead simply perpetually covers its entire arena in status-inflicting projectiles, which are luckily still destructible.
- Flash Step: If hit multiple times by anti-tank grade weapons or stratagems, the Great Eye can swiftly shift itself to the left or right to dodge any more incoming munitions.
- Flunky Boss: It is initially supported by Striders and Apprentices. As the fight drags on, Striders will be replaced by Outcasts and Apprentices with Illusionists.
- Immune to Bullets: Like the other Masters, the Great Eye can only be damaged with Anti-Tank Rounds.
- Interface Screw: It can fire a slew of the same projectiles that Illusionists fire which reverse your controls.
- Shows Damage: As the fight drags on, the Great Eye's sleek white armor plating will begin to get knocked off and show the exposed circuitry underneath.
- Wave-Motion Gun: From time to time, it will turn slightly to the side of a targeted Helldiver and then fire a powerful beam that it will sweep form one side ot the other. The beam can One-Hit Kill if it makes contact with a Helldiver, or any adds.
Helldivers II Enemy Factions
The Terminids
Generations of genetic experimentation and evolution have changed the original Bugs into what are now known as the Terminids. They're still mostly mindless beasts, but they have broken out of the E-710 farms, and are once again rampaging their way across the galaxy. While they have acquired a few more ranged attacks compared to their Bug ancestors, they're still very melee heavy. Keep your distance and you should be fine. In General
The evolutional step of the Bugs of the first game, they have lost all sense of self as their ancestor and now are little more than raging beasts that seek to kill and expand as much as they can.
- Allegorical Character: Like their Bug ancestors before them, the Terminids are mean to be physical representations of the lengths that expansionist governments will go to for the sake of maintaining access to precious resources. The satire present in II is a little more on the nose, though, as Super Earth willingly allowing the Terminids to breach containment so they can continue harvesting them can be closely paralleled with the deliberate destabilizations of regions like Iran by foreign governments for the sake of their own oil production.
- Ambiguously Evil: They're depicted in Super Earth propaganda as mindless killing machines, and they certainly come off as savage in combat. However, all of this aggression is directed at Super Earth, the same people who've been farming and killing them for over a century, if one can sneak up on them, they usually just harmlessly mill around until they detect the Helldiver. Additionally, it was implied that their ancestors were intelligent and peaceful, and it's unknown if they have retained any of this sapience, but some of their number do display a certain degree of cunning on the battlefield.
- Artificial Brilliance: In spite of relying on horde tactics, straightforward attack patterns and numbers advantages, Terminids will prioritize their targets appropriately. If a Helldiver places a sentry gun or a mortar nearby and stays in the area, Terminids will generally prefer to attack the stationary object mowing their numbers down before attending to the human even if they're actively shooting at them nearby. Similarly, Terminids will waste no time in disabling the Termicide Tower once they come back online and prepare to purge the area of their kind, with the whole nest promptly attacking the facility and focusing on active machinery so as long as a Helldiver isn't directly in their way. Chargers in particular will react to seeing sentry guns, hellbombs and mission-critical assets like a bull seeing red and promptly wind up a charge right into them instead of any players nearby.
- Hunters and Stalkers in particular display complete awareness of the players actions, with Hunters trying to juke the aim of anyone about to shoot them by dashing off to the side while other Hunters circle around for a flanking attack from the side, and Stalkers being uncannily patient and selective about their attacks, preferring to cloak away from sight and stalk around the edges of a firefight until someone turns their back long enough for it to leap from behind and butcher a Helldiver before retreating for another round.
- Determinator: Missing limbs and intense pain will do little to dissuade a Terminid from attacking a threat, as they will continue to fight on even once their legs and forearms have been blown off, they have giant gaping and bleeding wounds hanging off the sides of their bodies, and they will even attempt a blind charge before they lose all motor functions if their heads are blown apart.
- Enemy Mine: An In-Universe conspiracy theory has the Super Earth high command openly consider the possibility that the Terminids are, somehow, colluding with the Automatons through inter-galactic communications to provide them their new technologies that caught Helldivers by surprise. Note the lack of technology that Terminids employ, and the sheer distance between the Bug and Bot fronts.
- Evil Evolves: They're not the same as their bug ancestors, changing greatly due to years of accelerated evolution and deliberate genetic manipulation by Super Earth.
- Expy: As with the Bugs before them, the Terminids share a good bit of overlap and inspiration with the Arachnids from Starship Troopers, particularly their film incarnation, a race of Ambiguously Evil insectoid aliens who operate on a caste system of specialized bugs born for their roles. As a bonus, the Terminids sounds suspiciously close to the name of another invasive insectoid alien race, the Tyranids.
- Eyeless Face: Barring the Bile Titan and possibly Bile Spitters, if those aren't green sacs of bile at eye level, Terminids do not have eyes, or at least any visible enough to be useful for tunneling creatures.
- False Flag Operation: As alleged by rogue propaganda, it’s been said that the Terminid onslaught was deliberately started and perpetuated by Super Earth, likely by allowing Terminids to breach containment on a massive scale to give the public an enemy to rally against. Even ongoing extermination efforts happen to hold a dual purpose in their execution, with Super Earth command openly acknowledging that Termicide should exterminate the entire planet of most Terminids, but also induce mutations in the survivors who adapt and reproduce, and then flippantly moving on past that detail as if it’s not going to rebound into something even larger than the previous outbreak.
- Fantastic Caste System: Helldivers II goes into more elaborate detail about the role of individual Terminids within the greater collective population, retroactively shining some light on the castes of the Helldivers Bugs as well:
- Warrior Caste: This caste is the most numerous of all the castes, consisting of soldiers, workers, farmers, and even leaders. These are the Terminids' frontline Mooks. Warriors, Hive Guards, Elites and Brood Commanders belong to this caste.
- Hunter Caste: Known for their speed and agility, these Terminids are built for more specialized ambush and stealth roles. Hunters, Stalkers and probably Shadows belong to this caste.
- Hardshell Caste: Believed to be the primary burrowers of the Terminids, members of this caste can be easily recognized by their immense size and heavy exoskeleton plate armor. Tanks, Impalers, Chargers and Behemoths all belong to this caste.
- Bile Caste: The first (and so far only) caste to be introduced as a direct result of tampering with Terminid DNA. Members of this caste produce a green substance informally known as Bile, which is used to dissolve hard rocks while digging tunnels, as well as to deter or kill their prey and intruders. Any Terminid with "Bile" in its name belongs to this caste, including the mighty Bile Titans.
- Foil: The Terminids and Automatons are basically polar opposites in how they fight the Helldivers.
- The Terminids are Close-Range Combatant personified, with only two of their units (Bile Spewers and Bile Titans) being able to attack at range. And even those units prefer to get in close and personal to tear Helldivers apart in melee. Automatons meanwhile prefer to attack at a long distance with firearms, missiles, and artillery. They do have melee capabilities, but only three of their units (Berserkers, Brawlers and Scorcher Hulks) are dedicated melee, with the rest preferring to hang back and fire upon Helldivers.
- Terminids don't have any better strategy than mindlessly swarm over Helldiver positions, drowning them in sheer numbers until the Helldivers are overrun. The only units to display even some degree of tactics are Hunters and Stalkers, with the former side stepping and juking if they're being aimed at and the latter using proper Hit-and-Run Tactics and ambushing unaware Helldivers. Automatons display actual Artificial Brilliance, and will use well thought out strategies to attack Helldivers. For example, If Helldivers are behind cover, Automaton Troopers will throw grenades to flush them out. Terminids, aside from basic evasive maneuvers, will keep on stalking towards Helldivers no matter their advance.
- Terminids are biological in nature, and arrive to the battle via underground tunneling, breaching to the surface. Said breaches are also unstoppable once they start. Automatons are mechanical creations, and utilize Drop Ships to arrive from above. The Drop Ships are vulnerable to getting hit in one of their engines, causing it to crash and take out most of its cargo.
- Foreshadowing: The fact that the Helldivers have a ready supply on Terminids available as target practice, who all emerge from artificial nest tunnels in the Helldivers training facility, would be the first sign of what became of the Bugs after their war with humanity.
- Horde of Alien Locusts: Just like their predecessors, they will spread and devour until only they remain.
- Hostile Terraforming: Planets under particularly heavy Terminid infestations will have a thick fog of orange spore particles filling up the ground and even the lower atmosphere, obscuring the vision of vision of Helldivers on the ground until the local spore trees are taken out while also presumably making the environment ideal for Terminid life.
- No Blood for Phlebotinum: Super Earth is once again locked in a decidedly contrived resource war where the opponent is both the enemy and the resource. Super Earth barely conceals their intent to harvest E-710 from the Terminid population, calling in military assets to cull hordes of them and then promptly collecting all of the bio-fuel now available for easy pickings, which in turn fuels faster than light travel. This supply of oil is meant for both colonizers being sent planets under human development and for the much more pressing and unplanned war against the Automatons. The post-victory announcement after Operation Hell-Draco concluded outright states that complete Terminid eradication is not something Super Earth is wholly concerned about at the moment when such a lucrative opportunity is presenting itself.(Operation Prime Liberation briefing): With the TCS securing our citizens' lives, now we can secure their economic future, by culling the Terminid population and harvesting the E-710 they provide. Liberate Fori Prime and Zagon Prime.
(Operation Hell-Draco conclusion): The last of the crude solid E-710 has been collected, processed, and shipped off-planet, providing a healthy boost to our colony settlement effectors. The Planets can now be left behind to allow the Terminids to repopulate — under careful supervision. - Organic Technology: Every single thing they do will be derived from their own physiology. Their reinforcements are called via pheromones, their nests are partially defended with fauna that glows and leaks with a sickly amber tint, and Shriekers will emerge from very distinct and high rising nests built out of rock and unknown alien materials.
- "Psycho" Strings: Accompanying their battle theme, and evolved from their Bug predecessors Drums of War, is frequent usage of harsh sounding string instruments mixed with bombastic orchestral music, fitting for an enemy that rises like a tide from the ground to overwhelm and consume all in their way.
- Same Character, But Different: The Terminids are essentially the same faction as the Bugs from Helldivers (with "Terminid" —sort of— being retroactively introduced as the Bugs' scientific name), but a hundred years of genetic manipulation and selective breeding from Super Earth's factory-farms has put them on the evolutionary fast track toward developing many noticeable differences from their Bug ancestors, both in behavior and appearance.
- Turned Against Their Masters: They were essentially livestock for Super Earth before they started breaking out and attacking their captors.
- Zerg Rush: They can and will swarm over Helldivers in the hundreds if they are alerted to Helldiver presence.
Scavengers/Bile Spitters/Pouncers
The most common forms of bugs, these little critters are dangerous solely through numbers; a quick burst from any weapon is more than enough to put them down. But you can bet that where there's one, there's more, and not silencing them quickly will result in the arrival of more threatening Terminids.
- Enemy Summoner: Beware their chirping pheromone-release dance, as it signals an imminent Bug Breach.
- The Goomba: Small, awkwardly sluggish when on foot and sporting fat bodies with a large center of mass, they're very easy to take down, but can be massive drain on ammo with their sheer numbers. On top of that, they can also release pheromones that summons reinforcements, meaning you can't just simply avoid them once they see you.
- In a Single Bound: Pouncers look much like regular Scavs, but have a stubby pair of wings that let them leap long distances. They use this to jump into close range so they can bite your kneecaps off.
- Super Spit: The Bile Spitter variant that can appear at medium and higher difficulties adds a ranged spit attack to their repertoire. Whilst it does very little damage (even to the lightest armours) getting hit by it will slow you and make you easier prey for the many other, more dangerous bugs that are likely to be around.
Warriors
- Desperation Attack: If killed with a head shot, the Warrior's body will continue attacking for a couple seconds before finally succumbing.
- Mooks: They're the standard "low threat by itself, but is rarely by itself" enemy. Warriors can take a few good hits, and can hit decently hard, but are primarily there to distract you from more dangerous threats like Hunters or Chargers.
- Same Character, But Different: Terminid Warriors don't look anything like Bug Warriors (for starters, Bug Warriors can walk upright), but they fulfill an identical role as relatively easily-dispatched Mooks.
Hive Guards
- Heavily Armored Mook: About the same size as Warriors, but their head and leg plates are medium armour grade, making them fairly resistant to direct fire.
Hunter
One of the more sneaky Terminid forms around, Hunters prefer to flank their targets rather than attack head-on.
- Glass Cannon: They hit hard, but will die if so much as a five round burst from an assault rifle hits them in center of mass.
- Knockback: Their primary threat is the way they knock Helldivers about, wasting valuable seconds against a foe where remaining fast on one's feet is the most important way to stay alive.
- In a Single Bound: The bigger, bitier brethren of Pouncers, Hunters can leap in much the same way. They also like to skitter sideways and hop around if you're aiming right at them.
- Status Infliction Attack: Their bites apply bile on higher difficulties, drastically slowing the afflicted Helldiver for a few seconds.
Stalker
They're back! And they're meaner! Terminid Stalkers are bigger, tougher, and capable of making short work of unprepared Helldivers. To offset this fact, they generally only appear in missions that have actively generated Stalker Lairs, and they can be put down for good (well, for that mission) by destroying all of the nests.
- Deadly Lunge: Their primary attack that they always open up with, breaking from stealth to lash at a Helldiver with a tackling tongue-lash that flings their target some distance and makes them vulnerable for a follow-up attack while they're downed.
- In the Back: They’re very selective about their attacks, frequently lunging at a Helldiver from behind or from the sides if they can navigate around them.
- Lightning Bruiser: Stalkers are very nimble and quick on their feet, and unlike Hunters they won't go down to a couple bullets, requiring roughly a magazines worth of small arms fire to take them down without the appropriate armor piercing bullets to their head or well aimed shotgun blasts, which is easier said than done with how fast they can move and while fending off other Terminids throwing your aim off.
- Punched Across the Room: They frequently attack from surprising ranges with a tongue-whip attack that sends Helldivers tumbling and skidding for comical distances.
- Respawning Enemies: A Stalker nest will never stop releasing more of them into the battlefield, meaning that killing the one or two Stalkers who have been menacing you only buys you a few minutes at most until you can track down where they're coming from. Said nests are distinctly larger than average bug holes and are covered in a sort of amber silk to make identifying them easier.
- Super-Senses: Stalkers have such keen keen senses that sneaking around one is close to impossible, let alone running far enough away to escape, as any noise a Helldiver generates just by moving is enough to draw their attention from a large distance away. Once they’ve chosen you as their target, you have to kill them or they’ll just keep returning for more.
- Took a Level in Badass: While they no longer heal over time, they're no longer complete pushovers and Ineffectual Loners. They are more than capable of taking down a Helldiver by themselves if they can get the drop on them. They got a much higher healthpool, some extra armor, hit a lot harder, and can even potentially One-Hit Kill a Helldiver by knocking them around with their tongues and letting physics do the work.
- Same Character, But Different: Downplayed relative to many other examples in II. Terminid Stalkers look mostly similar to Bug Stalkers and fulfill the exact same role in cambat with some minor tweaks to accomodate for II's gameplay. The biggest notable differences between the two is that Terminid Stalkers look like slightly less of a Slaying Mantis than their ancestors and they're much more dangerous on their own.
- Stealthy Mook: They can turn invisible, which while rather conspicuous, prevents them from being tagged.
- Visible Invisibility: Like their predecessors, they can turn invisible. They're very conspicuous despite it (being very easy to spot, even at long distance), but they can't be tagged whilst they're invisible and they’re just subtle enough to slip by your peripheral vision from a distance in the heat of battle.
Shriekers
Bugs don't fly. Except for these ones, these ones fly. Much like Stalkers, these bugs will defend the area surrounding their nests once Helldivers approach and can permanently be eliminated from a mission by destroying their nests, but their advantage of flight can make them incredibly dangerous and unpredictable foes who can strike at the worst possible moments.
- Airborne Mook: The flying unit of the Terminid faction. They have low health, but move fast and their swooping attacks can hit hard and if they're killed while doing so, their entire dead body will act as a deadly projectile.
- Boom, Headshot!: It's not unlikely that their dives toward Helldivers will inflict this upon them, as attacking a human being from above is liable to cause.
- Double Think: As demonstrated in supplementary material outside of the main game, where the developers speak in character as Super Earth officials on social media, the existence of flying Terminid sightings was largely discredited as a myth meant to lower troop morale up until Shriekers began to appear with such frequency that they became impossible to not notice, at which point the Ministry claims that they always believed that flying bugs have existed and should be dealt with.
- Glass Cannon: Shriekers are as dangerous as they are fragile, even a glancing blow from most shotguns can knock them out of the sky, provided you can hit them of course.
- Taking You with Me: Their corpses are capable of delivering One-Hit Kill due to how fast they move. Shriekers have a nasty tendency to get kills from beyond the grave by ragdolling into Helldivers they're targeting. When facing an incoming Shrieker, be sure to dive out of the way of its corpse or side step then shoot the Shrieker as it passes by.
Bile/Nursing Spewers
- Action Bomb: Dealing too much damage to their bloated abdomens will cause them to explode in a tight but nonetheless deadly acidic blast.
- Boom, Headshot!: Nailing them in the head is the quickest way to kill them, unlike Warriors and Brood Commanders who can survive without their head for a good bit. It's also much easier to kill them with headshots than to attack their big, bloated rears.
- Breath Weapon: Their primary form of attack is to vomit up a spray of viscous, vicious acids that can melt flesh from bone in milliseconds. At higher difficulties, they can also lob it indirectly from their abdomens.
- Death from Above: Bile Spewers will often stick their rears into the air to rain death down on you and your squad. Keep your eyes on the sky for green bile mortars lest you be killed on impact.
- Ominous Fog: Nursing Spewers generate a dense, persistent, low-level fog in an area around them, which can betray their presence to the cautious Helldiver (and mask the movements of smaller Terminids, like Scavengers).
- One-Hit Kill: Getting too close one of these means getting murdered in one spew of their acid that even attempts to dive away from will fail to save the Helldiver. Even on some of the easier difficulties which prevents a lot of other enemies from spawning, Spewers will be around as a threat for players to watch out for.
Brood Commander
Functioning much like their previous incarnations, Brood Commanders are mid-size Elites that, like their predecessors, can go into a last-ditch frenzy when decapitated.
- Armored But Frail: They sport a noticeable amount of armor on their heads and bodies that can withstand magazines-worth of small arms fire, but their arms and legs are so poorly armored that these are their advisable weak spots to target in order to kill them swiftly, or at the very least as a way to literally disarm them.
- The Berserker: Brood Commanders fight harder and move faster the closer they are to death. Even removing their legs, which would usually slow down other Terminids will barely hinder them from rapidly dragging their body over to Helldivers to hack them into pieces.
- Discard and Draw: Compared to their Bug ancestors, Terminid Brood Commanders trade their large health pool and poisonous strikes for a more modest (but nowhere near fragile) health pool, the ability to summon a small group of warriors, the ability to call in an actual bug breach, and a Foe-Tossing Charge borrowed from the Charger that can leave Helldivers hit by it concussed.
- Elite Mook: Compared to most other Terminid units, the Brood Commander has a much broader repertoire of abilities it can use, and has a much more distinguished profile compared to the Warriors it bears a resemblance to. While they're no Bile Titan or Charger, a Brood Commander's ability to summon more Warriors and Hive Guards to the field independent of bug breaches makes them dangerous in attrition battles, their ram can concuss any Helldivers hit, and their ability to continue to fight after losing their head makes them plenty dangerous.
- Enemy Summoner: They can signal for Warriors to appear independent of any ongoing Breaches.
- Last Ditch Move: Brood Commanders that have their head destroyed may attempt to do one of several things before expiring:
- Summon a bug breach.
- Summon a group of Warriors or Hive Guards.
- Rush forward and perform one final flurry of melee attacks.
- Same Character, But Different: Terminid Brood Commanders look very dissimilar to Bug Brood Commanders, but they both share combat roles as Elite Mooks and The Berserker. In fact, Terminid Brood Commanders actually possess Enemy Summoner abilities that line up with how Brood Commanders are described as the equivalent of generals in the Bug army in the first game's Enyclopedia despite them not demonstrating any behavior like that in gameplay.
Charger
A lumbering, heavily armored beast with a meter-thick exoskeleton over much of its body. It slowly builds up speed into a devastating charge that lends it its name. Supremely indifferent to small-arms fire, it serves as a boss on lower difficulties, but is eventually downgraded to a regularly-spawning threat on higher difficulties.
- Armored But Frail: Their entire bodies are heavily armored to the point where many weapons either just bounce off or deal greatly reduced damage, with abdominal shots still taking a long time to down them. However, a Charger's health under their head armor or leg armor is rather low, and if a Helldiver can blast through their head with strong enough armor-piercing weapons or shoot off the leg armor and attack the exposed leg with a few rounds from small arms, they go down fast.
- Boom, Headshot!: Later patches significantly reduced their head health, making it possible to decapitate them with a single shot from a heavy armour-piercing weapon like a recoilless rifle or expendable anti-tank launcher. Thankfully, unlike other Terminids, this does instantly kill them.
- Bullfight Boss: The Charger's MO is to pick out a Helldiver as a target and run full-tilt at them, hoping to either ram them or trample them underfoot. Unlike other examples the Charger is capable of tracking its target as it moves, but a well-timed sprint or dodge will allow the would-be target to let it pass and get in a few shots at its fleshy abdomen before it reorients for the next rush. Alternatively, brave Helldivers with armor-piercing or explosive weapons can stand their ground and attempt a headshot.
- Heavily Armored Mook: The armor on its head and forelimbs is extreme, but the flesh beneath is its actual weakness. With a carefully placed recoilless rifle round or expendable anti-tank rocket to its front legs, Helldivers will find that small arms directed at the newly-created vulnerability drops the massive creature in a few casually placed rounds. This can be circumvented entirely with the aforementioned weapons being applied directly to the top of its head (which will kill it outright).
- Finishing Stomp: When it's at a standstill, it delivers the coup de grâce to any Helldivers who find themselves underfoot with a sharp and very heavy stomp — anyone knocked prone by its charge or still lying from a successful dodge need to scramble to their feet in short order.
- Foe-Tossing Charge: It's in the name. If a Helldiver is in the way of a Charger's charge, they'll usually be knocked aside with a damaged limb, if not outright killed by the Charger itself, or ragdoll physics.
- Lightning Bruiser: Writ very, very large. Lacking in maneuverability but not in speed, its charge stuns and partially blinds Helldivers that it hits. Avoiding this with a carefully timed lateral sprint or dive is the only real option when one has its attention. Rather than being mostly resistant like the majority of Terminid carapace, the armor of its front-facing body is entirely immune to things like shotguns and rifles, with stray bullets and buckshot visibly bouncing off at odd angles. From behind, its abdomen is largely unarmored, but still a seriously beefy target. If you're a professional matador, or brave enough to try, you can also bait a Charger into ramming itself into a bug nest. This will simultaneously destroy the nest entrance and kill the Charger.
- Logical Weakness: With the heavy armor over most of its body, its large front legs are a significant weakness — sufficient armor-piercing weapons against its front legs will peel off its armor and leave the leg vulnerable which will allow Helldivers to quickly collapse and kill them (or even shooting the leg off entirely from behind it) because its remaining legs can't hope to support its weight.
- Same Character, But Different: Chargers fulfill the exact same role as Bug Tanks and Behemoths, and even have the weak exposed backside that Tanks do.
Bile Titan
- Breath Weapon: If the name wasn't a hint; they, like Bile Spewers, primarily attack by barfing all over things. They just have a height advantage.
- Feed It a Bomb: While its armored head usually takes at least two direct strikes from man-portable explosives (like the EAT-17 or the Recoilless Rifle) to decapitate, it's possible for a skilled Helldiver to one-shot a Bile Titan by firing the rocket straight into its open mouth. Do note that since this usually means the firer is in range of the Titan's deadly bile vomit, chances are high that this will end as a Mutual Kill.
- Giant Mook: By far the largest Terminid enemy in the game at launch day, Bile Titans loom over every other unit and take full advantage of the second game's shift in perspective to be terrifying opponents.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Any unfortunate Helldiver (or Terminid!) that has the misfortune of ending up at point blank range of a Bile Titan may receive a very massive and sharp leg through their body. Bile Titans have two melee attacks, a single stab with their right leg, and a longer multi-stab with both legs.
- Lightning Bruiser: Despite their lumbering gait, their massive size means they merely keep up with Helldivers and their fellow bugs and have the prodigious endurance to match. Even when its not showering you with its signature bile, being stepped on by one of these things is equivalent to getting struck by lightning, as in you die. On top of that, their chitinous armor is ridiculously resilient to most weapons, and even with the right tools it's not uncommon to see Bile Titans stand in the epicenter of an airstrike or get pelted with multiple rockets and keep walking.
- Logical Weakness: With their large height, length and lack of a particularly-flexible neck, Bile Titans can't actually target Helldivers directly below the center of their body very well. Of course, there's probably enough other angry bugs to make it tasking for a Helldiver to stay under a Bile Titan for any significant amount of time, and a Helldiver who stays under a Bile Titan to actually kill it will then have to quickly flee to avoid getting crushed.
- Monster Is a Mommy: Bile Titans likely have a matriarchal relationship with their local Terminid hives, with them often appearing from the ground for battle once an objective has been completed by Helldivers. Said objectives most commonly involve destroying key passageways into a Terminid hive, killing a large number of Terminids, and breaching nest defenses to shooting up egg clutches, AKA doing anything that would disrupt a nest and send any parent/queen/guardian into a frenzy. In the intro cinematic, one can observe what appears to be a Bile Titan communicating with/doting over some Warriors who are looking up at it before the Titans head is blown up by a rocket, confusing and shocking all of the gathered Terminids who watched it die.
- Subsystem Damage: The two green sacks on its underside can be destroyed to damage the Bile Titan slightly, and prevent it from using its bile spew attack. Do be aware it's still fully capable of killing you with its legs.
- Taking You with Me: Bile Titans are so huge and heavy that you need to be a healthy distance away from one as they die, as their bodies and legs will crush anyone caught in their way.
- Unfriendly Fire: Bile Titans can do more harm than good for the Terminids with their bile barfing. When they vomit their bile, any Terminids chasing the target Helldiver will usually end up blasted away. To say nothing of Chargers getting caught by their stabbing legs.
The Automatons
Socialist, Scary and Sadistic, The Automatons are creations of the Cyborgs, hell bent on kidnapping Super Earth's babies and strongly opposing managed democracy. Supposedly, they seek to free their masters from the prosperous mines on Cyberstan, but that's just their excuse to sow terror among Super Earth's population!
In General
"CYBERSTAN! CAN'T KEEP HER DOWN!"
The Automatons are a faction composed of scary looking robots made by the Cyborgs. They are making an incursion on human territory and in response, Super Earth is sending their Helldivers to take care of the Automatons and retake the lost territory.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Played with. The Automatons sure seem like an endless army of human-loathing robots prone to corpse desecration...but listening to some broadcasts will reveal they were built by the Cyborgs, and are trying to free their creators from Super Earth's oppression. Their spite is more of a focused Pay Evil unto Evil stance, making them antagonistic sentient machines as opposed to rogue ones.
- Ambiguous Robots: While the sentience of the Automatons can only be denied by those fully hooked on Super Earth propaganda, it's still left very up in the air whether they're "descended" from the Cyborgs in a natural, organic sense or in the sense that the famously Posthumanist Cyborgs created fully artificial robotic lifeforms from the ground up as their "descendants". Not helping matters is that certain Automaton units have innards which look suspiciously visceral and organic.
- Anti-Villain: The Automatons are ultimately driven by their desire to liberate their Cyborg creators from the forced labor camps Super Earth has been holding them in for a century. Exactly where they fall on the sympathy scale is contingent on how justified their unquestionably brutal methods are, but considering Super Earth blatantly seeks to destroy or subjugate everyone and everything not already under their control, it's hard to say they're not Properly Paranoid.
- A-Team Firing: Automatons are normally deadly-accurate, but fortunately for the Helldivers, shooting in their direction (not even necessarily hitting them) will cause their accuracy to greatly degrade.
- Avenging the Villain: The Automatons seek to avenge the defeat and imprisonment of their creators, the Cyborgs, as well as free them from Super Earth's imprisonment. The Cyborgs are supposedly all now slaving away in the mines of Cyberstan, according to Super Earth propaganda. That said, now that Cyberstan has been seized by the Automatons, the fate of the remaining Cyborgs remains to be seen.
- Battle Chant: When patrolling, Automatons like to sound off a guttural and punctuated marching song."HEART! STEEL! WE! KILL! IRON! WILL! ON TO WAR!"
- Blatant Lies: Up until the Automatons swept the Valdis sector and began their Reclamation of Cyberstan, Super Earth intelligence vehemently denied that the Automatons were in any way related to the Cyborgs from the first game, despite how they have near-identical iconography, their war chants mentioning Cyberstan and how they share multiple units with the Cyborgs, such as Hulks.
- Boom, Headshot!: Unlike the Terminids, of which the tougher variants have armored heads, pretty much every Automaton enemy is always vulnerable to being shot in the head, save for the Tanks, Factory Strider, or Drop Ship, which are fully-enclosed vehicles that provide no head to shoot at. This means a lot of materiel for Anti-Materiel Rifles to work their magic on.
- "Bringer of War" Music: The Automaton combat theme uses heavy drones, war drums and trumpets to suit an army marching out to war. Their battle theme will also evolve depending on how dire the situation gets for Helldivers, with a skirmish against a handful of Troopers and Scouts being accompanied by a low yet persistent drone and drums, Devastator and Hulk reinforcements being introduced with trumpets, and walking calamities such as Factory Striders entering an active battle or an inconceivably impossible amount of enemy reinforcements dropping in with a chorus evocative of the Soviet national anthem.
- Catchphrase Insult: As a lingering inheritance of their ancestors, "Scum" is one of the few words they clearly enunciate — a word present in roughly half of their combat vocalizations.
- Chicken Walker: This is most obvious with their Scout Striders, but virtually all of their walking units have digitigrade legs. This tends to stand out with the Troopers who have an otherwise fairly humanoid silhouette.
- Corpse Land: Unlike the battlefields of the Terminids, who likely ate most human remains, Automaton territories are littered with human and bot remains alike, ranging between rocky trenches and craters peppered with dead SEAF troops and fallen robots to strung up human-scarecrows around their forward operating bases. In the largest of their bases, one can see large cages filled with dead troops and civilians alike, operating tables where people have been torn in half or have had invasive cranial surgery performed on them, corners where the dead were tossed aside into and even shipping containers with open lids where heaps of dead humans were neatly thrown into like garbage, presumably for later disposal.
- Cranial Processing Unit: All of their humanoid forces can be killed quickly by hitting them in the head. Even the Hulk can only take (relatively) little punishment to its eye visor before blowing up.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: In-Universe and going both ways. The initial combat operations on Malevelon Creek went so poorly for Super Earth that the Automatons were able to evict humanity from the planet and establish complete control. Weeks later, in response to the shattered morale and continuous controversy among Helldivers still in the planets orbit unwilling to admit defeat, Super Earth gave the order to liberate Malevelon Creek once and for all in spite of the planet's irrelevancy to current operations. The subsequent battles that took place over the course of a day, against an entirely fortified Automaton planet no less, went decisively in Super Earth's favor, earning the Federation much of its lost pride back, avenging millions of fallen humans and marking April 3rd as a day of remembrance where citizens honor the dead by standing for three minutes in silence during their lunch breaks.Several weeks ago, our citizens watched in horror as Malevelon Creek fell to the Automatons. Millions of valiant heroes perished attempting to defend it. For too long, the bots have maintained their illegal occupation, desecrating the memory of the fallen by rapidly depleting the planet's exceptionally rich rhodium deposits. This travesty will be allowed no longer. Take vengeance for the fallen. Honour our heroes. End the theft of valuable minerals. Liberate Malevelon.
- Cyborg: Possibly implied, and unsurprising given who their makers were. That every enemy variant is humanoid in shape with a shared weak spot to their head (which is abnormal given their otherwise purely mechanical nature), their uncharacteristically eager thirst for battle and their tactical prowess, that they're somehow vulnerable to suppressive fire in spite of being said to be heartless machines, and when combined with evidence of capture humans in cages and victims with their bodies intact save for a surgically opened head implies that those taken alive by the Automatons are used to bolster their numbers.
- Defeat Equals Explosion: A lot of their units and buildings tend to blow up spectacularly when destroyed. Hulk sniped in the head with a railgun? Kaboom. Emplaced turret or tank took one too many grenades to its rear vents? Kaboom. Fabricator got a grenade tossed into one of its vents? Big kaboom. Dropship downed by a recoilless round to its engine? Really big kaboom. Air tower got sabotaged? Extremely big kaboom.
- Early Game Hell: Terminids attack with straightforward tactics and have big obvious weak spots most weapons can hit while hip firing, with the only real concern early players have is learning how to always be on the move and how to dodge attacks once the nest is roused. Automatons however will attack with military precision, flamethrowers, explosives, suppressive fire, artillery and they'll liberally deploy heavy armor with stingy weak spots that require precision under pressure to hit. The difference is night and day for players who decide to attack the Automatons first with just their starting equipment and experience rather than sticking with Terminids after the tutorial — remember to Take Cover!.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Camaraderie among the Automaton ranks is so deep that intercepted transmissions shows that they mourn the loss of their scrapped kin and swear vengeance upon Super Earth after Operation Swift Disassembly failed to achieve a decisive victory.The Automatons have retained Tibit, and its manufacturing facilities. Reports indicate they have already begun increasing production elsewhere. Intercepted bot chatter includes expressions of great sorrow for the "murder" of in-development bots — a transparent attempt at disinformation, as bots can neither feel nor be considered alive. However, the simulated oaths of vengeance may indicate actual strategic intent. A counteroffensive is likely.
- Evil Sounds Raspy: Automatons have an extremely distorted and deep vocal register, not unlike the Cyborgs.
- Evil Tower of Ominousness: Tall, dark, and imposing are staples of Automaton base architecture. In particular, Gunship Factories resemble monolithic slab-like skyscrapers, while Detector Towers often go by the
Fan Nickname of "Eyes of Sauron" for their resemblance to the film depiction of Barad-Dur. Even their regular Fabricator complexes often feature tall pylons, some of which may be topped by heavy gun turrets. - Flare Gun: Like the Cyborgs, the Automatons' basic infantry can call for reinforcements by shooting a (red) flare up into the air. Commissars will do so first while still alive, but the other kinds are also capable of doing so unless interrupted from being shot.
- Foreshadowing: Early battles during Operation Swift Disassembly hint at the possibility of the Automatons maintaining extra-galactic communication with another force, who are possibly supplying them with the means to build war machines given that the blueprints for the then-unseen Gunship were decoded in those messages. It's later revealed that they were a scouting force communicating with the main Automaton fleet, who launched a massive counteroffensive to retake Cyberstan on behalf of their Cyborg masters.The Automaton Comms Array on Troost has been decommissioned. Strangely, it appears to have been broadcasting outside the Galactic Frontier. Analysts are working to determine more, but much data was already deleted.(…)
- Just a Machine: Super Earth's official party line is that the Automatons are nothing more than mindless killing machines that are merely following preprogrammed instructions and are incapable of feeling true emotions or empathy. The truth is a little more ambiguous.
- A Lighter Shade of Black: The Automatons started their war by wiping out a number of mostly defenseless colonies, are heavily implied to forcibly convert prisoners into more automaton soldiers, and apparently routinely torture captured humans in sacrificial temples. Also, they may kidnap babies. Compared to Super Earth, they're practically saints of human rights, and their supposed motivation to save their creators is infinitely more sympathetic than any casus belli Super Earth has ever used.
- Meatsack Robot:
Word of God reveals that some of the Automatons kidnap civilians to turn them into more Automatons and send them to fight the Helldivers. It is unknown if all Automatons have a fleshy interior or just the ones that are made from civilians. - Mecha-Mooks: Intentionally left ambiguous. It's not made expressly clear whether the Automatons are wholly robotic or whether they're posthumanist Full Conversion Cyborgs like their ancestors on Cyberstan.
- Mechanical Lifeform: They, as a whole, can be considered as the descendants of the Cyborgs, and they are race of robots trying to take over Cyberstan.
- Mechanical Abomination: At least, that is what Super Earth is trying to sell to its citizens. While yes, they look scary, chant battle cries with their raspy voice and are trying to take worlds by force, they are implied to be actually nicer than what Super Earth is telling.
- Mondegreen: Their marching chants are guttural, distorted, and electronic, and so fairly open to interpretation as to what they're saying exactly.
- Morale Mechanic: Automatons react not unlike real people do from being shot at — which is to say, their accuracy will be totaled from the stress of being under attack. A group of Automatons meeting a Helldiver out in the open will gun them down in moments, but simply shooting in the direction of those Automatons will cause them to be afflicted with A-Team Firing. Of course, given this seems to go both ways, it can be a little hard to effectively suppress something like a Heavy Devastator when it is also suppressing you.
- More Dakka: Unlike the Terminids, the Automatons primarily shoot back against Helldivers, with only a few dedicated melee units thrown in to distract Helldivers. Even some of their lightest infantry can pack fast firing machine guns. To say nothing of their outposts with manned turrets or command bunkers that are basically fortresses with tons of guns on them.
- Not Quite Dead: Turns out that the Automatons defeated in Malevelon Creek was a vanguard group of Automatons and they are back for a counteroffensive after being thought they were all killed.
- Occupiers Out of Our Country: The Automatons are motivated primarily for the liberation of the Cyborgs, one of the factions of the first game and their creators, who are being enslaved by Super Earth to do endless labour in Cyberstan. To say the Automatons are furious about this and want the liberation of the Cyborgs at all cost is a massive understatement.
- Red and Black and Evil All Over: Much like their Cyborg forefathers, Automaton units and structures are primarily dark grey or black, with red highlights.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: They have glowing red eyes. When alerted to Helldiver activity, their eyes shine a flashlight cone to indicate that they are suspicious of, but have not confirmed active Helldiver presence.
- Robot War: 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 Forever War.
- SkeleBot 9000: Several Automaton units have a broadly skeletal appearance. Troopers and Commissars tend to look the most conventionally human, while Berserkers and Devastators have grotesquely exaggerated proportions, presumably to amplify the intimidation factor.
- Skull for a Head: Nearly every Automaton ground unit sports a head designed to evoke the image of a human skull.
- Sigil Spam: Almost all of their buildings and even some of their units bear the Automaton insignia, consisting of a black Cyborg insignia from the first game inside a white-and-black gear on a red field, which simultaneously manages to look as Communistic as their ancestors' imagery and also resemble the flag of the Nazi Party.
- Sociopathic Soldier: The Battle Chant above shows a disturbing eagerness to fight and die if it means taking the Helldivers with them, and there are morbid battle trophies often found around Automaton bases.
- Taking You with Me: A lot of the Automatons' larger units will explode after defeated. Any Helldivers who stay too close and get caught in the blast will be easily killed.
- Terminator Impersonator: Much as both the Helldivers and the Terminids are obviously inspired by Starship Troopers, the Automatons take clear inspiration from the Skynet-manufactured robots of the Terminator franchise, with their skeletal humanoid frames and copious amounts of laser-based weaponry.
- Those Were Only Their Scouts: The Automatons who attacked the western front had managed to give Super Earth alot of trouble before they were destroyed. After their destruction however, it was revealed that they were only the vanguards of the main Automaton fleet, who are ten times larger and made their existence known by attacking Cyberstan and its surrounding systems.
- Unfriendly Fire: Automatons, especially Devastators, can often end up shooting each other in the back if they're clumped up. Scorcher Hulks also have no problems torching Berserkers that are in between them and a Helldiver. They don't seem to care about friendly fire one bit if it means getting a chance to kill a Helldiver.
- The Unintelligible: Unlike the completely foreign and unparseable language of their Cyborg forefathers, They can clearly converse in English, but their voices are so garbled and distorted that it's near impossible to actually make out what they're saying most of the time. They sound like an old dial-up computer having an anger induced heart attack.
- Unwilling Roboticization: All but outright stated, but still intentionally left ambiguous in keeping with the Ambiguous Robots nature of the Automatons. The amount of corpses and dead Helldivers found in cages and strewn on the ground across Automaton worlds suggests that they harvest organic matter from Super Earth's military and civilians in order to bolster their own ranks by creating new Automatons using the corpses of their enemies.
- Vehicular Assault: Especially at higher difficulties, Automaton forces tend to include heavily armed and armored fighting vehicles like Hulks, Striders, and Tanks. Though fighting them head-on ranges from "daunting" to "suicidal," Helldiver teams can even the odds through careful use of terrain, tactics, and hard-hitting stratagems.
Troopers
- Close-Range Combatant: The Brawler is essentially a budget Berserker, sharing the same role of singlemindedly rushing into melee combat against Helldivers to chop them up or flush them out of cover to make them easier targets for their comrades. Unlike their tankier cousins, Brawlers are Fragile Speedsters who are just as vulnerable to small arms fire as any other Trooper variant. Assault Raiders also like to get in close and personal with their jet packs, and shank you. It's advised to shoot their legs or melee them, unless you want to explode yourself with the Assault Raider.
- Defeat Equals Explosion: Assault raiders' packs are liable to cook off in a deadly explosion when they're destroyed — given their Close-Range Combatant status and how good their packs are at placing them right next to Helldivers, this frequently turns them into unintentional Action Bombs. This can be turned against the Automatons though, as those detonating packs don't pick sides; blowing up an assault raider in the middle of a tight cluster can potentially score a quick multikill.
- Enemy Summoner: If there are no Commissars present, Troopers of any variant may reluctantly attempt to call in reinforcements, though not with the sheer quickdraw speed that Commissars have on higher difficulties.
- Jump Jet Pack: Assault Raiders have jetpacks that don't allow for sustained flight, but instead allow them to perform long-distance jumps to get close with Helldivers. These also explode when the Assault Raider goes down, which can take out any unlucky Helldivers close enough.
- More Dakka: The MG Raider doesn't try to maneuver or approach much compared to the other Troopers, but it does shower any Helldivers (or even their last known location) in blistering laser fire.
- One-Hit Kill: Rocket Raiders take their sweet time to line up a shot on any Helldivers, and can easily be delayed or have their aim spoiled by even mild suppressive fire, but the rocket itself used to be likely the first instantly fatal attack a new player is likely to encounter. However, this was a bug due to the rockets unintentionally hitting a player multiple times as once, so this is no longer the case unless the rocket gets lucky enough to Boom, Headshot! the player.
- Taking You with Me: Many Helldivers that managed to shoot down an Assault Raider while it's jet-packing in the air toward them did not live to regret doing so after said packs exploded while their corpse fell toward to the Helldiver.
Commissar
HEART! STEEL! WE! KILL!
A less common Automaton trooper that uses a ranged weapon and a blade at the same time. Its main threat is its ability and willingness to call in dropships.
- Enemy Summoner: An extreme priority target — they typically attempt to call in reinforcements via signal flare immediately on making visual contact with the Helldivers. If they're not gunned down quickly enough, expect to see a dropship real soon.
- Kill It with Fire: On higher difficulties, they may also attempt to use their flare gun to kill Helldivers directly.
- Same Character, But Different: Commissars fulfill the same primary role as Cyborg Squadleader Soldiers, being able to summon loads of reinforcements with a Flare Gun. The main difference is that Squadleader Soldiers have an arm-mounted grenade launcher whereas Commissars are more lightly-armed along the lines of Troopers.
- Sound Off: They lead patrols of Automatons, and if a sharp-eared Helldiver gets close enough without attracting their attention, can be heard leading their marching cadences as well.
- Sword and Gun: They wield an energy pistol in their right hand, and have a blade as their left hand. While they do prefer to stay at a distance and shoot, they're perfectly capable of engaging Helldivers in melee.
Scout Strider
A frontally-armored Automaton walker with an open cockpit, manned by a trooper. It has a rapid-firing double-barreled ranged weapon that can put out a significant volume of fire for its comparatively low threat level.
- Abandon Ship: If the strider is destroyed but the pilot hasn't been damaged, it will abandon the strider and continue to fight on.
- Artificial Stupidity: Scout Striders are considered medium-class units, and may thus induce a frustrating degree of artificial stupidity in the orbital railcannon strike as it may elect to target them over higher priority armoured enemies like Hulks or Tanks, depending on where the beacon lands.
- In a likely case of deliberate behavior being programmed for game balancing, Striders normally turn and track toward a Helldiver in view very well, but can easily lose their targets if they get too close and veer off to their flanks, causing the pilot to clumsily reset their positioning and try to find the player again. This is fortunate for the Helldiver able to run past its cannons, allowing them easily shoot the pilot in the back while they’re disoriented.
- Attack Its Weak Point: Its fragile pilot is exposed from every direction besides the front and below. Its leg joints and the 'hip' module meanwhile can be taken out much easier compared to the armored shield on top, being vulnerable to medium-AP weapons such as the standard machinegun.
- Expy: They're conspicuously based off the Imperial AT-ST, a bipedal mech with digitigrade legs with a large, boxy cockpit that has a distinctive slit for the pilot to see through while blasting its twin cannons. While its silhouette is distinctively similar to the AT-ST, its size and exposed pilots seat makes it more similar to the AT-ST's predecessor, the Republic AT-RT.
- Chicken Walker: It has a pair of digitigrade legs.
- Glass Cannon: Any amount of explosives will do great in knocking them over (or just blasting off the exposed pilot), and their cumbersome design means any Helldiver can flank around to attack their pilots while they're confused as to where their target has gone, but those cannons aren't to be underestimated if you're caught in the open by them; even a single shot can easily clip off half your health, and they tend to fire in bursts of four to six rounds.
- Sniping the Cockpit: While the Strider itself features an armored faceplate, the pilot in its otherwise unprotected cockpit is just as vulnerable to regular small arms fire as a bog-standard Trooper. If a Helldiver can get beside, behind, or sufficiently above the Strider for a clear shot at the pilot or manages to shoot through the incredibly narrow visibility slit in the frontal armor, it's an easy kill.
Berserker
The Automatons' most fearsome melee unit, if only for their singlemindedness, the Berserkers are large bipedal attack units with chainsaws for arms and a downright psychotic thirst for blood. Whilst they lack the heavy armour of other Automaton units of their size, they more than make up for that in ability to simply absorb incoming bullets and keep striding on.
- Blade Below the Shoulder: Both arms are replaced from the elbow up with butchering saws.
- The Berserker: It's right there in the name. These things are designed to get up close and personal with their foes, picking out a target and chasing it down until they've reduced it to so much chunky salsa or been reduced to scrap themselves.
- Chainsaw Good: Every Berserker sports a pair of downright wicked-looking chainsaws in place of arms. A close-up inspection shows the teeth on the chains are highly irregular and often bent or misshapen; these definitely aren't intended for cutting down simple trees.
- Close-Range Combatant: Unlike almost every other Automaton unit (bar the Brawler) which has some kind of mid- to long- range attack, Berserkers use nothing but close-range attacks in the form of dual chainsaws and stomping, should those chainsaws be taken out. A group of them chasing a Helldiver will bring playing against the Terminids to mind — except the chasers will probably have much more gunfire from their allies focused in on their target as well.
- Creepy High-Pitched Voice: Listening carefully while they attack reveals that the Berserkers have a much higher voice than the rest of the Automaton forces, who tend to be fairly guttural. It certainly helps add to to their unhinged disposition, shrieking unintelligibly as they try to butcher you.
- Creepy Souvenir: While Automatons already have a fondness for displaying corpses around their bases like gruesome scarecrows, Berserkers go into battle wielding spikes decorated with multiple human skulls on their backs, worn almost certainly as a terror tactic when combined with their unrelenting sprint into enemy lines.
- Determinator: And how. Of all the Automaton units, Berserkers are some of the most damnably persistent and durable — as noted above, for all their lack of heavy armour plating they can still absorb damage that would stop most other enemies cold five or six times over at the least, and are incredibly hard to stagger. Not even losing an arm (or both arms!) will slow them down; they'll just try to stomp you flat instead. The only things that can slow them down reliably are hard stuns (like EMS "static field" munitions, or stun grenades) or the raw knockback power of the Punisher/Slugger pump-action shotguns. Anything else they'll just march through without so much as flinching, their vocoders emitting guttural screeches and snarls the entire time. Even once you take them down, their legs will keep flailing on for a good few seconds like they're still trying to get up and attack.
- Draw Aggro: They primarily exist to present an immediate threat to Helldivers, over more dangerous but farther threats. It's hard to hit a Rocket Devestator's rocket pods when a group of these guys are in your face trying to hack it off.
- Evil Is Visceral: Invoked Trope — Uniquely for an Automaton unit (whose construction is typically clean, trim, and utilitarian), they have exposed conduits and wiring, whose fleshy colorization and coiling patterns make them look remarkably like entrails running up and down (and even inside) their bodies. Combined with the jagged sheet metal, barbed wire, and human skulls festooning their chassis, you have a clear attempt to produce a terror weapon.
- Feral Villain: Most Automaton units demonstrate at least enough intelligence to coordinate their efforts with fairly basic fire-and-maneuver tactics. Berserkers instead seem to be driven by a rage-fueled singlemindedness to hack to pieces any human that crosses their line of sight, and they will rush the nearest target without any apparent regard for their own safety.
- Lightning Bruiser: When they're aware of Helldiver presence, they can move pretty fast to catch up to them. Wearing heavy armor and sprinting will just barely maintain distance. While they're no Hulk in terms of durability, they can tank a surprising amount of damage if you don't nail them in the head. They can survive a direct hit from an impact grenade, while Devastators will usually be killed by a direct (or even close proximity) impact.
- Run or Die: With their large amount of health, lethal chainsaws, relentless sprint and sheer numbers on high difficulties, Berserkers force Helldivers out of cover and into the open where other Automatons can shoot them apart if they're not dealt with from a distance in time.
- Same Character, But Different: They essentially fulfill the same role as Cyborg Berserkers (charging headlong into battle at their enemies), but instead of having menacing finger blades on one hand they have chainsaws on both arms.
- Spikes of Villainy: The Berserker chassis is incredibly jagged, including several nasty-looking spikes protruding from its back and shoulders.
- Weapon for Intimidation: Everything about the Berserker, from its grotesque and jagged proportions and glowing red eyes to the absolutely brutal butcher-saw blades and the singlemindedness with which it uses them, is intentionally designed to sow terror and chaos among any humans unfortunate enough to be caught in its path.
- Zerg Rush: Berserkers are rarely encountered alone unless they've been separated from their team. A common situation is to see a dropship enter the battle and drop an entire fields worth of them, who will all promptly chase the closest living thing.
Devastators
Hulking powerhouses, the Devastators are the first properly armoured Automaton unit Helldivers are likely to encounter (not counting the Scout Striders). Their heavy armour can shrug off small arms fire to their torso, meaning only their arms, legs, and head are really vulnerable to incoming fire. Worse, Heavy Devastators have a massive shield that offers even greater protection.
- Ammunition Backpack: Heavy Devastators have a heavy backpack used to feed their right-arm-mounted assault cannon.
- Arm Cannon: The default weapon of Devastators is a powerful forearm-mounted blaster that fires in two-shot bursts.
- Attack Its Weak Point: The rocket pods of Rocket Devastators and the ammo backpack of Heavy Devastators can be shot up to deal serious damage to them. All Devastators also have weaker armor in their mid section as well, so if you can't get a headshot, going for their larger stomach area is a viable alternative.
- Boom, Headshot!: Their small heads are their primary weak spot. Though good luck hitting those weak spots if they're trying to gun you down.
- Cognizant Limbs: All three variants have weapon limbs that can be independently shot off. Because the limbs are much less heavily armored than the body and much larger than the head, this can be a lifesaver.
- Death of a Thousand Cuts: A single round from a Heavy Devastator won't take much off your health bar, but they fire at a rate comparable to the machine gun stratagem. Each round will also cause Helldivers to flinch, throwing off aim and interrupting stim use.
- Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Heavy variants have an extra-durable shield on their left arm, as if they weren't tough enough already. This shield never protects their head, however.
- Macross Missile Massacre: Rocket Devastators attack by firing multiple rockets at once in a salvo spread. This makes them dangerous to engage up close, as dodging to evade one rocket may still put you in the path of another.
- Mighty Glacier: Devastators move at a casual walking pace. While easy to outrun, their heavy armor and dangerous weapons makes engaging groups of them a difficult prospect.
- More Dakka: The Heavy variant packs a rotary cannon alongside a massive shield — as if they aren't dangerous enough by default.
- One-Hit Kill: The Rocket Devastator's munitions can mulch most Helldivers in a single shot with frightening accuracy, if not appropriately suppressed. Their punches can kill Helldivers in one hit if said diver is not well equipped to survive such punches.
- Pinned Down: A torrent of gunfire, even if only marginally effective, will still usually ruin all three variants' accuracy.
- Same Character, But Different: Devastators roughly overlap with the role of Cyborg Hulks, namely in how they're durable heavy units with strong attacks who can be put down more easily with high-powered weaponry and Stratagems. Heavy Devastators even retain the Shield-Bearing Mook nature of their Hulk predecessors.
- Shield Bash: It'd be more accurate to call it a shield slash, but otherwise it fits. Heavy Devastators that have been disarmed of their gun will attempt to close distance and deliver a deadly chop with their shield, cutting any Helldiver in reach in half. They can still perform this with their gun attached, but will prefer to hose down Helldivers with their gun and will only attack with their shield if approached.
- Shield-Bearing Mook: Heavy Devastators sport a large shield that blocks most attacks from the front, and they can also use it to perform a shield slam attack. However, the shield has a notch that exposes part of their head as they won't be able to see otherwise, which is a weak point a skilled player can aim for.
- Shoulder Cannon: Rocket Devastators sport two clusters of rocket launchers on their shoulders. Though this makes them dangerous foes to face head-on, their exposed bulk makes them easy targets for even basic firearms.
Hulk
The largest bipedal Automaton unit, Hulks come in three variants; Bruisers, Obliterators and Scorchers. Bruisers pack two cannons, Obliterators a cannon and a rocket pod, whilst Scorchers have a close combat weapon and flamethrower.
- Attack Its Weak Point: There's a bright glowing vent on their backs that can be damaged with even a light amount of armor penetration, though this isn't always practical. Their head is also vulnerable and has lighter armor compared to the rest of is body, though it's rather tough to hit, being a small target, that's constantly wobbling about as they sprint to engage Helldivers.
- Arm Cannon: All three variants have arm pintle-mounted weaponry.
- Armored But Frail: Relatively speaking, Hulks sport less armor than other heavy units such as Tanks and Bile Titans, with small arms fire being able to blow up their exhaust vent and set them on a countdown to destruction, and they can be consistently killed with two anti-armor rockets to their center of mass and with only one if a Helldiver has great enough aim to hit their eye with a rocket. As a trade off however, they're twice as oppressive in terms of armaments and mobility and put constant pressure on players as long as they're in the field, to say nothing of any unfortunate Helldiver caught in a fight with zero weapons capable of piecing its chassis.
- Boom, Headshot!: Their eyeslit is a medium-armoured weakpoint, meaning that Helldivers with good aim and an anti-material rifle, autocannon, or any heavier support weapon can take them down in a couple of careful shots before they get too close. The fact that they're slow, lumbering Mighty Glacier enemies helps a lot with this.
- Cognizant Limbs: While still heavily armored, their weapon arms might just be the only thing on their bodies you can destroy, practically. Just beware that they're still willing to trample and stomp on any Helldivers it can reach if it has been disarmed. It's also possible to destroy them easier, albeit consuming more ammunition and time, than by their head slit by shooting out both of their legs with medium-armor-penetrating weapons. Even destroying just one leg will make it far easier for players to subsequently shoot at their slit.
- Close-Range Combatant: Scorchers sport a flamethrower that will incinerate any Helldiver caught in it, but the weapon has much shorter range than the Obliterators' and Bruisers' cannons and rocket pods. It's still longer than a Berserker's chainsaws, though. If that wasn't enough, they also have a large buzz saw as their offhand weapon which can One-Hit Kill any Helldiver in reach.
- Creepy Souvenir: Similar to Berserkers, Hulks have human skulls hung over spikes jutting out of their hunched backs, upping the intimidation factor on an already giant and scary opponent able to saunter into battle while shrugging off most weaponry.
- Expy: They look a lot like the Dreadnoughts of Warhammer 40,000, sporting an incredibly similar design in their legs and sporting the same silhouette of a small head placed within a massive hunch back of armor.
- Kill It with Fire: Scorchers are equipped with a gigantic flamethrower that they love to spew forth a constant stream of fire while charging and stomping over everything in their way. While this makes them the easiest to flank for Helldiver squads coordinating their attacks, someone is still going to have to keep its attention long enough for someone to shoot it down before they're toast.
- Lightning Bruiser: Scorcher Hulks' legs are by no means any longer than the standard models', but evasive Helldivers will soon notice that they're still capable of moving these mechanical terrors at speeds barely slower than a Diver's dead sprint.
- Mighty Glacier: Slow and obscenely heavily armored, what makes their weapons so deadly is their ability to line up careful shots and kill Helldivers without having their ordnance thrown off by the expected hail of gunfire. Well, that, and...
- One-Hit Kill: Scorchers and Obliterators only need one shot to render Helldivers into the past tense.
- Same Character, But Different: They're basically Cyborg Warlords right down to their appearance and status as Smash Mooks, but they're not suggested to be Automaton leaders like Warlords are (and confusingly they don't resemble the Cyborg unit actually called a Hulk).
- Smash Mook: While most other ranged Automaton units will tend to hang back and fire at range, all Hulk variants will constantly stomp their way forward to get closer to Helldivers, even the Obliterators. Their considerable armor lets them spearhead charges compared to their less armored kind, and their head is much more protected against weapons fire.
- Spikes of Villainy: The jagged silhouette of a Scorcher can be spotted at a glance compared to the other Hulk models well before their guttering flamethrower and sparking buzzsaw arm give them away thanks to their aforementioned grisly trophy rack on their hunched backs.
- Taking You with Me: If dispatched via the glowing vents on their back but only just, Hulks will rapidly lose coordination as their batteries begin cooking off, and will nonetheless attempt to hose down the nearest apparent Helldiver with their comically flopping deadly weapons. Because control of their limbs ebbs and flows as they near death, some of these shots may well strike true, so it's advised to keep shooting the gaping hole where the vent was until they actually stop.
- Tiny-Headed Behemoth: Hulks sport a massive, bulky body with a head as large as a standard Trooper's. This head is a weak spot, but its small size and constant wobbling can make it hard to hit in the heat of battle.
- Walking Tank: Though not quite as massive as Factory Striders, Hulks are heavily armed and armored bipedal monstrosities that are high-priority threats to any Helldivers within range.
Tanks
Unsurprisingly, the Automatons — like their forefathers — field armoured fighting vehicles. In this case, their tanks are fitted with either a powerful cannon (Annihilator) or a quad autocannon (Shredder) that can quickly reduce Helldivers to paste.
- Achilles' Heel: The Annihilator tank's lack of maneuverability means it's vulnerable to Helldivers who can simply climb onto it to evade its turrets' traversal and pop its vents with a well-placed (and cooked) grenade or anti-materiel rifle shot or four, although this is a risky proposition while other enemies remain able to shoot them.
- Rough, hilly terrain can also drastically slow it down, as well as block line of sight of Helldivers, turning it into a slightly mobile turret. This makes it an easy target for powerful stratagems, or for circling attacks as the Annihilator's turret turns slower than lightly-armoured 'divers can sprint.
- Attack Its Weak Point: The back of their turret has two (Annihilator) or four (Shredder) glowing vents that can be damaged by light armor-piercing or explosive damage.
- Crippling Overspecialization: The Shredder tank is optimized to be a nightmare for anyone who wishes to attack it on foot, with a lightweight and extremely fast-to-rotate turret bristling with autocannons and its weak points easily kept out of view of assailants, but the armor it sacrificed to get this extreme manouverability renders its turret vulnerable to even simple grenades, let alone dedicated anti-armor weapons or precision fire at its weak points. Meanwhile, the Annihilator Tank's multiple machine guns and its turret can threaten a handful of different angles at once, allowing it to excel at the attack role when its targets are bunched up in a static location, such as during the Evacuate High-Value Assets mission, but as previously mentioned, the hefty turret gives its primary gun a lethargic traverse speed that proves fatal when the Tank is used in defensive and rapid response roles (which, the majority of the time, it is).
- Ineffectual Loner: Automaton Tanks are powerful, but are easy pickings for even a single lone Helldiver if they are not escorted and covered by Automaton infantry. Their slow speed and limited firing arcs can let a Helldiver use terrain, speed, or element of surprise to get close to the Tank, throw some grenades at the heat vents and blow it up. Or failing that, just drop a 500 kilogram bomb on its turret. A well supported tank however can be a nightmare to fight.
- Kung Fu-Proof Mook: They are immune to being stunned by an EMS (orbital stratagem, SEAF artillery or mortar) and flashbang grenades, and cannot be set on fire.
- Mighty Glacier: Unlike the IFV used by the Cyborgs, Automaton tanks are slow, lumbering machines that take a while to get anywhere. To compensate however, they pack way more firepower than the IFV. The Annihilator in addition to its main cannon has a coaxial machine gun and another hull-mounted on the front, while the Shredder's quad cannon autocannon can turn any Helldiver in open terrain into swiss cheese.
- More Dakka: The Shredder variant is this trope on treads, but even the Annihilator can get in on the action between its hull and coaxial guns.
Cannon Turret
Take an Annihilator Tank's turret, mount it on a tall tower to provide over watch, and you've got one hell of a static defense. Cannon Turrets are most commonly seen guarding large Automaton outposts, but can also be seen occasionally guarding medium outposts or random minor points of interest. They're deadly at mid range, where their splash damage is sure to kill any light or medium armor wearing Helldivers, but tend to have poorer accuracy past one hundred twenty meters and cannot attack Helldivers that are very close to it.
- Arbitrary Weapon Range: They cannot attack any Helldiver that's too close to it, due to being unable to point their turret below a straight line.
- The Guards Must Be Crazy: For some odd reason, they tend to ignore Helldivers for extended periods of time if they're not spotted by other Automatons, or do not attack the Cannon Turret itself. A Cannon Turret will eventually notice and shoot a Helldiver that's in front of it, but if they are sprinted by, it will rarely if at all react. Presumably, the cannon turret's operator only has optics facing forward for its turret, rendering it more blind than the Tank which its turret comes from.
- Ineffectual Loner: A lone Cannon Turret, such as ones found at minor points of interest, are easily taken down by a Helldiver with access to anti-tank grade weapons or stratagems. A Cannon Turret supported by an outpost and Automaton troops can become a deadly suppressive force.
- Long-Range Fighter: These things can easily kill Helldivers from long distance. Even when Helldivers are outside its optimal range, the large splash damage radius can still heavily damage if not kill them.
- One-Hit Kill: Capable of nailing Helldivers with them, especially if they're caught in open terrain with no cover.
Gunship
Deployed from special facilities, Automaton Gunships patrol the ground with a searchlight. They might not be as heavily armored as a Drop Ship, but they're far from weaponless.
- Airborne Mook: The first Automaton offense-based flier introduced into the game, they can hover around a few tens of meters above the ground, harassing any Helldivers caught in their searchlight with a rapid fire light cannon and a barrage of missiles.
- Artificial Brilliance: Gunships seem to be keenly aware that Hellbombs are one of the only two methods capable of destroying the Gunship Facility that spawns them. The moment a Hellbomb is in their line of sight, they will ignore all other targets to destroy it, denying Helldivers the chance to destroy their Gunship Facility.
- Attack Its Weakpoint: Similar to the Drop Ship, hitting a Gunship in one of its four engines with anti-tank or heavy armor piercing weapons will cause it to come crashing down in a spectacular explosion.
- Cap: There can only be 3 Gunships per Gunship facility, so it may be a good idea to get one person to attract the Gunships' attention and run away, letting others destroy the facilities. Otherwise, you'll have to deal with constantly spawning Gunships.
- Crosshair Aware: They project a spotlight wherever they're looking. Get caught inside it, and expect a rough time.
- Enemy Summoner: If a Gunship spots a Helldiver, it can call other Gunships to its position to take down said Helldiver.
- Kung Fu-Proof Mook: Well, not them, but their large and tall fabricators are notably completely immune to being destroyed by anything save for a Hellbomb...or the very-rare occurrence of one of their Gunships being shot down and falling into them. This can make taking out their fabricators difficult even if the Helldivers handle the Gunships quickly and easily as long as the fabricators are still surrounded by any other enemies.
- Super-Persistent Predator: Once a gunship has Helldiver in its sights, it becomes very hard to shake it off, short of shooting the thing down. This is further complicated by their aerial positioning making it difficult to keep it cover against them.
Factory Strider
You thought the Automaton Tanks were the largest threats around? These massive quad walkers would like to disagree. Serving as a mobile fabricator, capable of deploying Devastators, the Factory Strider can tank hits like a Bile Titan and hit back even harder with its main cannon, rocket pods and chin mounted laser chain gun.
- Attack Its Weak Point: Despite being covered in nearly impenetrable armor, there are a few sections of the Factory Strider that aren't armored and serve as weak spots. The less-armored spot in the face can be damaged by medium-penetration weapons, as can an exposed spot on the knee. Most importantly, the large hatch on its belly that deploys Devastators is a medium-armoured weak spot with particularly low health even when it's closed, and takes bonus damage when it opens to spit out more reinforcements. Provided you can evade or destroy its deadly chin gatlings (and fend off the swarm of other Automatons that will likely accompany the Strider), the massive machine is extremely vulnerable from below.
- Base on Wheels: Factory Striders serve the dual purpose of being both heavily armored assault units which can take a ton of punishment and kill Helldivers en masse while also reinforcing Automaton frontline units with freshly-created Devastators.
- Boss in Mook Clothing: They're much harder to take down compared to other armored Automaton unites, can deploy Automaton troops to the field and are absolutely bristling with weapons.
- Expy: With their quadrupedal form, the placement and movement of their cockpit/heads, and their large and boxy bodies carrying military ordinance, Factory Striders form a very distinctive parallel to the Imperial AT-AT Walker in form and troop transport purposes, although its squat form, heavy ordinance and the presence of a large laser cannon on its back also doubles its resemblance to the Republic AT-TE Tanks that preceded the Imperial design. Like the AT-ATs, Factory Striders are also vulnerable to getting their legs taken out, causing them to collapse from lack of balance.
- Giant Mook: Three times larger than any other Automaton unit, with the health and armor to match.
- Huge Rider, Tiny Mount: The Factory Strider can be carried into battle by the dropships like the other Automaton units, despite the fact that they're noticeable larger than the aircraft.
- Ineffectual Loner: Much like the Tanks, a lone Factory Strider can be easily dealt with by a lone Helldiver equipped with an anti-tank weapon and a medium armor penetration primary. Once their chin mounted guns are destroyed, a Helldiver can simply walk underneath it, and blast the underside until the Factory Strider collapses. And unlike the Bile Titan who can quickly reposition itself to make standing under it a dangerous prospect, the Factory Strider is too slow to even attempt crushing Helldivers under its legs, being reliant on any Devastators it spawns to protect its underside. Doing so however makes a Helldiver's job that much easier in destroying it, thanks to exposing its internals. Of course, Factory Striders are almost never seen alone.
- Logical Weakness: Like the Terminids' Chargers, it requires all four legs to support its extremely heavy weight. If even one of its legs is taken out (such as via the knee joint), the Factory Strider cannot hope to support its own weight and it falls over before self-destructing. Like regular stationary Fabricators, it's also momentarily vulnerable to explosive attacks when its deployment bay opens to drop its Devastators onto the field, and its more lightweight design means that the hatch itself is an exploitable medium-armoured weak point even when closed.
- Mighty Glacier: These things are slow enough to be outran by even a non sprinting heavy armor wearing Helldiver, but they're even tougher than Bile Titans. They can take a 500kg bomb to the face, or an orbital rail cannon strike and STILL keep trucking along. Without Stratagems, players will need heavy-armor-piercing weapons to bring these things down (though its head's guns can be disabled by medium-armor-piercing weapons).
- Mighty Roar: They sometimes let out an echoing, robotic bellowing during battle.
- Mook Maker: They can create and deploy Devastators in the middle of combat, if their impressive armaments weren't already enough.
- Super Prototype: When the Automatons first deployed Factory Striders in combat, they were generally pretty uncommon but had identical stats to later mass-produced ones. However, once the main fleet attacked, they brought a much greater number of them, with their previous rarity being attributed to the vanguard fleet only having a limited number of prototypes.
- Walking Tank: They're gigantic, extremely well-armored walkers decked out with extremely heavy weaponry and the ability to fabricate more automatons on the fly.
Drop Ship
Large, quad-engine dropships used to drop off Automaton reinforcements, capable of hauling anything from a full squad of eight Devastators or Scout Striders all the way up to a single Factory Strider.
- Airborne Mook: The first flying enemy unit of the Automatons. Unlike Gunships, they cannot attack, but instead drop off Automaton troops like their name suggests.
- Collateral Damage: Crashing dropships can take out more than just any hapless ground units; they might even (rarely) take out things like fabricators or stratagem jammers if they crash in the right place!
- Defeat Equals Explosion: Hitting one of their engines with a recoilless round will cause it to come crashing to the ground, causing a huge explosion. This will take out most of the lighter units like Berserkers and Troopers, but heavier units will survive, though not unscathed.
- Defenseless Transports: While it can shrug off any attack short of anti-tank grade, Drop Ships themselves cannot attack, and rely on nearby Automaton units to distract Helldivers from shooting them down.
- Expy: They look suspiciously like the bastard child of Cybran engineering and a Tier 1 UEF Air Transport, having the general Red and Black and Evil All Over aesthetics of the former and overall hull structure of the latter.
- It's Raining Men: Drop Ships are quite literal in their name. Whenever an Automaton Trooper or Commissar shoots a flare, a Drop Ship (or multiple of them) will come in, and drop a squad of Automatons directly from its underside without any parachutes to the ground.
- Sound-Coded for Your Convenience: If you can't see the signal flare, you'll definitely hear its distinct engines as it decelerates. If that wasn't enough warning, it makes a deep buzzer-like sound as its cargo disembarks. If you hear the latter, you'd better move before a pack of Berserkers (or worse, Scorcher Hulks!) drops directly on top of you.
- Support Party Member: Unlike Pelican-1 who has a light cannon to support Helldivers, the Automaton Drop Ship is strictly a transport, and has no means of attacking on its own. It comes in hot and quick, drops off a squad of Automatons, then blasts off just as fast.
- Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: As they're Airborne Mooks, they will sometimes be targeted and shot down if they're in range of an active SAM site.
- Zerg Rush: On lower level missions, usually only one Drop Ship will appear. Anything higher than level 7 however will see two, three or even four Drop Ships converging on the flare's location, and each will unload a full cargo bay of Automaton forces. To say nothing of extermination missions, where they will be constantly delivering Automatons to the battle.
