Video Game / Helldivers II

"How about a nice cup of LIBER-TEA!?"

"Super Earth. Our home. Prosperity, liberty, democracy, our way of life. But freedom doesn't come free.^note "No... Sweet Liberty! NOOOOOO!!!" Look familiar? Scenes like this are happening throughout the galaxy, right now! You could be next. That is, unless you make the most important decision of your life. Prove to yourself that you have the strength and the courage to be free. Join... the Helldivers! Become part of an elite peacekeeping force! See exotic new lifeforms, and spread managed democracy throughout the galaxy. Become a Hero. Become a Legend. Become a Helldiver!"

— Broadcast Narrator/Helldiver, opening cinematic

Attention Citizens. Please observe the following PATRIOTIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: ^* Any deviation of attention or attempts to exit the page without fully reviewing the contents will be considered treason. Treason is punishable by death.

The following page and its contents have been decreed "MANDATORY" reading by the Ministry of Truth. Please read the page and listed trope examples in its entirety for the betterment of DEMOCRACY and LIBERTY! For the Glory of SUPER EARTH!

Helldivers II is the long-awaited sequel to the 2015 top-down horde shooter Helldivers from Arrowhead Studios. It shifts the gameplay perspective from top-down to over-the-shoulder, was announced at Sony's "PlayStation Presents" showcase on May 26, 2023, and it was released in February 2024.

Super Earth has (seemingly) reached an era of peace and prosperity following its victories over the enemies in the first game, 100 years ago. Utilizing technology and resources harvested from the slain invaders, Humanity has reached out to the stars, colonizing other planets in the name of Liberty and Democracy. For many, it really does seem that Humanity has achieved a utopian society, to the point that the original Helldivers are disbanded as there is simply no need for them any more...

...or so they thought.

Unfortunately, the bugs (now named "Terminids") rear their ugly heads again^note After breaking out of the factory-farms that were used to harvest them on an industrial scale and murderous Automatons^note Who seek to free their Cyborg masters from imprisonment in the mines of Cyberstan declare war upon Humanity, once more putting Super Earth at risk. To combat these enemies, the Helldivers are once again reactivated, and a new generation of soldiers ready to fight for Super Earth and her people take to the stars, aiming to utterly destroy those who threaten her safety...with plenty of explosives and firepower in hand, of course.

Since the game has an Emergent Gameplay narrative unfolding in almost real time, a Recap page detailing the most important Story Arcs can be found here.

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Our utopian nation at Super Earth provides samples of:^note Reading all these tropes is mandatory. Failure to do so will be considered treason. Treason is punishable by death.

• Achilles' Heel: Automaton Stratagem Jammers usually require a hellbomb or other superheavy ordnance to destroy, but will sometimes have a fabricator built into their base; take out this fabricator and the chain reaction will blow up the entire Jammer, no need to call in a Hellbomb and deal with all the mooks.
• Airborne Mook:
  • Automaton Dropships are flying enemy carriers that will reinforce the enemy ranks by dropping off a squad of Automatons. They can be taken down by well-placed powerful shots to one of their four engines, causing them to crash and their passengers to be destroyed (or take severe damage, in the case of larger ones).
  • Terminid Shriekers are flying Terminids that attack by performing powerful diving swoops at the Helldivers. They continuously spawn from nests around the map. Their biggest danger occurs when they die — in a surprising nod to physics, shooting them down when they dive causes their bodies to turn into gravity-boosted projectiles that can one-shot a Helldiver in the way.
  • Automaton Gunships repeatedly spawn from towering factory structures somewhere on the map. Unlike Shriekers, the gunships have lasers and rocket batteries on board and will judiciously apply them from above until brought down.
• 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.
• All-or-Nothing Reloads: Very much Averted, as reloading is done in stages. This even means the phase of ejecting your magazine while your gun wasn't empty will even still leave a single round chambered into it that can be still fired before completely finishing a full reload.
• Always Over the Shoulder: The default aim view, but can be switched to a First Person scoped view with the press of a designated button or key while aiming. Especially useful for the marksman rifles, whose settings include Zoom Magnification.
• Anti-Air:
  • Automaton anti-air guns can be seen visibly firing on inbound Eagles, preventing them from dropping the requested ordnance in a large area around themselves. Attempting to throw an Eagle stratagem from outside of their range to the inside simply causes the stratagem to not go through, though this doesn't waste a charge or the cooldown time.
  • Activating Surface-to-Air Missile stations are an optional objective in Automaton missions. When activated, they can shoot down Automaton Dropships and Gunships within their attack range, preventing or heavily sabotaging Bot Drops, or buying space to reach the Gunship Fabricator.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • It's no longer possible to wipe through all players dying; instead, there will be a short delay and players will drop in close to where the last player died, assuming there are enough reinforcement charges left.
  • The Pelican transport cannot be destroyed, no matter what stratagems the players place on it or how many enemies happen to be surrounding it (in fact, enemies will never target it either)...the players inside it however can be unfortunate enough to still be killed in action while in their seats.
  • While players can try to move outside the bounds of the mission area and get considered a traitor that will be barraged by heavy artillery, they cannot place the reinforcement beacon to guarantee dropping other players into such places. It is possible for a reinforcing player to direct their hellpod into the out-of-bounds area if their reinforcement placement was about on the line of the area, but it won't be guaranteed.
  • Dropped weapons, equipment and sample containers cannot be destroyed, so a player who has dropped these due to death in combat or via friendly fire always has a chance of retrieving these items, and unlike the first game they can be called in again on a timer. Of course, the area where they were dropped can be overrun by enemies, thus making this more difficult; however, the items will remain intact even if these enemies are cleared with extreme prejudice by the most explosive stratagems in the game. They can still be lost if they fall out of bounds or into an unreachable area though.
  • If a mission has any objective that requires the demolition of a large structure that cannot be destroyed with (most) conventional weapons, the game will provide the ability to call in a Hellbomb when in close proximity to that objective.
• Anti Poop-Socking: Defied in a loading screen tip.
  "Don’t forget to take breaks! — That is, if you want to be remembered as a coward."
• Anti-Structure:
  • Explosive weapons are usually capable of taking down enemy structures like Terminid Bug Holes and Automaton Fabricators. However, certain structures (particularly Gunship Fabricators) are too durable to take down with such weapons, requiring the use of a Hellbomb.
  • The Hellbomb is made specifically for destroying structures, even the most durable ones like Automaton Gunship Facilities. The bomb is stationary and takes a good 15 seconds to arm, making it unreliable against mobile targets despite usually being a One-Hit Kill against most mooks. Furthermore, Hellbombs are only provided when a Helldiver is close to a viable building it can destroy.
• Armored Coffins: The Patriot walkers epitomize Super Earth's design philosophies. Though they are packed with amazing firepower, they are remarkably fragile, explode violently when taken down, and have no ejection of any kind.
• Armor Is Useless:
  • Averted, as your armour (but not your helmet or cape) now affects your Armour Rating, Move Speed, and Stamina Regeneration, along with carrying one of several Perks - such as Servo-Assisted, which increases your grenade & stratagem throw distance, and makes your limbs less likely to be wounded by attacks.
  • Played straight, if unintentionally, by a bug affecting the earliest versions of the game that caused Armour Ratings to be ignored, meaning that all armour sets would take the same amount of damage regardless of weight class. Light Armour was thus the go-to for a while, since it gained all the speed benefits with none of the reduction in survivability it should have had.
  • Special mention to the sets of armour that provide 50% additional limb health/reduction in limb damage... but in some of those it's clearly because an arm and a leg have been replaced with cybernetics. That is, the Helldiver has 50% less limbs that can take damage.
  • Still played straight for helmets, which all have the same armor rating and don't provide any perks. This means Helldivers are still vulnerable to being critically wounded or instantly killed by headshots regardless of whatever armor they are wearing, even if the helmet is from a heavy armour set and looks more protective than the standard helmet.
• Art Evolution: The first game has a more cartoony, less graphically detailed artstyle reminicient of games like Team Fortress 2 or Overwatch. Helldivers II swaps this out for much more extreme realism with its graphics.
• Artificial Stupidity: Enemies' decision-making processes and pathfinding can occasionally bug and cause them to be seen standing around ineffectively. The Automatons are also capable of blundering into their own mines, not that the Helldivers would ever know what that's like.
• Ascended Meme: The in-universe styled Super Earth High Command Brief posted by the developers on the Helldivers Discord described Malevelon Creek as, "a bastion of human endurance and a symbol of our resistance against the Automatons," a nod toward the Creek's popularity even when Major Orders directed players elsewhere.
• Attack Its Weak Point:
  • A lot of weakpoints, such as a Charger's and Bile Titan's soft unarmored section, and the Automaton's tanks, Hulks, and their large turrets have heat vents on the back that can be shot to deal large damage. Explosive weapons particularly (such as the Dominator and Scorcher) deal extra damage to these weak spots, and Automaton Tanks can be taken out with just two impact grenades to the rear.
  • Terminid Chargers have an even less obvious weakpoint: the legs. While shooting the unarmored rear abdomen does significant damage, the fastest way to drop a Charger is to take out the armor on one of their legs (via the Railgun or Autocannon, though this is easier with explosive weapons like the Recoilless Rifle or Expendable Anti-Tank), then shooting the exposed leg a few times with any weapon.
  • Automaton Dropships can be destroyed by aiming a recoilless rifle round (or similar anti-armour ordnance) to one of their four engines. Should your aim be true, the Dropships will crash and explode, taking out most of its cargo. Heavier units however, such as Hulks, Tanks and Devastators may survive the crash.
  • Automaton Rocket Devastators have a pair of shoulder-mounted rocket pods. These pods are a weak point however, as they can be destroyed with concentrated fire and this will also likely kill the Rocket Devastator in the process.
  • At higher difficulty levels, this starts to become an Enforced Trope, as higher difficulty enemies take significantly less damage from non-weakpoint hits.
• 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.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Arc Thrower is a potentially powerful weapon that can chain its shots on tightly packed enemies. However, its main drawback is very poor performance at short ranges, as well as the chance for the Arc Thrower's shots to chain onto friendly Helldivers. Whilst the Cutting Edge Premium Warbond includes 3 new armors with the Electrical Conduit perk which supposedly reduces Arc damage by 95% (in reality moving it down from "immediate oneshot" to "survivable twice, or three times if you're lucky", this necessitates sacrificing other highly useful armour perks as a bandaid fix for poor coordination/situational awareness - no enemies inflict electrical/Arc damage (at present, certain Illuminate units might), so it offers no protection against anything but friendly fire.
  • The SPEAR is supposed to be an upgrade over the Recoilless Rifle, being the handheld weapon with the most power per shot. However, the SPEAR can only lock on to large targets and cannot be used to combat swarms, has an extremely long reload time, only comes with a measly four missiles, and can only be restocked by a resupply stratagem. Oh, and it's incredibly fussy about when and what it does want to lock onto, making it a potential liability over the simple point-and-shoot recoilless rifle or expendable anti-tank weapons. It's great when it works and immensely satisfying to watch the missile fly off and just obliterate something, but it's just so fussy and unreliable that it's not worth taking over the point-and-shoot simplicity of EATs, the Recoilless Rifle, or the Quasar.
  • Both the Orbital 120mm and 380mm HE Barrages are potentially powerful, but their low accuracy over a wide area makes them inconsistent to use, especially if you're trying to aim for a specific facility or mobile units. The 380 might as well be addressed 'Dear Grid Square'; for all of its power, it's not something you want to rely on. Both have received accuracy buffs since launch (and have a Super Destroyer upgrade to further improve their accuracy) and are now more usable, but remain rather unpredictable and inaccurate, and therefore unreliable, compared to most other fire support options.
  • The Rocket Sentry is the most powerful sentry on a per shot basis, but it often refuses to attack enemies that get too close to it, and the relatively slow speed of the rockets it fires means that it is prone to outright completely missing particularly fast moving targets. Plus it has splash damage, so if it tries to 'help' you it may just end up blasting you to bits; at least the machinegun or gatling sentries won't.
  • The EXO-45 Patriot mech is a powerful stratagem that can lock down multiple bot drops or bug breaches with missiles that can easily destroy heavily armored enemies and a minigun that shreds smaller mooks. Its drawbacks are its limited ammo pool that cannot be restocked, a long recharge time (6 in-game minutes) to call another mech and its large frame being vulnerable to ranged attacks especially from Automatons.
  • In-universe, the cape that every Helldiver wears. It looks great, but there are good reasons that no modern military goes into battle with capes as part of their uniform. These reasons include: the potential for capes to impede movement, capes giving enemies something to easily grab onto in close-quarter combat, and even capes possibly being able to lead to disease outbreaks because they're are difficult to keep clean and sanitary in the field.
• Ax-Crazy: As a result of the conditioning from-birth that they have undergone on Super Earth, Helldivers will periodically yell in satisfaction or desperation when throwing grenades/stratagems ("EAT THIS!!") and killing their enemies ("Ahahahahahaha!")
• Badass Normal: Special mention goes to a posthumous one; in certain minor locations of interest, you can find a Citizen (possibly a member of the Armed Forces) who was killed in the middle of burying some other Citizens in the field. Occasionally, a dead Devastator will also be present if it's an Automaton-controlled planet. Cause of death? Shovel Strike. Yes, this humble citizen took down a heavily-armoured, roughly-eight-foot-tall war machine with an Arm Cannon that could turn them into paste in a single hit with just a shovel.
• Battle Amongst the Flames: One of the planetary biome types present is a hot, arid world periodically consumed by apocalyptic brushfires, which in practical terms means your Helldiver squad will spend a not-insignificant amount of the mission being chased by incredibly lethal fire tornadoes. The best known is a planet pleasantly named Hellmire, but other examples do exist.
• Badass Finger Snap: The Helldiver in the intro Propaganda Piece performs one, timed with a Smash Cut with him going from civilian to Helldiver, and the music transitioning to the game's main theme.
• Beam Spam: This is the primary tactic of the Automatons, who will fill the area surrounding your Helldiver with ridiculous amounts of energy weapon fire the second you become visible. Some of this is supported by cannons that can one shot even the most heavily armored Helldiver. Players can also get in on the action with the Sickle pulse laser carbine, or by borrowing Automaton gun emplacements.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: In late April 2024, a Major Order dropped in which two planets were slated for liberation, but the players could only choose one of them, while the other planet would be lost. Even more interesting, each planet had a stratagem linked to it that would be unlocked for players once the planet was liberated: planet Choohe would unlock an Anti-Tank Mine Layer, while planet Penta would unlock an Airburst Rocket Launcher. Because of mine stratagems' reputation with players, the fanbase overwhelmingly chose Penta to be liberated... only to finally use the Airburst Rocket Launcher and realize it might have been a better idea to pick the mines. Many players are thinking this was Joel's plan all along.
• BFG: Automaton bases and fortresses may have tank turrets mounted on towers guarding them, and they have considerable range. If they are alerted to Helldiver presence, they can easily deliver a suppressive barrage of One-Hit Kill blasts. You are generally encouraged to either stealthily infiltrate and disable them from within, call down a stratagem on their head, or take them out at long range where their accuracy becomes questionable.
• Big, Bulky Bomb: One of the tools in the Helldiver arsenal is the hellbomb, an orbitally-deployed explosive charge nearly as big as a human and chiefly used as a demolition charge to destroy various kinds of fortified installations. The SEAF, in their infinite wisdom, have opted to require Divers to use a manual input terminal to arm the device rather than provide any sort of remote detonator or automatic arming mechanism. It's a budget-saving measure, you see.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Helldivers II is a bit more explicit about the satirical aspect of Super Earth and how it is pretty much just another shade of black, likely to make sure the satire was more clear. Various in-game tool tips, notes, and so forth openly talk about many oppressive actions Super Earth takes on its own people and in the ways in which it actively endangers them for dubious benefit or are clearly designed to benefit a select few such as: employing child as young as 7 for the war effort, requiring government approval before any action that might result in a child, farming the terminds for resources (which, given the resultant E-710 comes spewing out of the ground like oil, implies raising the bugs, then mass slaughtering them before burying them in mass graves), utilizing front loading guns... on spaceships, any given Helldiver mission costing more than a Liberty-class cruiser (a bigger ship than the Super Destroyers the Helldivers use), and perhaps the most obvious, knowingly continuing the Helldiver program despite knowing that survival rates for Helldiver training are only around 20%, with the program lasting less than a day and taking in around 48,000 trainees a day, meaning an average of 38,000 people die each day in training alone. In addition, the Cyborgs have been replaced by their creations, the Automatons, and giving how their motive is saving their creators by any means, one could make an argument that they're the Grey in this, mainly failing to be considered the White because you can find things like the corpses of civilians locked in cages in their bases.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: The Automatons love this trope, with most of their common infantry units having one or even two arm blades. Most notable in their 'Berserker' close-range heavy unit, which just has chainsaw arms and no ranged capacity whatsoever.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Helldivers, thanks to its stylized artstyle and distantly-positioned camera, doesn't offer much in the way of graphic violence, with the worst offences being a light red mist. II makes anything and everything Bloody Hilarious, and Helldivers are constantly blowing up into Ludicrous Gibs, getting crushed into bloody paste and being splattered with the blood of their fallen comrades, themselves, and their enemies. It shows in their ESRB ratings; Helldivers is rated T, while II is rated M.
• Blood-Splattered Warrior: Receiving damage will cause Helldivers to become coated in increasing amounts of visibly dark red blood splatters, whilst killing enemies at close range will add black oil (Automatons) or yellow-green ichor (Terminids) respectively, and all of these can be mixed together or overlaid. This gore is not washed off between missions either, going away only if you die, quit the game, or switch lobbies.
• Boom, Headshot!: The primary weakspot of all Automaton units (well, besides their vehicles) is the head. The largest unit to have one is the Hulk, and theirs is protected by a plate that requires Medium Armour Piercing to take out, but even so, a dead-on headshot with the Recoilless Rifle, Quasar, or any proper antitank weapon can take out a Hulk in one shot. Devastators, likewise, can be taken down with just two hits from either of the Diligence rifles. On the other hand, good luck getting those shots if they're alerted to your presence.
• Boring, but Practical: While the game gives you all sorts of exotic support weapons, from the Terminid purging flamethrower, to the explosive autocannon, the machine gun stratagem you start with can serve you well. Its fire rate can be switched between three states (630, 760, and 900 RPM) and it can punch through up to medium armor. Against Terminids, it can quickly cut down swaths of Warriors, Hive Guards and Hunters, while also quickly killing Brood Commanders and Bile Spewers. Against the Automatons, it will cause them to near instantly become suppressed, throwing off their aim drastically. It will easily destroy anything that isn't heavier than a Devastator, and can make fairly short work of those too. Even Scout Striders aren't safe, as it can simply saw through their legs. The machine gun might not be able to kill Bile Titans or Factory Striders, but in a team a machine gun user can easily cut down chaff and weaker enemies easily, letting the others focus on the heavier targets.
  • The EAT-17 Expendable Anti-Tank support weapon stratagem gives you two single-shot disposable rocket launchers, with a short cooldown period compared to the other anti-tank weaponry. If you die and lose your Recoilless Rifle (or its ammo pack) in a bad spot (or worse, it falls out of the map entirely) you're waiting a good eight minutes to replace it, but the EAT takes maybe one and a half, two tops.
  • The humble, bog standard Eagle Airstrike that you can purchase as a beginner is an extremely reliable all rounder stratagem that will serve you well into the late game. Its multiple bombs cover a long line parallel to the direction you're facing, combining enough firepower that it can instantly kill or heavily damage anything short of a Factory Strider or Bile Titan with splash radii large enough that it can obliterate swarms of lesser enemies as well. It can take out nests and fabricators, and a well-placed bombing run can flatten an entire outpost (and its occupants) instantly, leaving a smoking husk for you to pick over for samples and supplies. Similarly, the basic Orbital Precision Strike; it's more or less pinpoint accurate to where the beacon lands, does respectable damage over a decent radius with enough power to destroy not just nests and fabricators, but also even Tanks and Hulks; and it even has a relatively short cooldown. Both of these stratagems also have the benefit of very short and straightforward dialcodes, making them easy to master and input when you're overwhelmed and in desperate need of some breathing room.
  • Running away from fights. If the enemy becomes too overwhelming, it may be better for you and your team to just run away. Getting far enough from enemies will (usually) cause them to despawn. This is more effective against Automatons, who respect line of sight and are generally slower than the Terminids, but it's still possible to run away from multiple Bile Titans if you're wearing light armor.
  • The laser cannon can be a very solid pick when you know that it can deal healthy damage to weakpoints. It's mostly a laser machine gun, see above, but its somewhat worse at dealing with groups in return for being stronger against single larger targets you can hit the weak point on, especially the machines. Even a tank or sentry tower will fall before it can turn around if you focus your aim on the heat vents when they're fully turned away from you.
• Border Patrol: Stray too far past the map's borders and the Democracy Officer in charge of the mission will warn you to get back into the mission zone or be declared a deserter and traitor. Failure to comply will result in the Super Destroyer shelling the area near you until you die, even if you return to the mission zone. In particularly desperate situations (probably in an Eradication mission), one may even find it beneficial to cause the Super Destroyer to do this.
• Butt Cannon: Terminid Bile Spewers function as artillery, shooting long range bile blobs to suppress Helldivers and flush them out of defensive positions. They're far from defenseless at close range though, as they can vomit up a One-Hit Kill stream of bile at close enemies, or if they miss, slash them apart with their claws.
• Bullfight Boss: Terminid Chargers are similar to Bug Tanks. While they can track you better than Bug Tanks, they can also be stunned for a brief but significant duration by baiting them into a wall, letting you shoot their unarmored backside for a few crucial seconds.
• Calculator Spelling: In II, the Terminids broke out of E-710 (OIL, upside-down) farms.
• Can't See a Damn Thing: Some desert and tundra planets can randomly cause inclement weather conditions of a sandstorm/blizzard respectively, which greatly reduces visibility for everyone on the battlefield. This is very bad for the Helldivers when they're engaged in a close-quarters battle with enemies as they'll be likely to simply trip into more enemies at close-range and shooting at enemies lets other nearby enemies know their location to bypass the weather, but likely advantageous to them otherwise as it can allow them to disengage or sneak around to fulfill objectives while they can use their radars to compensate for their inability to see.
• Cap: Resources are designer-limited to 50,000 requisition slips, 250 medals, 500 common samples, 250 rare samples, and 100 super samples, to prevent/discourage hoarding and avoid trivializing the acquisition of items from newly-released warbonds. Stratagems can cost up to 20,000 requisition, whilst Super Destroyer upgrades cost varying amounts of resources, with the Tier 4 upgrades in particular costing around 50% of the total amount you can hold.
• Claiming Via Flag: There's a mission mode called "Spread Democracy" where your Helldiver squad is tasked with taking and holding one or more spots on the map, calling down a Super Earth flagpole, defending it while a drone plays the Super Earth anthem and raises the flag... and that's it. Whether this mission has any utility beyond being a symbolic propaganda-building exercise is unclear^note Worth noting is that this is just a more blatantly parodic version of the "Capture Area" mission objective from Helldivers, which is identical in that it involves defending an area while a flag is raised.
• Close-Range Combatant: Zig-zagged. The Automatons almost universally use ranged weapons except for the occasional one that uses chainsaws or swords. Likewise, while the Terminids remain a mostly melee-oriented foe, they do include some units that can spray corrosive bile at Helldivers from a moderate range.
• The Computer Is Your Friend: Downplayed, as it wasn't to the detriment of their actual creators, but the Automatons have empathy, loyalty, and genuine belief in the virtues of their makers... the problem for Super Earth is that their makers are the Cyborgs, and they seem to have picked up Pay Evil unto Evil as well.
• Continuity Nod:
  • As of the time of this writing, Cyberstan, the Cyborgs' homeworld, can be found if you look at the Valdis Sector. The Valdis Sector itself is positioned roughly where the old Cyborgs would have been in 1. Keplar Prime and Squ'lath Shrine have yet to make an appearance however. Additionally, the Automaton marching song mentions Cyberstan. "The Reclamation" offensive that took place in April 2024 saw the Automatons launch a massive invasion fleet that captured Cyberstan, along with several other planets in that sector of the Known Galaxy.
  • There appear to be Hive Lord husks or molts on worlds controlled by the Terminids. They do appear to be smaller than the Hive Lords from the first game, so whether this implies that they're still around waiting to come back for round two in a future update, or have evolved into something even worse is up for debate. After all, the Bile Titan is only considered ''medium'' sized.
• Cool Starship: Your ship - a Super Destroyer - plays a bigger role than in the first game. Your ship is your primary source of supplies and heavy firepower (either directly or via its Eagle fighter-bombers) and can be upgraded through gameplay to enhance its ability to support you on the ground. When you join up with a party of fellow Helldivers, your Super Destroyer joins their formation (or vice versa), and any movement is then done as a group. You can also see fleets of Super Destroyers around embattled worlds. Oh, and you also get to name your ship, from a preapproved set of prefixes and suffixes.
• Cranial Processing Unit: A surefire way kill an Automaton is to aim for the head. Even Hulks can go down in a single hit from a railgun right to the head. While tricky to aim at, especially during hectic firefights, all that armor Automatons wear tend to not matter if you can reliably hit them in the head.
• Crapsack World:
  • A crewmember fondly remembers the local Democracy Officer from her childhood giving her and the other kids candy as a reward for spying on their own parents.
  • The propaganda film shows it is apparently completely normal to have soldiers in full combat gear patrolling the streets of what appears to be a peaceful, middle-class neighbourhood. As well, displaying any emotion other than extreme patriotism while watching that film can result in you being arrested or executed.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The infamous Fall of Malevelon Creek event in February 2024. Despite the player base's concentrated efforts, the planet became 0.000000% Liberated. In the meta-game, it represents the complete failure of Super Earth forces to take the planet from the Automatons, mirroring the failed Invasion of Klendathu.
• Cutting the Knot:
  • Illegal Broadcast towers are normally dealt with by manually shutting them down from the terminal at the base of the tower itself. However, the side objective can also be achieved by just destroying the tower itself either with heavy weapons or stratagems. A single impact grenade will do the trick, if your arm (and aim) is good.
  • A specific configuration of Stratagem Jammer and Detector Tower can spawn with a bot fabricator right at its base, and blowing it up will take the tower with it; however, whether or not this happens is up to RNG.
• Cycle of Revenge: While the Automatons are perfectly justified in having grievances against Super Earth for the 'liberation' of Cyberstan and the imprisonment of the Cyborgs, their desire for revenge is so strong that they self sabotage their own case by committing atrocities of their own that equal or even exceed what Super Earth is capable of. On almost every planet where the Automatons have landed, Helldivers can find the corpses of dismembered Helldivers and SEAF soldiers displayed like trophies, as well as entire prison camps full of massacred Super Earth soldiers and civilians, and in Extract Essential Personnel missions, the Automatons have no qualms about shooting unarmed civilians, either. This gives both Helldivers in-universe and players in a meta sense little reason to show any empathy or mercy towards the Automatons.
• Darker and Edgier: To an extent. While the gameplay and tone are largely the same, Super Earth's dystopian corruption is much more explicit than in the original, the increased graphical fidelity means that pitched battles can quickly become a lot more bloody and harrowing, and your Helldivers will now audibly panic as they get overwhelmed and their health dwindles.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Downplayed thanks to the reworked reinforce mechanic compared to the original game. Instead of having unlimited reinforces as long as one of your squadmates is alive to throw down the beacon, you have a limited shared pool of reinforces that each Helldiver death subtracts from and which slowly recharges the longer you manage to stay alive. This means that while you can now survive a squad wipe, you have to actively pay attention to how frequently your team is dying and take steps to avoid it beyond a mere "low death count" bonus on mission completion lest you run out of reinforces in a hairy situation.
• Death World: Quite a few planets the Helldivers end up fighting over can be considered this. For example, there is Hellmire, which is a desolate desert planet whose surface is quite frequently scorched by massive fire tornadoes, posing a significant threat to both Helldiver and Terminid alike.
• Degraded Boss: You'll be tasked with eliminating high threat Terminid bugs on lower difficulties, that become common at higher difficulties. Level 1 missions need you to assassinate a Brood Commander. They become fairly common on level 4 missions and above. Level 3 missions need you to kill Chargers. At level 6 missions, Chargers become part of Terminid patrols. Level 4 missions see you slaying a mighty bile titan. At level 8 and above they can be found wandering the map or summoned during a Terminid tunnel breach.
• Denser and Wackier: Helldivers is mostly a Stealth Parody of Military Science Fiction not unlike Starship Troopers where part of the fun is that it takes itself more or less completely seriously. II moves away from this and leans much harder into Rule of Funny as a means of satire, primarily as a way of showing how Fascist, but Inefficient and stupidly repressive of a regime Super Earth is. Look no further than comparing the two games' opening cinematics—the opening of Helldivers is a recruitment ad which is a little melodramatic but otherwise played straight, whereas II's is a blatantly obvious Propaganda Piece full of appeals to emotion, Dare to Be Badass and Bad "Bad Acting" which could only fool someone already brainwashed by Super Earth's endless Propaganda Machine.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Super Destroyers can be named from a list of available nouns. The possibilities for a name include "Patriot of Patriotism", "Pride of Pride", "Warrior of War", or to a lesser extent "Dawn of Dawn" (which potentially can have a precise meaning that isn't entirely redundant).
• Developer's Foresight: A recurring sight at places of interest is a drop pod that opens when a Helldiver does a salute; this can either be done by pressing the interact button, or, if the Helldiver has the 'salute' emote equipped, pressing that button instead.
• Diegetic Interface: The Ammunition Backpack for specific Support Weapons (Recoilless Rifle, Autocannon, Spear) serves as the reserve ammunition counter for them, especially for when it's being operated by a single user instead of a two-man crew. The Resupply Pack also shows how many of its 4 Ammunition Supplies are remaining this way. Charge-based weapons (such as the Railgun and Quasar) also have visible charge meters when using the first-person sights.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • The Airburst Rocket Launcher can be this outside of, very valid but managable, concerns of friendly fire with the large splash damage. Its a shoulder held airstrike that you can reload in the field but at the same time its slow reload and weak armor piercing making it weak against tougher enemies means you have to pick the right times to use it. Use it well and crowd control is putting its effectiveness mildly as swarms of lesser enemies vanish. Pick the wrong targets or aim it wrong and at best you're saddled with an unreliable support that takes time to reload, at worst you'll kill more of your own team than the enemy.
• Dirty Communists: Continued with the descendants of the Cyborgs, the Automatons — parts of the Internationale are used as a motif in their Terminator-esque faction theme, to rather chilling effect. Played with, however, in that it's heavily implied the real reason Super Earth hates them is that they have viable alternatives to managed democracy, as most of their aggressive war crimes are implied to be a False Flag Operation or scapegoating (Cyborgs) or otherwise sympathetic in goals, just going a bit too far in their justified hatred of Super Earth (Automatons).
• Distant Sequel: Helldivers II is set 100 years after the original Helldivers, and the Federation's victory over the three original enemy factions.
• Don't Celebrate Just Yet: After the resounding success of Operation Swift Disassembly and the destruction of the Automatons at Durgen, Super Earth held massive celebrations in the capital (including a Million Mook March) and issued an extra 1-minute break to all Helldivers^note Said break was inclusive of the time spent reading the announcement and was not available to currently deployed Helldivers. Less then a day later, the Automatons returned to the galaxy with their main fleet, ten times larger than the vanguard forces defeated by Swift Disassembly, and rapidly overtook the entire Valdis Sector. Naturally, Super Earth was caught with their pants down a little bit and hurriedly placed the entire galaxy on LIBCON-1 Alert.
• Dramatic Wind: Apparently the Super Destroyers have their air conditioners going pretty fiercely, because the capes of you, your fellow Helldivers and the Democracy Officer will still be billowing heavily even though you're all inside a spaceship.
• Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer: Any player can drop into any active Public mission if there are less than four other players present. The host can decide in their options menu whether they want to set their missions to Public or Friends Only, which limits openings to players who have accepted friend requests unless and until a special SOS Beacon stratagem is deployed.
• Drop Ship: Used by the Automatons in to deploy their troops, and by you to deploy walkers and extract on mission completion.
• Early Game Hell: At least, if you decide to start off fighting the Automatons rather than the Terminids. The Automatons are quite a large difficulty spike over the Terminids given their greater access to ranged weapons, heavy armor, and vehicles, and new Helldiver cadets don't have much access to armor piercing weapons that would be effective against them. Probably a big reason the initial campaign efforts focused on the Terminids, sidelining the war effort against the Automatons with comments about how the main Super Earth Armed Forces would be handling that front with limited deployment of the Helldivers essentially acting as special operations teams for critical objectives.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: At release, the mission mode "Spread Democracy," where your objective is to call down a flagpole at a certain location and defend it until the Super Earth flag is fully raised, was exclusive to the lower difficulties (Trivial and Easy). While in-game your Mission Control treats it with the same gravitas as any other mission, there was an implied criticism in the nature of the mission itself that Helldivers who only chose the easiest assignments were wasting their time on pointless symbolic gestures while their peers on higher difficulties were accomplishing goals of actual strategic importance. This was eventually patched by popular demand to be available on all difficulties, so now Helldivers of all skill levels and on all battlefronts can spend their vast arsenals of heavy firepower engaging in mindless flag-waving exercises at their discretion.
• Emergent Gameplay: Helldivers II actively expands on the first game's galactic campaign system, employing an actual Game Master who is able to react to player response to in-game events and further concoct storylines based around what the playerbase is doing. This was first seen to a great extent in the sequel with the Battle of Malevelon Creek from February to April 2024, which was initally a completely mismanaged disaster for Super Earth but was eventually turned around into a morale-boosting victory after High Command gave the order to liberate the planet once and for all from Bot control.
• Enemy-Detecting Radar: It's part of the Level-Map Display, where enemies appear as periodic red blips on the minimap. Note that the player cannot attack while using the minimap.
• Enemy Summoner:
  • Most Terminids (but particularly the most basic Scavengers) and Brood Commanders can let out a pheromone flare that causes a Bug Breach that summons more enemies into the area. Brood Commanders can also summon groups of the mid-size Warriors independent of Breaches.
  • The Automatons have the Commissar, who wield a Sword and Gun and can also fire a flare gun to call in a Bot Dropship that unloads enemies into the area. Most other basic Automaton units can too if no Commissar is available, though most of the larger units cannot.
• Evil Versus Evil:
  • A century later has done little to change the fact that Super Earth is still an authoritarian, corporatist dystopia masquerading as a democratic utopia, nor has it changed the nature of its enemies.
  • The Terminids, the evolution of the Bugs, are used as cattle to be bred, mass slaughtered, and put in graves to produce an oil substance for fuel. Time has not dampened that they are still a Horde of Alien Locusts.
  • The Automatons, descendants of the Cyborgs, that wish to free them aren’t much better them, given the cages and stone tables with mutilated bodies of both SEAF soldiers and civilians are found in their bases. They, supposedly, take children, but we don’t know what they do with them.
• Explosive Overclocking: By default, Railguns are set to "Safe" firing, which charges it up to about half of its power for respectable, but modest damage. Switching it to "Unsafe" firing allows the Railgun to build up more power to dole out even more damage, but if the Railgun charges too much, it will explode in the user's hands, killing them instantly.
• Expospeak Gag: Several of the Super Destroyer upgrades have descriptions that indicate Super Earth really is Fascist, but Inefficient:
  • One upgrade for turrets enhances them with "cyanoacrylate adhesive" - which you probably know better as super glue.
  • Enhanced Combustion improves all incendiary damage by lacing fuel with a unique chemical compund. The ingredients of this compound include capsaicin and allyl isothiocyanate, otherwise known as chili pepper and horseradish respectively. They're lacing your flamethrower with food spices.
  • Blast Absorption reinforces sentries with "polystyrene pieces [peanut-shaped variety]". Also known as packing peanuts.
• Failed a Spot Check: Downplayed. While prone Helldivers are much harder to detect than if they're standing or sprinting, enemies can still see them a respectable distance away, especially if they're on open ground with no shrubbery or cover. Using an armour with the Scout perk (reduces detection distance by 30%) can still let you sneak up right behind enemies, though it may not be the best idea to do so — you're not going to be performing any stealth takedowns on Devastators.
• Foreshadowing: As a result of the game's Live Service aspects, the devs have been (not-so-)subtly foreshadowing upcoming plot points, ranging from obvious (repeated comments about discovering the "true source" of the Automatons) to the much less so (mysterious shadow warships visible at certain angles on certain missions). Then there's been things like the CEO jokingly stating that Terminids can't fly (purely coincidentially around the time of first player encounters with Shriekers and their nests), and in-universe crackpot allegations of the Automatons colluding with the Terminids when the Automatons rolled out their own flying enemy, the Gunships.
• Forever War: Some hints of this. Very occasionally, on certain points of interest, you can find some very old skeletons wearing fairly modern-day looking BDUs and body armor. Which combined with talks about a 'less patriotic predecessor' of the Helldivers means that Super Earth has been at this for a very long time.
• Friendly Fireproof: So, very, Averted. If it kills the enemy, it can definitely also kill Helldivers. This is also actually the case for the enemy as well, and any enemy that uses Herd-Hitting Attacks is pretty likely to hit some of its allies between the Helldivers and it.
  Training Manual Tips: Friendly Fire isn't.
  • A notable aversion came from a glitch/malfunction with the Airburst Launcher which will detonate in the air if it senses an enemy in a certain range. The huge area of effect was already prone to accidents, but on release it counted friendly Helldivers and structures as valid targets meaning it would detonate on top of allies if you didn't realize it had this flaw. This got patched quickly however.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • As of mid-April 2024, a bug affecting some Automaton missions has led to the spawn rate for bot dropships and gunships being massively over what it should be; some players have reported less than ten seconds between gunship spawns, which essentially leads to an inevitable failure of the mission, as more gunships spawn than can be taken out with weaponry, leading to the reinforcement budget being depleted faster than you can say "Managed Democracy".
  • A major order issued on April 18th, 2024 called for the extermination of two billion terminids; due to a bug wherein each terminid kill counted for about three to the kill count, this was completed in under fifteen hours. While people still got their medal payout, several players complained about not being able to participate in the order due to obligations such as work preventing them from playing.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Despite pretty heavy indications that Helldiver training is genuinely only what's seen in the roughly-ten-minute tutorial before they are cryogenically frozen and then dropped into a mission, playable Helldivers are nonetheless fully capable of reliably using every single weapon they can pick up, calling down stratagems, and generally capable of not completely losing their shit...because that wouldn't be very fun.^note  There's also some implication that Helldivers have previous weapons training and physical conditioning, as the player character's skills with firearms handling, grenade throwing, and leaping into a prone position are all identical between the level cap and the second they do these things for the first time in the tutorial
  • Despite Terminids and Automatons both being intelligent factions who are highly capable of prioritizing critical targets, they will never attack the dropship during an extraction. Even as it mows them down to clear its landing zone. They are also generally polite enough not to directly attack anyone who has already made it aboard, even if a couple of seconds of fire from a Hulk's flamer would end things quite quickly for the Helldivers inside, though the odd Herd-Hitting Attack aimed at other Helldivers not currently in the Pelican may still put the seated Helldivers in the ground.
  • Artillery cannons can only load 5 shots period. Even though more than five rounds spawn around emplacements, and when rounds are fired new space opens up in the magazine for rounds to be loaded, the player will be barred from loading more than five.
  • Resupply crates will somehow perfectly stock the exact magazine you need when you pick them up. Even if you called it in at the start of the mission and subsequently replaced all your guns before picking it up. And it's still too small to carry more than half your total allotment of ammo.
• Genocide Backfire: OPERATION SWIFT DISASSEMBLY was meant to completely wipe the Automatons out. It turned out that they were just fighting the vanguard of the Automatons, who immediately followed with The Reclamation, a new offensive push beyond anything seen before.
• Genre Shift: The original Helldivers is a top down twin stick shooter, which controls not unlike Smash TV. Helldivers 2 is a third person shooter, with the camera hanging over the player's shoulder, similar to Resident Evil 4. That said, the narrative tone of both games are identical: As a Helldiver, you are an elite, yet expendable, soldier, who shoots alien bugs and robots, in a satirical world where you are fanatically loyal to the fascist government of Super Earth.
• Geo Effects: In the sequel, certain planets have certain weather conditions. They are usually a mix of both good and bad. Rain for example limits line of sight for both you and the enemy, while extreme cold throws off your aim but reduces heat buildup in laser weapons. High difficulty Terminid planets may also have Spore Clouds as a mission modifier, which obscures the drop pod map and personal radar. For all you know, you could be jumping straight into a heavy bug outpost with a Bile Titan and its Charger escorts.
• Godwin's Law: Super Earth propaganda usually refers to the Terminids as 'fascist'. Given that they're a Horde of Alien Locusts of unclear sapience who are only at war with the SEAF because humanity keeps slaughtering them for oil, this comes across as nothing more than a lame attempt by the Federation to pretend that they think fascism is something bad to be fought, rather than the driving force of their own ideology.
• Grenade Hot Potato: Helldivers can throw or kick Automaton grenades back with a quick tap of the Interact button. Aiming them is basically impossible and odds are they'll just skitter along the floor wildly, but it's better than standing on top of a live grenade.
• Guilt-Based Gaming: Your Democracy Officer gets downright passive-aggressive if you spend just a little too long browsing the Galactic War screen, mixing Dare to Be Badass challenges with admonishments that innocent lives are being lost with every second you dawdle.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Thanks to friendly fire being a thing, it is entirely possible for Helldivers to pull the classic example of this trope by blowing themselves and their squadmates up with their own explosives, ranging in scale from the simple hand grenade to the airdropped 500kg bomb and demolition Hellbomb.
  • Terminid Bile Spewers are not a result of the bugs rapidly evolving over the last 100 years. Instead, they are the result of Super Earth genetic engineering on the Terminids, probably to increase E-710 (oil) production. The fact that new mutations are apparently appearing as a result of exposure to the Termicide is "to be expected", according to the Shipmaster, and surely won't have any consequences down the line either.
  • Automaton outposts and bases have manned turrets that they can use to quickly shred any Helldivers caught in their sights. Helldivers can kill its operator and use the turrets for themselves against Automaton forces.
• Holographic Terminal: The main mission selection interface of the Super Destroyer is a big circular table which shows a holographic projection of the galaxy map or the planet your ship is currently orbiting. Most of the other interface and display systems seem to be more practical touchscreens though.
• Hostile Weather: One of the early updates for the game added weather effects that can complicate missions, including tremors (trips up players and enemies), meteor showers (falling space rocks that can hurt players and enemies), rainstorms (persistently obscures vision), ion storms (prevents the use of stratagems and the minimap), volcanic activity (similar to meteor showers, but the debris also lights players and enemies on fire) and fire tornadoes. These can work in your favour quite nicely though, as it's possible to see random turrets, fabricators, or nests get perfectly dead-center bullseyed by meteors, saving you the trouble.
• Human Resources:
  • Several pieces of randomly-generated terrain in Automaton missions strongly imply that they're rounding up humans, possibly for forced conversion into more Automaton soldiers. At the very least they're being put in cages and often mutilated, implying that - for all the fan favoritism - the Automatons are just as capable of committing atrocities as the Cyborgs were.
  • One PA announcement on the Super Destroyer goes as follows: "Too old to contribute [to the war effort]? Why not volunteer at your nearest bio-repurposing facility." While this may be more Alien or Animal Resources versus Human, the lack of any indication thereof should give pause.
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: One of the planets in the "eastern" quadrant of the Galactic War map is Hellmire. It is a scorching desert world which frequently spawns fire tornadoes. One imagines that Super Earth's colonization bureau must have a very slick marketing team to make a place like that sound ideal to settle down and raise a family in a prefabricated sufficiently sized house.
• Ignored Epiphany: One bit of NPC dialogue aboard your Super Destroyer has the speaker reflecting on how, by using the E-710 the Terminids produce to sustain their war effort, Super Earth is "using corpses to create more corpses." It almost sounds like she's on the verge of having a Heel Realization before she concludes "There's something satisfying about that."
• Immune to Bullets: Made a little more distinct than in the first game, where weapons are noted as having Light/Medium/etc. Armour Penetration capabilities and the deflection effects are more noticeable.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Bile Titans have four very big, pointy legs, and won't hesitate to use them to stab anything that gets on their bad side. Or that just happens to be underfoot at the time. Even other bugs aren't safe. Even more egregious, if you're unlucky, you might kill the Bile Titan, only for it's leg to hit you flush as it collapses.
• Incredibly Lame Fun: On board your Super Destroyer is an arcade minigame called Stratagem Hero. It's literally inputting various stratagem codes over and over and over again, without anything as basic as visual feedback or graphics. This could, however, be an In-Universe reason why the replacement Helldivers are so familiar with their equipment, as their games and entertainment were various forms of training.
• Incredibly Obvious Bomb: Automaton Contact Mines are big grey metal things with lots of glowy red bits all over. And yet they're still surprisingly easy to trip over in the heat of battle. Sometimes, by the Automatons themselves.
• Instakill Mook:
  • Terminid Bile/Nursing Spewers and Bile Titans can kill you if enough of their bile manages to hit you. Unless you have a shield and heavy armour, the amount required is not very much at all (and even with them, it won't take much).
  • Terminid Shriekers don't have an instakill attack while alive... but when they're killed, their entire body becomes a deadly projectile boosted by momentum and gravity. Due to how object impacts work, a swooping Shrieker's dead body can one-shot its intended target. Toned down in recent updates though.
  • Automaton Cannon Turrets, Mortars and Tanks can instantly gib you with a well placed shot. Their Rocket Devastators and Rocket Raiders are also notorious for sniping players with a single rocket from unexpected angles. Apparently most of this was due to a bug that caused Helldivers to take an explosion's damage multiple times, which has since been fixed; rocket devastators and raiders are now much more forgiving (especially if you have heavy armour with explosive resistance), though a tank turret can still atomize you with a direct hit.
  • Automaton Scorcher Hulks have two attacks: a circular saw, and a flamethrower. The saw is an instakill but because of at least one bug the flamethrower is more mixed; sometimes the flamethrower may deal no damage at all, sometimes it may set you on fire, and sometimes it may kill you instantly without visibly touching you.
• Interface Screw: Certain effects can also cause Shell-Shock Silence as the screen blurs and all noise is drowned out. It's most often caused by getting grazed or otherwise knocked around by a Charger or Brood Commander. Jamming (e.g. from an Automaton Stratagem Jammer, or an Ion Storm) will also Static Screw your stratagem icons and garble their names whilst it's ongoing.
• Interface Spoiler: The total number of primary and secondary weapons available in the Armory on launch noticeably outnumbers the number of weapons that can be unlocked through Warbond progress, indicating that developers plan to add many more. The galaxy map is also conspicuously large for the two factions present thusfar, and includes both Super Earth and Mars as potential locations.
• Invasion of the Baby Snatchers: Super Earth propaganda claims the Automatons kidnap infants in a couple places. It's unknown as of yet if this is Malicious Slander (as the Automatons' political agenda is freeing their Cyborg creators), or if they are actually abducting new potential Cyborgs to indoctrinate in their Dirty Communist ways. Another possibility is that despite how much they hate Super Earth, they're not going to kill children for the crime of existing and are getting the kids out of the way.
• Iwo Jima Pose: Parodied in the Helldiver recruitment video, where several divers impale a bug with a flagpole bearing Super Earth flag and enthusiastically celebrate with a chest bump.
• Jack of All Trades: The Autocannon support weapon is a BFG that fires potent medium-armor-piercing explosive rounds with moderate accuracy and excellent range. It's semi-automatic by default, but can be switched to full-auto if you really want to spray something (or a horde of somethings) with Powerful, but Inaccurate explosive doom. To further sweeten the deal, it has unusually deep ammo reserves for a support weapon, with ten rounds in its integrated magazine and enough spare rounds for five full reloads or ten half-reloads before you have to seek out a resupply drop^note as a comparison, the heavy machinegun you get as your first support weapon only has a maximum of two reserve reloads. This makes it capable of dealing with groups of light enemies, medium armour, destroying weak points of heavy enemies and even destroying buildings like shrieker hives, bug holes and bot fabricators^note fabricators require a trick-shot off of one of the vents or aiming through the open door from across the map. It even reloads with half-clips quickly so it can take advantage of slight lulls in battle better than other support weapons (and that's without a loader!). The main downsides are its manageable-but-sluggish handling, its exploding rounds being quite capable of killing other Helldivers without care, including the user, the slow reload animation if you empty the entire magazine, as well as requiring a backpack slot for the ammunition (which makes an autocannon user a bit of a Glass Cannon, since most backpack items they could otherwise wear are either partially or entirely defensive). Despite all this, it remains a reliable weapon that's pretty good against nearly everything, and is a common sight in Helldiver teams as a result.
• Jump Jet Pack:
  • A common Automaton unit is a jetpack trooper. Whilst they're quite fragile, their jetpack also has a nasty habit of violently exploding if it takes too much damage. These units themselves don't actually fly, but instead use their jetpack to leap into melee range so they can use their Blade Below the Shoulder on you, with predictably lethal results for the Helldiver on the end of that leap attack if they aren't careful with their aim or their trigger finger.
  • Players can also gain one, it's a great way of accidentally gibbing yourself, but equally great for escaping ravening hordes of Terminids. There's an achievement for ragdolling yourself whilst using it too.
• Level-Map Display: The game allows bringing up the minimap in the corner, zooming in/out, and placing navigation pins for other players to see.
• Luck-Based Mission: The Stratagem Jammer sub-objective on Bot-occupied planets can go one of two ways: either a squad pushes up onto it and has to manually disable the terminal before calling in a stratagem to destroy it, whether that be a Hellbomb or an Eagle 500kg... or, you get lucky, and a bot fabricator spawns in just the right position where, when it goes boom, so does the jammer.
• Mini-Mecha: The EXO-45 Patriot Suit. Slower than Helldivers on foot, but more heavily armored and equipped with much heavier firepower.
• Losing Your Head: Downplayed with some Terminids, which can still function for one last charge and attack even if their heads have been blown off, before dying shortly after.
• Mission Control: The Democracy Officer on your Super Destroyer serves as mission control. Not just for you, but for Super Earth as they're responsible for maintaining "democracy" on the ship and in the field. In a meta sense, there's also a channel on the official Discord server that has in-character dispatches from "High Command", providing information on the ongoing war effort and additional insights and commentary into events.
• Money Sink: The Tier 4 Super Destroyer upgrades each cost somewhere in the region of 20,000 requisition, 200 common samples, 150 rare samples, and 50 super samples. Released not long after an increase to the maximum rank (from 50 to 150), they're quite transparently there to soak up resources from dedicated players.
• Mook Chivalry: While it would be logical and simple for enemies to attack the Pelican transport when it arrives and/or touches down for Helldivers to extract, they never try to. Fortunately for the players, it seems to be invincible anyway. They also do not specifically target the Helldivers seated in it, though targeting Helldivers nearby it with a Herd-Hitting Attack can end up killing these seated Helldivers.
• More Dakka:
  • Automaton Heavy Devastators trade the slow-firing high-power Arm Cannon of the standard Devastator for a rapid-fire cannon to go with their armoured shield, making them incredibly dangerous to unprepared Helldivers. Two or three of them can lay down absolutely withering amounts of suppressive fire, to the point that returning fire is almost impossible.
  • A couple of weapons can have their firing mode changed. For the basic assault rifle this lets you toggle it into burst or semi-auto modes, but for the support-slot machineguns it's their rate of fire. You can either dial it down to make the weapon more controllable, or dial it up for More Dakka. The Stalwart's high setting in particular is 1100rpm. The Heavy Machinegun used to be able to set up to an eyewatering 1200rpm, but the max firerate was dialled down to a more reasonable 950 not long after it was released.
  • The first Sentry you can unlock is a machinegun. Not long after that, you can get a full on Gatling Good version.
  • The Patriot Exosuit solves problems by dispensing thousands of rounds per minute from an arm-mounted gatling. For anything bigger, it's got a rocket pod loaded with armour-piercing explosives.
• Mundane Made Awesome: The phrase "Shield/Sword of Steel" is usually a pretty ordinary one, but it'll seem a bit cooler when it's the title attached to your massive Super Destroyer. The preceding noun for the list of ship titles also includes job titles which would be a good bit more mundane in most contexts like Custodian, Comptroller, Elected Representative, or Ombudsman... but yet again, attached to a roughly half-kilometer long warship.
• Musical Nod:
  • A Cup of Liber-Tea, the sequel's main title theme has a short nod to the original Helldivers' title theme, at 30 seconds in.
  • The Stratagem Hero Mini-Game uses snippets of a retro sounding remix of the Helldivers 1 theme. When put together, you can hear the original theme.
• Nerf: The March 6, 2024 patch nerfed both the Breaker shotgun and the Railgun.^note The Breaker's magazine capacity was slightly reduced along with its damage per shot and its recoil was increased, and the Railgun's armor penetration capabilities were reduced in Safe Mode plus its damage was reduced against durable enemy parts, necessitating more skill-based use of the Unsafe mode for maximum effect.
• No Blood for Phlebotinum: The Terminids produce a substance called E-710 which is essential for Super Earth's Faster-Than-Light Travel to properly function. In the sequel, it's mentioned that Super Earth had managed to corral some broods into massive underground farms until some broke free and kickstarted the latest crisis.
• Oh, Crap!: The game adds more to this than the first with voice lines that range from 'cool headed professional' to 'about to have a psychotic break', depending on how stressed the Helldiver is. This can result in Helldivers screaming their lungs out when calling in reinforcements or essentially screaming propaganda to themselves in order to keep themselves hyped up.
• One Bullet Clips: Entirely averted - not only are the remaining bullets in a magazine discarded when you reload, they are discarded at the very start of the reload, so if you interrupt it before finishing (by, say, dodging, meleeing, or bringing up the map), your gun will be empty.
  • Rendered moot by the Punisher and Slugger shotguns, which reload one shell at a time. Given how long it would take to reload 16 shells into two empty tubes, it's more practical to top them off as often as you can unlike the detachable magazine-based firearms. Likewise the Senator revolver reloads one bullet at a time, making it painfully slow — offsetting its otherwise fairly high accuracy and power when used correctly.
• One-Hit Kill: The Spear is capable of downing a Bile Titan or Automaton tank in a singe hit, if the missile strikes the victim dead center.
• 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.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic: One of the fastest ways to defeat a Terminid Charger isn't to shoot the less-armored, glowing rear spot, but to break the armor off one of their legs and then shoot that leg. Doing so will kill the Charger faster than shooting it in the rear.
• Overheating: As in the first game, the flaw of otherwise infinite-ammo laser weapons is that they overheat and cool off over time; if you manage to max out the heatsink, it needs to be swapped out for a replacement - except for the Quasar, which always spikes to 100% and then requires several seconds to cool down again. Automaton bases also have various emplaced turrets that operate on similar principles (instead of needing a heatsink replaced, they just lock up and can't be used for several seconds), and can be used by Helldivers. Complicated by the fact that the Geo Effects of hot and cold planets influence heat generation, nerfing or buffing the effective capacity of energy weapons respectively as a result.
• Point of No Continues: Once the mission timer runs out, all stratagems and reinforcements become unavailable, and an emergency dropship is called in. Die before you get there, and the mission ends without you, although it's still a success if the primary objectives have been completed.
• The Political Officer:
  • Automatons have "Commissar" officers that can fire off flares to call reinforcements with lightning speed if alerted. It's not entirely clear if the Automatons themselves require the usual duties of such an officer to maintain party loyalty or not.
  • Helldiver destroyers are staffed with a "Democracy Officer" near the mission select station who informs the divers of attacks on Super Earth worlds and otherwise urges them to join the fray.
• Premium Currency: Super Credits, which are used to buy armors and helmets in the cosmetics store, and to unlock new Warbonds. You can find them in missions though, making it possible to earn any cosmetic or warbond simply by playing enough (though the pickup amounts are usually just 10 SC each where a Warbond usually costs 1,000, so you'll have to play a lot). Warbonds also typically have at least one Super Credit reward option per Tier, effectively reimbursing you some of your investment as you progress; the primary Helldivers Mobilize bond includes a total of 750 Super Credits spread across its tiers, whilst the Premium warbonds have only ~300 across their three tiers.
• Procedural Generation: Toned down from the first game, where all of the basic details about planets appear to be relatively hand-made, but the individual missions themselves still take place on randomly-generated maps with shared elements and predesigned points of interest (that may have semi-randomized sub-elements, such as one part might sometimes be a pool of water and other times it might be drained with a collapsed mineshaft, etc.).
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: It's taken a step further from the first game, as the bodytypes are merely described as 'Bulky' or 'Lean', and the voiceprints are just 'Helldiver Voice' with a number after them.
• Put on a Bus: The Illuminate are absent from the sequel, on account of having been defeated and disarmed (and their technology apparently used to enhance Super Earth's own Faster Than Light travel tech). Observant players will however notice that there is a conspicuously wide gap at the bottom edge of the galaxy map; the Terminids and Automatons were not placed directly opposite one-another, leaving plenty of room for the late arrival of a potential third front to the war. Players have also reported seeing ominous shadows of unknown warships against the backdrop, and of being sniped at by blue energy bolts during certain missions...
• Recurring Riff: Segments of "A Cup of Liber-Tea", the main theme, can be heard in multiple places. Most prominently, the loadout select, dropping, and successful extraction.
• Rewards Pass: The sequel's Warbonds, which are unlocked with Super Credits and progressed with Medals (acquired by completing missions, and through semi-rare in-mission pickups). All players start with the Helldivers Mobilize Warbond for free, and Warbonds don't go away once unlocked, offering various rewards split across several tiers that are unlocked by spending a sufficient number of medals in the prior tiers in that Warbond, allowing players to progress through them however they like. So far, a new warbond has been released on the second thursday of each month since launch.
• Ridiculously Fast Construction: Even if they're actively invading a planet, Automatons have generally already made a good amount of buildings and encampments by the time the Helldivers show up, and their already built foundries are churning out new soldiers ready to defend them. Justified Trope for the Helldivers' defensive stratagems, which were already constructed beforehand and are simply dropped onto a location using hellpods.
• 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.
• Same Character, But Different: The two factions we fight against are basically just the Bugs and the Cyborgs of the first game all over again, just changed a bit now.
• Screaming Warrior: Especially compared to the boisterous but still reserved Helldivers of the original game, the Helldivers in II have No Indoor Voice and will yell and scream every single thing they are doing. If you lay down sustained fire on the enemy for a few seconds they'll let out a cacophony of sound that is somewhere between laughing hysterically and crying. Very obvious with the first and second voice packs, with Erica Lindbeck and Yuri Lowenthal going all-out on the maniacal laughter.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Most shotguns are highly effective at realistic ranges and have decent pellet spread to kill a small enemy at a hundred yards. They instead suffer an entirely realistic shotgun drawback in that the pellet-based shotguns have no armour penetration whatsoever — so whilst they can rapidly reduce unarmoured enemies to nothing more than a pile of mulch, they can't do a damn thing to heavily armoured enemies unless you can find (or create) an exploitable weak spot. On the other hand, some shotguns like the Breaker Spray-And-Pray do indeed have a fairly extreme damage falloff (in the case of the SP, it's because it fires lots of small, low-powered pellets with little muzzle energy, and basically sandpapers enemies to death), while others like the Blitzer tesla shotgun have a hard maximum range that their special projectiles (a lightning bolt, in the Blitzer's case) can reach to, and are useless beyond that.
• Shout-Out:
  • There's a planet named "Klen Dahth II", a pun on "Klendathu".
  • You can actually name your Super Destroyer The Hammer of Dawn. Bonus points if you have the Orbital Laser stratagem to go with it.
  • The achievements in the sequel reference Alien, Monty Python, and Homestar Runner of all things.
  • Inside the Lacaille and Kelvin Sectors are the planets Lesath and Emeria.
  • One of the "reviews" that appears for items in the Acquisition Center is written by someone named Specctrei and reads as follows: "I'm [redacted] and this is my favorite product in the acquisition center!"
  • Of course the AT-AT-esque Factory Striders were re-deployed en masse on a snowy ice-planet.
• Situational Sword: Some stratagems are good for fighting one faction, but useless or poor choices for others. The flamethrower can make a nice Terminid flambé, but its short range means it'll be useless against the Long-Range Fighter Automatons - and setting the Berserkers on fire just means that you have flaming Berserkers trying to cut you in half. Conversely, the Ballistic Shield can easily keep you protected from the hail of laser fire from the Automatons, but will not do anything against the swarming melee oriented Terminids.
• Smoke Out: This is especially powerful against the Automatons, as smoke screens will prevent them from tracking and firing on your location. While it won't prevent the occasional lucky hit, it will still dramatically reduce their accuracy, and can cause them to stop firing and start advancing towards the smoke in an attempt to find any Helldivers. Smoke screens can even be used against melee enemies with the aid of terrain, as the smoke may cause the enemies to lose sight of Helldivers long enough for them to hide behind something else and keep out of sight.
• Snowball Fight: Stand still for a few moments in the snow on a suitably frosty world and you may get a prompt to make or pick up a snowball, which you can then throw. There's not really any situations in which this is particularly useful, but hey, it's there.
• Snow Means Death: The Battle of Marfark saw some of the most heated battle against the Automatons during the Reclamation since Malevelon Creek, as the bots concentrated all their attack power on the planet and deployed much greater numbers of Factory Striders than previously seen. Marfark also just happened to be an ice world ravaged by freezing blizzards.
• Space Sector: The Federation divides the space around Super Earth into named sectors (the Akira Sector, the Severin Sector, and so forth) each containing multiple planets. Unlike in Helldivers, these sectors aren't made up of randomly generated planets and have specific named locations within them.
• Strawman News Media: Appears repeatedly amongst other propaganda shorts viewable aboard the player's Super Destroyer. Appropriately, the news organization in question is even called "Strohmann News."
• Sterility Plague: The Crawl on Strohman News reveals that the fertility rate among citizens of Super Earth is 1.4%, and that's worth celebrating, because it's up from a previous low of 1.36%. It's unclear what, exactly, this is caused by. Though, since it's known that Super Earth tightly regulates procreation by requiring a permit for it, this low fertility rate may in fact be intentional on their part.
• Stuff Blowing Up: A staple of the gameplay in general (it would probably be easier to list the things that don't explode when they're destroyed), but also the specific theme of the Democratic Detonation warbond, which adds a crossbow that fires exploding bolts, a grenade launcher pistol, sticky thermite grenades, and a bolt-action rocket-propelled explosive sniper rifle.
• Subsystem Damage: Both Helldivers and their enemies can suffer from this.
  • Helldivers that have their arms damaged will be unable to aim properly, and will be unable to throw their stratagem beacons (and grenades) as far. Should their legs be crippled, they will move slower and lose the ability to sprint. If their chest is hemorrhaging, they will suffer Damage Over Time till they die or use a stim.
  • Terminids that have their legs destroyed will be forced to hobble on their remaining legs (except for Chargers, who die if a leg gets destroyed). For heavier armored Terminids such as the Charger or Bile Titan, a Recoilless round can destroy their armor and expose the fleshy bits to shoot at with regular bullets.
  • Automatons can have their arms blasted off, preventing them from firing their weapons, throwing grenades, slashing at you with melee blades, or signaling in a dropship. Beware that they can still kick or stomp you. Cyborg and Automaton tanks can have their treads blown up, immobilizing them, but beware; their turrets are still fully functional and capable of killing you. There's even an achievement in II for leaving a mission whilst an armless Hulk is still alive.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Enemies can easily perform Taking You with Me with their own dead bodies if they're moving too fast or are too massive. Being under a Bile Titan as it dies is asking to be crushed, and a Shrieker that's killed as it swoops at you can all too easily take you out with the force of its high-velocity dead body. One video circulating around also shows a Charger somehow being catapulted backwards on death (due to a physics glitch of some kind, most likely) and plowing into a Bile Titan, killing it instantly.
  • Shooting down Automaton Dropships can have all the destructive effects you'd imagine for anyone (or anything) that happens to be in the way as it's coming down.
• Super Wrist-Gadget: Helldiver armour has a wrist-mounted computer that serves as the dialling interface for stratagems, conveys situation information whilst on the Destroyer, and for the map whilst in missions. Automaton infantry units also seem to have a similar wrist-mounted interface that they sometimes pause and refer to. As an added bonus, if you mess around with the camera angles and your character position (easiest on the Super Destroyer), you can position the camera in someone else's model in such a way that you can see that the display reads 'Personal Hellpad System'.
• Take Cover!: One "Brasch Tactics" video advises this, providing a very clear indication that Helldivers are woefully undertrained despite their supposed elite status. Players should probably still do it, though.
• Take That!: The entire game is one to the futility and impotence of American imperialism, but special mention goes to the "Mission Accomplished" poster following the alleged victory over the Automatons. The phrase used and how flagrantly it was invalidated just two days later make it an obvious jab at the "Mission Accomplished" speech by George W. Bush during the Iraq War.
• Taking You with Me:
  • Assault Raiders have jetpacks that tend to explode on death, taking out any Helldivers near them. This is exacerbated by the Assault Raider's tendency to Jump Jet Pack into close range with the Helldivers to perform melee attacks.
  • Shriekers are Airborne Mook Terminids with a decently-damaging swooping attack, but their most dangerous trait comes when they're killed while doing so, as the momentum turns their entire body into a deadly projectile that might one-shot any Helldiver it hits.
• Tech Tree: Averted. There is no upgrade system for specific weapons and stratagems like the first game, instead having you collect various tiers of samples (common, rare, and super) in order to upgrade your Cool Ship, which in turn enhances various aspects - such as reducing the cooldown for all Orbital stratagems.
• Those Were Only Their Scouts: As it turns out, the initial Automaton forces that gave the players such hell on places like Malevelon Creek were just the vanguard fleet. Helldivers forces celebrating a crushing victory against the bots in the Valdis Sector were soon overrun by the main fleet, which is comprised of tens of thousands of warships and quickly retook several worlds, including Cyberstan itself. Super Earth really thought it would be that easy to keep Cyberstan down, did they?
• Triumphant Reprise: A slightly more bombastic remix of "A Cup of Liber-Tea" plays upon victory of a mission.
• Unconscious Objector: Even when disabled, many Automaton units will continue thrashing around as their cybernetic components try to execute the last commands they received. Very easily observed with the Berserkers.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: While the game is not a hardcore simulator, there's still plenty in the game that would make perfect sense following real logic that might be unexpected for a co-operative third-person shooter like it, such as players being unable to check their map and stratagems at the same time because both are read off of the player's left hand, or players being able to be killed instantly from being struck in the head. Players can not only suffer damage from falling, but even be killed or damaged from being knocked through the air or having things crash into them. Then there's reloading, with tactical reloads (that is, reloading before the magazine is empty) for most weapons preserving the round in the chamber - unless the weapon fires from an open bolt. Your shots might even be deflected against enemy armor due to hitting them on an oblique angle, which is the reason for sloped armor in reality.
• Unlockable Content: Equipment is unlocked by spending warbond medals on warbonds, and new stratagems are unlocked for purchase as you level up. Similarly, samples are used to upgrade your Super Destroyer, giving more incentive to players for taking on higher difficulty missions, as Rare and Super samples can only be found on difficulty 4+ and 7+ respectively.
• Weapon Running Time:
  • Offensive stratagems take anywhere from a second to twenty to call in. They're supposed to be aimed at the enemy, but in the chaos, a teammate can throw one down dangerously close, prompting a terrified scramble out of the way. Of particular note is the 500kg bomb, which has a one-second fuse—when it lands on the cliff you're on instead of the valley you aimed it at, you have just enough time for an Oh, Crap!
  • Artillery—whether the SEAF's, the automaton's mortars, or the bugs' bile spewers — takes many seconds of arcing through the sky to land.
  • In a volcanic eruption or meteor shower, you have just enough time to spot incoming rocks and dodge them.
• We Have Reserves:
  • Justified with Automatons, as they are robots with Ridiculously Fast Construction; literally any Automaton mission has at least some foundries that churn out troops ready to fight, so it isn't hard to realize the drops are from more established factories on the same planet.
  • One of the ship NPCs comments along the lines of "The existence of high fatality missions implies the existence of low fatality missions. And that's heart warming."
  • Another NPC will note that the cost of an average Helldiver mission exceeds that of a Liberty-class cruiser (with cruisers typically being larger ships than even the largest destroyers in real life).
  • You can have your character voice randomized to change each time you die on a mission, hanging a huge lampshade on the trope. To say nothing of how you can literally see the body of the previous "you" when the next "you" comes along.
• We Need a Distraction: Enemy patrols like to home in on the objectives once Helldivers are there. On higher difficulties, this will inevitably result in a Bug Breach or Bot Drop. However, there can only be one ongoing Bug Breach or Bot Drop. Therefore, it is highly advised that one Helldiver becomes The Bait and purposefully alert a patrol far away from the objective. This will give those at the objective a lot more time to work with.
• We Will Spend Credits in the Future: The primary currency is Super Credits, given out for completing missions and spent on equipment. Also mentioned in NPC dialogue where it is made clear it is also used as currency by the populace to buy things.
• You Have Researched Breathing: Some of the ship modules you can get include streamlining paperwork, providing hand carts, and applying superglue to your turrets to buff your stratagems.

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[This Stinger under investigation for treason]