Helldivers II - TV Tropes

"Super Earth. Our home. Prosperity, liberty, democracy, our way of life. But freedom doesn't come free.^note  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

Helldivers II is the long-awaited sequel to the 2015 top-down horde Extraction Shooter Helldivers from Arrowhead Game 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...

• 24-Hour Armor: Helldivers arrive at training suited up, immediately get stuffed into a Cryo Pod upon completion, and then are defrosted to deploy to a mission where they will most likely die within minutes. If they survive to extraction, it's back into the Cryo Pod until the next mission, meaning the only time they ever take off their armor is to change into different armor. Given the typical casualty rate and high mission tempo, it's a miracle if a Helldiver actually survives to spend twenty-four waking hours in their armor. Even if your Helldiver didn't go back into cryo by dint of you quitting the game while on your ship and with a surviving Helldiver, they're been walking around the ship in their armor.
• Action Bomb:
  • The B-100 "Portable Hellbomb" is a backpack-wearable hellbomb that Helldivers can carry and detonate near the enemy and/or an objective, though dropping the pack and running away from the 10-second fuse is optional.
  • The "Integrated Explosives" armor passive causes Helldivers to explode upon death, taking the enemy with them to the great ballot-box in the sky.
• Airborne Mook:
  • Terminid Shriekers are flying bugs that spawn in massive swarms from their nests as an optional tactical objective, or as random patrols if included as an enemy modifier in the mission.
  • Automaton Gunships spawn from towering factory structures occasionally found on the map, or as freestanding patrols as an enemy modifier, similar to Terminid Shriekers. These gunships have fusion blasters and rocket batteries on board and will aggressively apply them to any hapless Helldivers they lock onto until brought down.
  • Illuminate Watchers fly over terrain, giving them an advantage when it comes to locating Helldivers and keeping them within their sensors. Should the Watcher stay alert for too long, they call in Illuminate reinforcements.
  • Illuminate Elevated Overseers are flying variants of the Overseers with Jet Packs that grant them sustained flight around the battlefield. They ditch the basic Overseer's Boom Stick melee/ranged weapon and energy shields for a rapid-fire energy gun and the ability to throw grenades down at Helldivers.
• A.K.A.-47: Surprisingly common despite the Sci Fi design of a lot of the weapons.
• 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.
• Alien Invasion: The Illuminate are technologically advanced War of the Worlds aliens in all but name, complete with human abductions, UFOs, and tripod walkers that fire laser death rays.
• The Alleged Car: While the FRV averts experiencing the Every Car Is a Pinto effect and has significant utility as a rapid transportation tool, the state-mandated lack of seatbelts and the high learning curve (by actually requiring manual transmission and being a little slippery) can lead to rapid burnouts and Helldiver ejections from their transport.
• All-or-Nothing Reloads: Averted; reloading is done in stages. For magazine fed firearms, the phase of ejecting your magazine while your gun wasn't empty will leave a single round chambered that can still be fired. Likewise, if you're forced to cancel reloading right before you finish, all you'll need to do is cock the thing and then you're ready to go, though emptied firearms will take longer to 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.
• Ammo Resupply: The Resupply Strategem is a mission-provided Strategem that allows each Helldiver to call upon a Hellpod containing four supply boxes, which refills each player's ammunition, grenades, and stims. Additionally, the Supply Pack is a backpack Strategem that allows a player to carry supply boxes with them to supplement their team.
• And I Must Scream: It is implied that the humans who are converted into Voteless are at least somewhat aware of what has happened to them. The animations of idle Voteless seem to show them grappling with what they have become, while some death animations look like they are saluting you as you put them out of their misery. Even more disturbingly, players have reported hearing screaming in the distance even when there's no fighting going on.
• Anti-Air:
  • Automaton anti-air guns can be seen firing at any nearby Eagles on higher-difficulty Automaton missions, preventing Eagle stratagems from being used in a large radius around themselves. They're still vulnerable to non-air stratagems like orbital strikes or SEAF artillery.
  • Surface-to-Air Missile stations are an optional objective in Automaton and Illuminate missions. When activated they can shoot down Automaton Dropships, Automaton Gunships, and Illuminate Warp Ships within their attack range, preventing or heavily sabotaging reinforcements or buying space to reach an Automaton Gunship Fabricator. Unfortunately, whilst the Evacuate High-Level Asset missions have SAM sites near the generators, they appear to be purely decorative.
• Anti-Armor: Certain weapons deal bonus damage to heavily armoured targets or "durable" bodyparts. This means that weapons like the Railgun or Recoilless Rifle do relatively little damage to the Damage Sponge Automaton Berzerker (which has lots of health but very low armour) but do massive damage to Hulks when hit in the right spot.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Several features were implemented to relieve frustrations from the first game:
    • The entire squad dying does not cause a mission fail. Instead, the whole squad will redeploy near where the last player died after a short delay, assuming there are enough reinforcement charges left.
    • If the squad fails to extract (either by running out of reinforcements or not getting to the Pelican on time) but managed to complete the primary objective, the mission will still count as a win for the purposes of the Operation, though players will miss out on rewards.
    • The Resupply stratagem is a freebie that doesn't count against the four-stratagem limit, and there are significantly more ammunition spawns at points of interest in order to offset how frequently players ran out of ammo.
    • Dropped weapons, equipment and sample containers aren't be destroyed, so a player almost always has a chance of retrieving their kit after death, though they can still be lost if they fall out of bounds. Additionally, support weapons can be called in again on a relatively long timer, in case they are lost.
  • Mission-critical items that fall out-of-bounds will be respawned back at their point of origin in order to prevent a mission softlock. Likewise, the SSSD call-in that's required for some sub-objectives can be called in multiple times, in case the pod accidentally lands somewhere inaccessible.
  • If all players die within range of an Automaton Stratagem Jammer, the squad will redeploy outside the jammer's area of effect (rather than on top of where the last player died) in order to give the players a chance to recover their footing.
  • Players who join a game in progress will always be able to spawn once, regardless if the squad is out of redeployments or is experiencing conditions that would otherwise prevent spawning like Ion Storms or the mission timer expiring.
  • Respawn beacons thrown into lethal areas (out-of-bounds, deep water, off cliffs) will cancel out, rather than forcing players to drop to their deaths.
  • Eradication missions, the equivalent to the first game's Retaliatory Strikes, stop spawning after the kill quota has been met and Pelican-1 will immediately arrive instead of having the usual two-minute extraction timer.
  • Samples are required for ship upgrades that improve stratagems in various ways. The number of samples required to fully upgrade one's ship is quite high, so collecting them can be a fairly arduous task. Common and rare samples are found all around any given map, although rares only appear from difficulty level 4 (Challenging) onwards. Super Samples only appear at a specific location on each map - marked by a specially shaped rock - from difficulty level 6 (Extreme) onwards. The developers have made the task a little easier by guaranteeing that a small number of common or rare samples - dependent on difficulty level - will always spawn at the extraction point of any map. This makes it certain that divers who require samples will always be able to evacuate with at least a few of them, so long as they can make it onto the shuttle after collecting these.
• 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: Most explosive weapons can destroy enemy structures like Terminid Bug Holes and Automaton Fabricators. Basic buildings are more resistant, but can be taken down with explosive orbital/eagle stratagems. However, certain structures (e.g. Gunship Fabricators) are too durable to be taken down by either, requiring the use of a Hellbomb. Due to their dangerous nature, these stationary bombs have to be manually armed when called in close proximity to a structure, and take several seconds to explode once activated, but thankfully do not take up one of your four available stratagem slots in a mission and are instead provided to all team members.
• Anti-Trolling Features:
  • Arrowhead doesn't wish to disable friendly fire, so a few measures exist to prevent players from getting any ideas. Namely, Divers will always drop their support weapons and collected samples upon death and players currently seated in Pelican-1 during the ending extraction phase of missions won't get damaged by direct friendly fire. (Stratagems, however, are still capable of being an issue, and you can still be ragdolled out of Pelican-1 with a melee strike.)
  • To prevent players who are kicked—justifiably or otherwise—near the end of a match from having their time and potential samples wasted, the Escalation of Freedom update changed the rules so they are transferred seamlessly to a copy of the same game. This removes actual griefers from the lobby while giving said players the chance to finish the game legitimately.
• April Fools' Day: On April 1st, 2025, weapons while on the ship's bridge were given unusual sizes, acknowledging how some updates would accidentally mess with weapon scaling. This was especially noticeable with the Sickle the Senator, which became wildly oversized, and the Liberator, which was shrunk to Noisy Cricket size.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age:
  • The CB-9 Explosive Crossbow. The actual bolts do almost nothing, being incapable even of killing a single low-level Terminid on a direct hit. Instead their damage is almost entirely due to their small concussive blast. It was later given buffs that gave it a nifty ability to destroy basic enemy spawn points like bug holes and bot fabricators, greater explosive damage, and being made wieldable with only one-hand.
  • The Viper Commandos warbond adds a set of throwing knives capable of piercing through Automaton steel and Terminid carapaces and are good for instantly dispatching lighter-armored enemies quietly on one-hit kills. Canny players have also discovered these knives seem to bypass certain types of Deflector Shields, though this has yet to prove particularly useful.
  • Downplayed, the R-2124 Constitution is a bolt-action rifle that looks more at home in the trenches of the Somme than futuristic battlefields on faraway planets (being based on the real life M1917 Enfield). It's a ceremonial weapon given out to all Super Earth citizens when they reach the age of sixteen, to encourage military service.
  • Similarly, the R-6 Deadeye is a lever-action marksman-class rifle. Whilst it lacks a high-power scope, its raw firepower is comparable to the Diligence Counter Sniper, and its ammo reserves are comparable - with no risk of throwing away unspent rounds during a tactical reload. It was issued alongside the equally semi-archaic LAS-58 Talon laser revolver in the "Borderline Justice" warbond.
• Armored Coffins:
  • The Exosuits epitomize Super Earth's design philosophies. Though they are packed with amazing firepower they explode violently when taken down, and have no ejection of any kind. And while they can take more of a beating than any Helldiver could, they don’t last forever under concentrated firepower. It is possible to survive one exploding around you, but you will be set on fire, so... good luck with that!
  • Played for Laughs with the unlockable ship modules that “improve” the Eagle-1. While they do increase the firepower overall, basic safety devices like air bags and ejector seats are removed in order to make room for said firepower. It’s a testament to just how talented Eagle-1’s pilot is that you don’t have to worry too much about the fact you’re turning her vehicle into a death trap.
• Armor Is Useless:
  • Averted by armor sets, which impact overall damage taken from all sources at the cost of different speed and stamina increases/decreases depending on how much mass is packed on. Different sets also come with different perks that carry significant gameplay utility, such as carrying more grenades, taking reduced explosive damage, outright having a 50% chance to shrug off a lethal blow, etc.
    • Played straight, unintentionally, on launch due to a bug that caused Armor Ratings to be ignored, resulting in armor sets taking the same amount of damage regardless of weight class.
  • Played straight by helmets, which are purely cosmetic. They did originally have some minor impacts on stats, but this was fixed not long after Armor Ratings were made effective again.
• Art Evolution: The first game has a more cartoony, less graphically detailed artstyle reminiscent of games like Team Fortress 2 or Overwatch. Helldivers II swaps this out for much more extreme realism with its graphics.
• Artificial Brilliance:
  • The more drop pods hit an area, the more likely the enemy is to investigate to see what the hell is going on. Likewise, an explosion of any size is more likely to attract attention than gunshots. As a result, fortifying a position with defensive stratagems like turrets makes it more likely that the position will need fortification, because enemies will start to converge on it from everywhere.
  • Tunnel vision will get you killed, for any position can be flanked, and enemies will gladly flank you. They'll even send in heavy units as a distraction so that smaller, faster units can run around your killzone and hit you from behind. Terminid Hunters specifically try to flank you, even.
  • The enemy is well aware that they have unlimited numbers on their side and will use it to their advantage by rushing your position with small units to bog you down before bringing up heavy units to crush you. And if you happen to have a heavily fortified position that the enemy can't get to easily, they'll send in their fast medium units (the Charger for Terminids, Berserkers for the Automatons for example) to break your lines.
  • Automaton Troopers and Illuminate Elevated Overseers will throw grenades at Helldivers hiding behind cover to flush them out.
• Artificial Stupidity: Enemies' decision-making processes and pathfinding can occasionally bug and cause them to be seen standing around ineffectively. All enemies are also quite capable of killing each other with their attacks (to the point that crafty Helldivers can bait them into doing so) and the Automatons are also capable of blundering into their own mines, not that the Helldivers would ever know what any of that's like.
• Artistic License – Military:
  • The in-game ranks a Helldiver can achieve include variations of general and admiral, which are almost universally army and navy ranks and thus kept separate in real life. Additionally, admirals and generals are nominally equal in the chain of command, but you unlock General, 5-Star General, and 10-Star General long after you get promoted through the Admiral ranks. Then again, this is Super Earth, where Concepts Are Cheap. The highest ranks in the game being Private and Super Private, though, is clearly intended as a joke.
  • Helldivers graduate boot camp and are immediately given command of a Destroyer. Even more notable is the implication that every cryo pod containing a helldiver is technically in command of the same destroyer, and that when the Helldiver in command is reduced to a fine paste on planet the next Helldiver is unthawed and given command, deployed to complete the previous mission.
  • Despite ostensibly being in absolute command of the Destroyer, Helldivers can be overruled by the Democracy Officer to prevent them from deploying the Destroyer to chosen planets, typically planets that are either 100% liberated or lost causes. In fact, the Democracy Officer is treated more as the actual leader of the Destroyer, overseeing most of its functions, especially when the Helldiver is away on a mission. It's heavily implied they're the real power behind the Helldivers, as they watch their every move.
  • Further, Super Earth appears to field no other spacecraft except Destroyers (a Liberty-class cruiser is mentioned but is never seen). When Helldivers arrive to planets where SEAF is officially operating, the horde of starships outside your windows will all be Destroyers. No Cruisers(which are technically what Destroyers are supposed to be defending), Battle Cruisers, Carriers, or Battleships. All things you would expect to be critical at providing support to operations on the ground in a planetary invasion, at minimum for the SEAF troops you find inevitably dead in your AO. The Super Destroyer is also incredibly small and compact with a fairly small crew, only being able to house a single Pelican transport and Eagle fighter which would make it more akin to a heavily armed frigate.
  • There also appear to be no space-to-space battlezones, all operations Helldivers arrive at will only have their Spacecraft contested by ground-based Anti-Starship cannons, and all fighting will be infantry fighting with some mechanization and artillery support. Boarding actions are apparently nonexistent.
  • General Brasch (if he actually exists) is a Frontline General, which is a no-no in modern combat. What's more is that he's (supposedly) some kind of mega-Super-Soldier that makes Master Chief and the Nanosuit look like invalid pacifists, which would be for an NCO at best... but then again, Super Earth left behind things like "actual tactics" and "working chain of command" behind centuries ago.
• Ascended Glitch:
  • The Flamethrower being able to kill Chargers by burning through their armor (instead of the spray of fire deflecting off of it), and the Commando's ability to destroy bot fabricators without aiming at the vents, were listed as unintended behaviors, and were thus respectively changed and slated for removal in previous updates. However, due to their popularity and the length of time these weapons worked like this, Patch 1.001.100 buffed the Flamethrower to have a higher armor-piercing value and changed fabricators to be destructible through ordinary damage—effectively changing their mechanics to resemble their bugged (and more popular) states.
  • A coder from Arrowhead noticed that other developers and play testers were often saluting the flag during the Raise the Flag objective, and so quietly coded in a feature that makes the flag raise slightly faster when players are saluting it; 15% faster for the first, and then a smaller bonus for every extra player past that.
  • Emoting in the air was a beloved glitch not only because it would reset momentum and cancel out fall damage, but because it allowed a Helldiver to spend their possibly last moments mid-salute or prepared to hug the earth. Though initially removed, the ability was later brought back (without the fall damage modifier) on fan request, and would even be extended to landings from a Jump Pack.
  • Players quickly noticed that armours with the "Siege Ready" perk granted increased reserve ammo to most secondary and support weapons as well as their primary despite the perk description only saying primary weapons got extra ammo, and after some deliberation Arrowhead decided to side with the playerbase and make this a feature of the perk - though they have reserved the right to walk the change back should they find that it's causing issues elsewhere.
• Ascended Meme: Helldivers enjoys a vibrant community, which its developers often acknowledge in-game.
  • 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. Later, when the Creek was finally taken under Super Earth control, the President of Super Earth declared April 3rd to be known as “Malevelon Creek Day” in memory of those who fought and died on the planet, plus in real life all players who were active around that time were given an exclusive cape commemorating the event.
  • Two Major Orders acknowledged the community's months-long inability to earn, and later memetic aversion toward, the Anti-Tank Mine stratagem. The first was Operation Trolley Problem, where the Helldivers had to choose between liberating a planet to get the mines, or another to save Super Citizen Anne's Hospital for Very Sick Children. The other was a Mass Monster-Slaughter Sidequest, where the failure to accomplish the goal would be "punished" with getting the stratagem for free.
  • John Helldiver, a legendary community figure and famed Helldiver memed by the community that was capable of doing any task and clearing any mission, was revealed in the Patch Notes as the one responsible for the removal of the Heavy Laser Cannons on Automaton Hulk Bruisers and their subsequent replacement with the default Rocket Launcher once again on Automaton Factory Production Lines after the 63 Day Patch.
  • A joke about eating squid/calamari had surfaced since the squid-people Illuminate returned in the "Omens of Tyranny" update. A few days after the update, an in-game news segment featured a small section about Super Earth running studies on whether ordering calamari was patriotic or evidence of Illuminate brainwashing.
  • Fans have long requested shovel melee weapons in order to create "Kriegdiver"/Death Korps of Super Earth meme builds. Patch 01.002.101 would quietly add POIs where Helldivers dig for samples using abandoned shovels, and replaced some of the shovels in existing POIs with the new tool. Though they take up your support weapon slot, they're useful since they can actually entrench the ground (if only by about a foot) and can be used to knock the enemy senseless.
  • It is suspected that the B-100 "Portable Hellbomb" may have been inspired by one diver's brilliant idea for dispatching Stratagem Jammers.
  • While the legendary "Press F to Pay Respects" meme long predates Helldivers, members of the officially-supported Helldivers Discord Channel had spammed "F" en masse to protest over-moderation. Almost exactly a year after this incident, a free cape—the "Emblem of Freedom"—was released, commemorating the, "great Freedom Chant of 2-14."
• Attack Its Weak Point:
  • All humanoid Automaton units have either heads or face plates that, when destroyed, instantly kill the unit.
  • Automaton Hulks have large, glowing radiators on their backs that will kill the unit after "bleeding out” when destroyed, which comes with the bonus of said unit acting sluggish and having difficulty aiming in its final moments. Or you can destroy one of its legs and crush it with its own weight.
  • Automaton Reinforced Striders have side-mounted missiles which, if targeted, will explode and take out the entire unit.
  • Automaton Gunships and Drop Ships cannot fly any longer if even one of their thrusters is destroyed. Gunships have weaker armor but will fight back with guns, and Drop Ships only serve as reinforcement carriers that will crush/heavily damage their passengers if shot down in time.
  • Automaton Tanks and Turrets have glowing radiators that are protected by minimal armor, requiring medium penetration at minimum to hurt and destroy.
  • Played with the Automaton Berserkers, who have a large glowing section on their chest that is unarmored, and while the rest of their body is only covered by medium armor they have much higher health pools than average enemies. This was done on purpose to punish players who rely too heavily on medium penetration and higher to make up for shoddy accuracy.
  • Subverted by Terminids. While the fleshy, brightly-colored sacs on their enemies are vulnerable, they're not "weak" points so much as "not armored" points and don't deal the bonus damage one would expect. The actual weak points on heavy and elite units in general are hidden behind armor that has to be stripped with explosives or anti-tank weapons.
  • Illuminate Harvesters (aka Tripods) have small struts that connect their legs to their main body; destroying any one of them will cause the Harvester to collapse.
• Attack Drone: Helldiver arsenals include the AX-series "Guard Dog" rovers—autonomous flying weapon systems that are stored in Helldiver backpacks and fire at will, but can also be recalled if a Helldiver desires stealth. They come in several varieties that fire ballistic, laser, and chemical payloads.
• 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 were supposedly all 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 Firebomb Hellpod booster makes Hellpods ignite the area around their impact point in a ball of fire, turning every Hellpod into an adhoc napalm strike. A reinforcing Helldiver can even steer their pod for maximum damage, returning to the battlefield in a literal blaze of glory! However, the booster applies to all Hellpods, including supply and support weapons, and so introduces a major risk of friendly fire from standing too close to stratagems that are normally safe. Additionally, only reinforcement pods can be steered, and other Hellpod stratagems tend to have longer call-in times that make aiming difficult.
  • The Democratic Space Station (DSS), upon release, proved itself to be as awesome as it was unwieldy. Besides a passive bonus to liberation and defense campains, the DSS offers three main abilities: Planetary Bombardment, a massive orbital barrage that is deadly for enemies and helldivers alike; Eagle Storm, which continuosly provides strafing runs against enemies; and Orbital Blockade, which gives all helldivers the hellpod space organization booster without consuming a slot. This resulted in the DSS being tinkered with by Arrowhead for improvements, which reduced the time it takes to move the giant space station so Helldivers can react more swiftly to changing events on the battle map, and improving the abilities for reliability.
• 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 with full-auto fire ("Ahahahahahaha! HA HA HA HA")
• Badass Normal:
  • Citizens can be found at certain points of interest who were killed in the middle of burying their dead in the field. Occasionally, a dead Automaton Devastator will also be present if it's an Automaton contested or 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, and you can use it for your own purposes as well.
  • The titular Helldivers themselves, who are barely-trained ordinary human soldiers sent to battle powerful and implacable foes. While Helldivers are themselves backed by an array of powerful weapons and stratagems, even a single Helldiver is capable of clearing objectives by his or her lonesome and doing great damage to masses of enemies.
• 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 example is a planet pleasantly named Hellmire, but other examples do exist.
• Badass Fingersnap: The Helldiver in the intro Propaganda Piece performs one, timed with a Match Cut with him going from civilian to Helldiver, and the music transitioning to the game's main theme.
• Beam Spam: Many Automatons will fill the battlefield with ridiculous amounts of energy weapons fire. 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 various energy weapons like the Sickle, or by borrowing Automaton energy beam 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.
  • A mini gun was one of the most heavily requested weapons by the fan base, prompting Arrowhead to release the Double Edge Sickle, which can fire infinite amounts of energy beams at opponents which becomes stronger and gains higher penetration the more you shoot... at the cost of this only happening because all the safety guards were removed, and shooting it constantly will burn the Helldiver to a crisp if fired for too long.
• Beehive Barrier: Both man portable and deployable versions are available. The Shield Generator Backpack will project a golden bubble around the player that helps avert the Slowed state that comes from the otherwise Scratch Damage attacks of the smaller bugs, while the Shield Generator Sentry will deploy a very large bubble that's ideal for weathering incoming fire from Bots. The Directional Shield pack gives you a buckler-style wrist module that deploys a classic beehive barrier shield in your facing direction when you're aiming a one-handed weapon - with the added bonus that it's wide enough to protect your friends and lets them fire through it as well.
• BFG: Players have access to an entire class of support weapons that must be air-dropped as stratagems. In addition to Sentry stratagems, there are also man-portable heavy weapons like the Autocannon, Recoilless Rifle and the Quasar Cannon.
• Big, Bulky Bomb: One of the tools in the Helldiver arsenal is the Hellbomb, an orbitally-deployed explosive charge available in some missions that is as big as a human and used as a demolition charge to destroy various kinds of fortified installations. The SEAF, as a cost-saving measure, opted to require the bombs be armed manually rather than use a remote detonator or timed fuze. They also spawn on maps as defective drops which can be detonated with any gunfire or explosives. Not necessarily yours, either.
• Bigger Is Better: Due to being far larger than the man-portable support weapon version that the Helldivers use, the A/AC-8 Autocannon Sentry's rounds will never bounce off on impact and effectively damage targets even through tank-grade armor.
• 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 the ways in which it actively endangers them for dubious benefit (or the benefit of a select few) such as:
  • Employing children as young as 7 for the war effort.
  • Requiring government approval before any action that might result in a child.
  • Farming the Terminids 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.
  • Glaringly obvious inefficiencies such as utilizing front loading guns... on spaceships.
  • Lacking any built-in weather sensors or service on Super Destroyers, thus requiring them to pay for a subscription to a third party weather service.
  • Any given Helldiver mission costing more than a Liberty-class cruiser, which is potentially a bigger ship than the Super Destroyers the Helldivers use (as cruisers are typically a larger class of ships than even the largest destroyers in real life).
  • Perhaps the most obvious, knowingly continuing the Helldiver program despite knowing that the expected survival rates for Helldiver training are only a small 21.3%, with the program lasting less than a day and taking in around 48,000 trainees a day, meaning that an average of around 38,000 people die each day in training alone. By comparison, SEAF forces get a whole 72 hour training program. Meaning the supposed 'elite' forces are given far less training, presumably under the guise of being 'naturally better'.
  • In addition, the Cyborgs have been replaced by their creations, the Automatons and given 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.
• Bling of War: Several armor sets are covered in stylized gold accents and other stylish decorum.
• Black Knight: Ironically the Knight armor is this, in contrast to the other trope listed below.
• 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), yellow-green slime (Terminids), or cobalt blue ichor (Illuminate) 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 - though oil/slime/ichor may magically change to the other faction's splatter if you change which faction you're fighting.
• Blown Across the Room: Explosions or attacks might not kill players on their own, but they can cause them to fly through the air or into other objects to cause even more Falling Damage. Particularly unfortunate players may find themselves killed by being ragdolled straight into stratagem beacons or landing Hellpods that they would have otherwise consciously avoided.
• Boom, Headshot!:
  • The primary weak spot of all Automaton units (well, besides their vehicles) is the head. On the other hand, good luck getting those shots if they're alerted to your presence.
  • Zig-zagged with the Terminids. Heavy and Elite enemies like Chargers and Bile Titans can be killed quickly by exploding their heads with an anti-armour weapon, while many of their ground forces can survive for a short while after losing their head and charge forward faster than usual to try and kill you before perishing. But some Terminids who rush forward after losing their head have abnormally large heads as well, making them easier to shoot sometimes then their limbs.
  • By contrast, the Illuminate seem to have had the good sense to issue their Overseers with hardened helmets that can deflect low-power rounds entirely, requiring something like an Anti-Materiel Rifle to snipe their leaders.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Your starting primary weapon, the AR-23 Liberator, is a basic assault rifle with overall well-rounded stats in terms of both accurate long range shooting (which can be modified by changing the scope magnification and fire mode) as well as being a serviceable close range weapon, complete with a meaty forty-five round magazine. It excels at nothing, and its damage falters against medium armor as well as completely negated at heavy, but it’s nonetheless a serviceable firearm against the majority of infantry enemy units that doesn’t rely on a gimmick to be useful.
  • The starter Machine Gun support weapon has respectable damage, high ammunition capacity, and medium armor penetration, making it a perfect weapon for killing everything but the most heavily-armored enemies (and even then said enemies typically have weak spots that can be destroyed quickly using Machine Gun fire). A Helldiver with a Machine Gun can single-handedly kill dozens of enemies (even mid-tier elites that are resistant to primary weapons), freeing up their squadmates to focus on taking down high-threat enemies without harassment.
  • 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, while having the same damage against armored targets and objectives. Their disposable nature means not having to stress about ammunition management or losing the weapon after dying - just wait 60 seconds for another pair. It's also common for players to take advantage of the quick cooldown to stockpile multiple launchers around an objective, ready for anyone on the team to use in a pinch.
  • The humble Eagle Airstrike is mundane compared to orbital strikes but is considered one of the best all-rounder stratagems in the game. The bombs it drops have enough AoE to kill groups of enemies, enough damage to kill or heavily damage armored enemies (up to and including Bile Titans and Factory Walkers), and can reliably destroy most buildings and spawners, making the Airstrike flexible enough to handle any mission and enemy type. Its versatility is enhanced by rapid call-in time, easily predictable strike path, and short overall cooldown.
  • The Orbital Precision Strike shoots a single, high-damage projectile with respectable AoE and has an extremely short cooldown. It can be used to pop Automaton fabricators, Terminid nests, or landed Illuminate warp ships (even when their shields are up!), and destroy most secondary objectives along with heavy and elite enemies (or at least deal heavy damage to them). It's often overlooked for more fancy and destructive stratagems, and one patch note even explicitly noted that an additional cooldown buff was to help it stand out against the more "exciting" stratagems.
  • Many offensive stratagems like the Eagle Airstrike and Orbital Precision Strike have a metagame practicality in that they have some of the simplest input codes of all stratagems, making them easy to enter quickly under the stress of combat. In contrast, several defensive stratagems (e.g. turrets) are more complex, meaning it’s sometimes easier to make use of low cooldown offensive stratagems to deal with enemies.
  • 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 eventually cause them to break contact, which gives the players a chance to regroup, re-arm, and approach an objective from a different angle.
  • Smoke grenades and stratagems lack the direct destructive power of other more explosive options, but provide excellent utility in concealing Helldivers and civilians from enemy fire. In particular, smoke blocks line-of-sight for most Automaton units, disrupting their accuracy and forcing them to focus on your last known position. Experienced Helldiver teams can use smokescreens to great effect to break contact, reposition, or otherwise take the heat off themselves while they prepare more effective countermeasures. They can also be used to obscure defense objectives, such as the drill used to blow up Terminid nurseries, or hellbombs. A single smoke cloud can make enemies seemingly forget they exist, and attack something else instead.
  • Machine guns, including the Stalwart, Machine Gun, and Heavy Machine Gun stratagems and a few personal Helldiver firearms, have an adjustable rate of fire. While there's a certain appeal in turning your gun into a lead hose singing a mad prayer to the gods of dakka, the sensible option is more likely to be selecting the minimum ROF so you can actually handle the recoil well enough to hit something and don't empty your (often quite limited) ammo supply in a matter of seconds. This is more true the larger the machine gun gets, with the massive HMG being almost useless outside a few highly situational circumstances if you select its maximum rate of fire.
  • The B-01 Tactical is standard-issue Helldiver armor which comes with a yawn-inducing 50 extra armor. But then you check the numbers and realize that it offers the same protection rating as heavy armor without any of the drawbacks. It may not have an exciting passive, but at the end of the day it is an armor available from the get-go with an excellent protection to speed ratio which will always be useful no matter what you're fighting.
  • Its heavy equivalent, the B-27 Fortified Commando, tacks on 50 extra armor to the default heavy standard of 150 armor. It's not fancy and moving around can be a little slow, but in defense and solo missions, it's useful to have extra padding.
  • Stealthing objectives, especially on the Automaton front. Sometimes, the enemies spawn in a pattern around the objective that lets you prone/crawl your way to the terminals, letting you input commands without having to deal with the potential of an enemy reinforcement drop or a fight. The Automatons in particular have several objectives they leave hanging that can be completed by sneaking nearby, dropping a hellbomb out of their sight, arming and destroying it all without having to fire a single bullet.
• Border Patrol: If you stray too far past the map's borders 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.
• Breakout Character: Not a character, but an entire planet. In Helldivers, "Malevelon Creek" was but one of dozens of randomly generated names a planet could have with no more thought put into it. Then the name was assigned arbitrarily to a jungle planet in the Severin sector in II, which quickly became an infamous Automaton battleground in the early days of the game and garnered it the nickname of "Space Vietnam". Subsequently after a huge massacre and loss on the planet it would receive a Major Order dedicated to liberating just it, memorial capes issued to commemorate the battle and those who fell upon it and an entire day of the year dedicated to remembrance of the battle that took place on it, with "Remember Malevelon" becoming a common Helldiver war cry.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Downplayed. The Killzone tie-in hands you a set of Helghast armor that gives a flat 50% resistance against all elemental damage, as well as an assault rifle and SMG with more rounds than the default AR and SMG you're issued. However, given that you're never fighting multiple factions at once, it's better to just get armor specifically for one element, because they're guaranteed a 90% resistance against one element. Additionally, the Killzone weapons have modest drawbacks alongside their benefits, so they're not really straight upgrades over their peers (and the SMG was a freebie, so it's not even bribing!).
• Broken Armor Boss Battle:
  • Terminid Chargers and Impalers are covered in armor that is only vulnerable to anti-tank and incendiary weaponry, but with an exception. The armor on their legs and sides can be stripped by high explosives to reveal orange, vulnerable flesh that takes massive bonus damage from even light penetration weaponry. And should their chest armor take heavy damage and strip off, it will similarly be vulnerable to conventional weapons.
  • Terminid Bile Titan legs are invulnerable, but stripping their chest armor leaves them vulnerable to bonus damage from small-arms fire.
  • Automaton Factory Striders have side armor plates that can be blown off to expose weak points.
  • Illuminate Harvesters lose their shield permanently if the top or bottom prong on their core body is destroyed.
• Bubble Shield: The Shield Generator backpack and sentry stratagems create Beehive Barrier shields around a person or position, respectively. Illuminate Harvesters - their large, tripod walker units - are also protected by one.
• 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 stream of bile at close enemies, or slash them apart with their claws.
• Bullfight Boss: Terminid Chargers are similar to Bug Tanks. While they can track you better, they can also be stunned for a brief but significant duration by baiting them into a large object that leaves them vulnerable.

• Calculator Spelling: In the backstory for the game, the Terminids broke out of E-710 (If you rotate '710' 180 degrees, it looks like "OIL", which is exactly what it's an allegory for) farms. A Major Order later resulted in the Divers rescuing 4311 (HELL) patients from a children's hospital under threat from an Automaton invasion, which the development team chose to celebrate with a real-life donation of $4,311 to Save the Children.
• Can't See a Damn Thing: Desert and tundra planets will cause inclement weather conditions of a sandstorm/blizzard respectively that reduces visibility for everyone on the battlefield. Other planets may have dense fog; it’s not as visually impairing as the sandstorms or blizzards, yet still limits visibility by a good margin.
• 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.
• Captain Ersatz: The weapons contractor that produces the "StA" series of weapons is called "Stål Arms", meant to be an obvious stand-in for Helghast weapons manufacturer Stahl Arms from Killzone, since the weapons come from a Crossover between the two games^note .
• Captain Obvious: Several of the loading screen tips

  'Tip for Success-Try not to die!'

• Car Fu: The FRV might not have any armaments for the driver, but that doesn't mean they can't cause some damage with it anyways! Or at least try to - most enemies have enough health to resist being flattened immediately.
• Chain Lightning: Tesla Towers and Arc Throwers can electrocute multiple enemies with each shot, and the Circuit Expansion upgrade on the Super Destroyer allows the arc to chain to an additional target. The lightning bolt does not descriminate between enemies and friendlies when chaining, and the Tesla Tower is as prone to friendly fire as any regular Sentry.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome:
  • To say nothing of the Meridian Black Hole, created through weaponized Illuminate Dark Fluid, which looks suspiciously like an Illuminate portal and emanates a strange sound akin to demented whale song. And as of Liberty Day 2184^note , players have noted — with some measure of impending dread and alarm, that the demented whale song sounds are getting louder and there are new sounds coming from the hole too. Ones that sound like growling and screaming.
  • The Illuminates were absent from this game, 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 noticed that there was 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. At the time players also reported seeing ominous shadows of unknown warships against the backdrop, and of being sniped at by blue energy bolts during certain missions...
    • As of the Omens of Tyranny update, somehow the insidious Illuminate returned and make no mistake, they want payback on Super Earth for a century of xenocide and exile. Oh, and pay no attention to the fact that Meridia has changed colour and appearance (it's now a much more vivid blueish-purple with the exterior much more 'fluffy', looking like galactic arms), rather than the sharp, clean appearance it had around the time it was collapsed.
• Claiming Via Flag:
  • In the "Spread Democracy" mission type, your squad is tasked with going to designated points on the map, calling down a Super Earth Flagpole, defending it while a drone plays the Super Earth anthem and raises the flag while said drone also watches the whole spectacle, likely giving the video feed back to Super Earth’s government for later usage as propaganda^note . Additionally, enemy forces react extremely negatively to the flag raising, and will immediately swarm the flag's location when it starts raising. Not even the threat of launching an ICBM at their main forces generates such a response.
  • Another variant shows up in the Reclaim Colony mission type, introduced with the Omens of Tyranny update. This involves going into a colony (whose populace appears to have been almost fully converted into mindless Voteless, save for the occasional bunker full of survivors in need of evacuation in some missions) and raising a flag in one of the decorative park areas, as well as taking out the nearby monolith the Illuminate are using for unknown purposes in the area. While the flag raising is still a symbolic gesture designed to use as propaganda, the Illuminate’s hatred for Super Earth causes them to storm the area en masse to destroy the flag in order to crush the hopes of Super Earth’s citizens.
• Close-Range Combatant: Zig-zagged. The Terminids primarily rely on swarm tactics to close the distance and rip their prey apart, keeping ranged options to their Bile variant forces. Automatons are mostly ranged with limited melee, but have chainsaw wielding Berserkers to rush at you. The Illuminate are an even mixture, using the Voteless to swarm you while Overseers shoot you from a distance, but grounded Overseers have no problems beating you with their gun staff either.
• Color-Coded Armies: The various factions all have a primary color associated with them.
  • Super Earth: Light blue
    • Helldivers: Yellow
  • Terminids: Orange
  • Automatons: Red
  • Illuminates: Purple
• Competitive Balance: The Expendable Anti-Tank, Recoilless Rifle, Spear, Commando, Quasar, and Wasp all have roughly the same role (blowing up tanks and armoured targets) but have differences that set them apart and means that there isn't necessarily a "best" choice of the lot.
  • The Expendable Anti-Tank provides two single-shot launchers on a one-minute cooldown. It struggles against large numbers of targets at once, the disposable nature of the launchers makes them flexible to use, easy to share, and dying while holding one isn't a major setback. While waiting around at an objective, the team can accumulate an impressive number of EATs for when the heavies finally arrive.
  • The Recoilless Rifle can be reloaded up to five times with a backpack that replenishes via common ammo pickups. When assisted by another Helldiver, the reload is almost instant and the operator can engage multiple armored targets quickly, but doing so requires complicated coordination, without which the weapon has an extremely long, vulnerable reload animation. Furthermore, if either the launcher or backpack is lost, the weapon is useless until the eight-minute cooldown expires to call in another.
  • The Spear deals 25% more damage and has superior armour penetration compared to the Recoilless Rifle, ensuring that if it hits something it will kill it, but its ammo pack has only three reloads and it requires a solid lock-on in order to do its job - which costs precious seconds, much like the charge time of the Quasar below.
  • The Commando is a disposable like the EAT, also with a relatively short cooldown. What sets it apart is the fact it holds four shots in a single launcher and it features (optional) laser guidance. It's the weakest of the lot, but the guidance makes it a bit more user-friendly.
  • The Quasar has infinite ammunition, but has a three-second charge-up time that requires more careful aim and each shot has a 15-second cooldown time. As a result, it has fantastic long-term endurance but struggles even more than the EAT-17 against multiple targets, and if lost takes eight minutes to get a replacement.
  • The Wasp is a seven-shot launcher with direct hit and airburst modes, and is mostly designed for taking out heavy/armoured infantry rather than tanks. Like the Recoilless and Spear it uses a supply backpack (with four shots). It can't lock onto the smallest infantry units, but it can lock onto smaller ones than other launchers and will take out Illuminate Overseers in a single hit. It excels at taking out Automaton Gunships in particular.
• 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:
  • Several mission objectives are retooled versions of ones from the original game:
    • SEAF Artillery and SAM sites are "Repair and Fire Artillery" and "Activate SAM Site" respectively, though they're now optional objectives that actually provide a tactical advantage on the battlefield (Artillery gives you essentially five uses of an extra Stratagem that isn't affected by debuffs, and SAM sites will shoot incoming airborne enemies and ships out of the sky).
    • "Conduct Geological Survey" is the same as in the first game but with extra steps, and the geological drill can no longer be destroyed.
    • "Launch ICBM" is a more complicated and elaborate version of "Activate and Defend Launchpad", and like "Conduct Geological Survey" the rocket itself also can't be destroyed.
    • "Spread Democracy" is a more blatantly silly and farcical version of "Capture Area", both of them being a Claiming Via Flag objective (though the flag now doesn't massively slow down in raising if there are enemies nearby, they'll only prevent the objective completing at the very end).
    • "Retrieve Recon Craft Intel" is "Retrieve Black Box" combined with elements of II's unique "Retrieve Valuable Data" mission.
    • "Evacuate Priority Citizens" is a reworked version of "Escort Survivors", now being about protecting unarmed civilians at a static location as they escape to fill a quota rather than escorting at least one survivor to a safehouse somewhere on the map (with how big and chaotic levels are in II, a more traditional Escort Mission would be a huge pain in the ass).
    • "Activate Oil Pumps" is the old Bug-exclusive objective "Activate Oil Extractor" (even strangely still referring to E-710 as "oil"), but much more labor-intensive, as you now need to actually connect the pump to an overhead shuttle and extract it from the earth rather than just turning the pumps on and walking away.
    • Eradication missions are Retaliatory Strikes, but with the amount of enemies you need to kill massively pared down so that they're much shorter missions overall.
  • Numerous returning weapons and Stratagems from the first game are new iterations on the same model of equipment and have an appropriately new number and/or designation to match (e.g. the EXO-45 "Patriot" mech is the latest version of the old and familiar EXO-44 "Walker").
  • Dialogue from the destroyer crew and in-game news announcements explains that, since the end of the Galactic War, the Cyborgs have been working in reeducation camps on Cyberstan, and that the Bugs have been contained on E-710 farms, which aligns with the victory screen upon each faction's defeat in Helldivers 1.
  • As part of the effort to destroy the Terminid supercolony, Super Earth scientists have been developing a superweapon called "Dark Fluid" which was recovered from the Illuminate from the previous war.
  • 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.
  • For Liberty Day 2024, the original default armor from Helldivers returns (renamed the DP-00 from the Mk. 5 "Tactical"), as does its famous Joke Item, the Constitution Rifle (renamed the R-2124 from the M2016)^note .
• Cool, but Inefficient:
  • The Orbital Railcannon Strike is a cool-looking stratagem where the Super Destroyer shines a targeting laser on the biggest thing near your call-in ball and then snipes it with the Destroyer's main gun. Except it doesn't always pick the right big target, doesn't do enough damage to guarantee a one-hit-kill on certain enemies (or it front loads all its damage in a single hit, and thus can be stopped cold by a shield), and has a long cooldown that doesn't keep pace with the rate that large enemies are encountered.
  • The M2016 "Constitution" Rifle, a ceremonial bolt-action rifle present in the first game, was a much-requested weapon that was given for free to all players on 2024's Liberty Day. While it has decent damage and medium penetration, it lags behind other primaries due to its slow rate of fire, small internal magazine and sluggish reload. In addition, trying to bayonet your enemies, no matter how amusing the idea is, often has predictable results when you're facing murderous bugs with sharp claws, angry gun-wielding robots, and vengeful 7 feet tall squids.
• Cool Car: The Omens of Tyranny brought Helldivers the Fast Recon Vehicle, or FRV, a 4x4 all-terrain vehicle that serves as the game's answer to certain other iconic all-terrain vehicles. It bears a reloadable heavy machinegun on a back pintle mount (with 360-degree rotation) and three passenger seats, so it could theoretically carry five people.
• 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 to kill humanoid Automaton forces is aiming at their 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.
  • You don't get a say in “Managed Democracy” — computers that are totally not tipped in favor of a government that forces its citizens to hope they get decent housing and a chance to see a doctor in their lifetime will decide it for you! ANY QUESTIONS ARE DEEMED DISSENT AND WILL RESULT IN PERSECUTION OF YOUR FAMILY, CITIZEN.
  • Humanity is engaged in a Forever War against three implacable foes, none of whom show any hesitation whatsoever in visiting horrific atrocities upon both soldiers and helpless civilians. This is not just propaganda, as players can easily observe the brutality shown by each faction in any given mission.
  • It's implied that the Automatons' vision of Glorious Communism is just the flip-side of Super Earth's — fresh-faced recruits thrown into the horrors of war after being blasted with propaganda to kill the other side's civilians. They've burnt entire colonies alive.
• Crippling Overspecialization:
  • The armor sets in the Cutting Edge Premium Warbond come with the Electrical Conduit perk which reduces electrical damage by 95% and even enables players to use themselves as a target to spread arc lightning to enemies. However, the Terminids and Automatons do not use electrical weapons, so against those forces the armor sets only protects against friendly fire - and if no Helldivers brought arc weapons then the perk is redundant. This makes Electrical Conduit armor a safe pick only against the Illuminate who have a few electrical weapons and their own Tesla Towers.
  • The Orbital Napalm Barrage bombards a large area with napalm for half a minute (with flames that last even longer) with a recommended clearance of about 65m. Because the flames last long, and they cannot destroy structures, it’s somewhat impractical to use on offensive missions like Blitz, and can cut off escape routes if you’re not careful. However, it shines on defensive missions like Spread Democracy (aka Raise the Flag) where you must hold an area against enemy forces, creating a large area of denial against ground troops that last for a considerable amount of time, letting you focus on other areas unless a heavy/elite enemy spawns in the flames.
• Crossover: In late December of 2024, a collaboration with Killzone 2 was unveiled, allowing Helldivers to dress up in the sinister Gas Mask Mooks outfits of the Helghast infantry and use their signature StA-52 Assault Rifles. Because, y'know, the Helghast were also largely expendable grunts working for a malevolently fascist human faction.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The infamous Fall of Malevelon Creek event in February 2024. Despite the playerbase'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 Off the Branches: Obviously, Super Earth hasn't exploded like it did whenever the Helldivers of the first game failed... or has it?
• Cutting the Knot:
  • Shutting down Illegal Broadcast towers is intended to be done by completing an input-arrow minigame at the tower's console, but players found that it's quicker to just destroy the tower with heavy penetrating/explosive weapons or stratagems.
  • Automaton Stratagem Jammers usually need to be deactivated through a console at the base of the tower before they can be destroyed. Since the purpose of these jammers is to block stratagems, it's not possible to immediately call down an airstrike or artillery barrage to blow them up. However, the SEAF artillery installations sometimes found as secondary objectives are unaffected by its jamming. It's possible to blow up the jammer from distance by dropping an appropriate shell from these guns on it; for example, a mini-nuke.
  • Automaton Orbital Cannons are typically destroyed by Hellbombs, but they have complex inputs to summon them and take time to arm, which can be a problem when murderous robots are converging on your position en masse. If you are lucky enough to find a SEAF artillery installation and armed it with a mini-nuke you can instead use the mini-nuke to destroy the Orbital Cannon(s), which is both easier to input and can be flung from a safe distance.
• Cycle of Revenge:
  • The Automatons indiscriminately kill all humans they find in their war against Super Earth; their outposts have cages full of corpses, and during extraction missions they have no qualms in shooting unarmed, cowering civilians. However, they see their war as an existential war of liberation against a fascist superpower that has enslaved their Cyborg makers for a century. But, the Cyborgs were enslaved due to the escalation of the Galactic War, which itself started due to Cyborg extremists (allegedly) bombing Super Earth... which, in turn, was because of Super Earth oppressing Cyberstan's workers to endure inhuman conditions.
  • In a meta sense, evidence of Automaton war crimes has driven playerbase memes and justifications for exterminating the Automatons once and for all.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • While the gameplay and tone are largely the same, Super Earth's dystopian corruption is much more explicit than in the original game. Furthermore, the shift from isometric to first-person view, coupled with increased graphical fidelity, means that the arcadey violence of the first game is seen in harrowing, close-up detail, with Helldivers screaming in panic and pain as they take damage.
  • The Illuminates in the first game seemed to be an enlightened Proud Scholar Race who were not the aggressors in the war against Super Earth. Come their return in II, it seems a century of xenocidal war and exile from the Milky Way has really done a number on their culture.
• 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 shared pool of limited respawns (which only recharges after the last is used, and even then very slowly). 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.
  • Typically, a freshly-dropped Helldiver spawns in with half-full ammunition, grenades, and stims, requiring a resupply to top off, but with the "Hellpod Space Optimization" bonus Helldivers will spawn with full supplies. This negates the downside of dying, and sometimes making it practical to intentionally die to get a resupply along with the chance to kill a large enemy with your drop at the same time.
• 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.
• Deconstructive Parody: A lot of the game's comedic world building comes from taking common gameplay conceits completely at face value and justifying why a society would be structured to include them. The most common answer seems to be "that society is extremely dumb."
  • With This Herring: The player starts the game with only basic equipment because Super Earth's bureaucracy is either obstructive or corrupt (or both). You have to acquire your own war equipment in-universe to the point that even your ammunition is crowdfunded rather than provided by the government. Some of the ship upgrades you can buy exist for no reason other than cutting through unnecessary red tape. They'll even make you buy weather data that any modern First Worlder would have access to for free - much less the government's soldiers.
  • You Have Researched Breathing: Super Earth is both callous and incompetent and doesn't even provide their warships with bare essentials. Items any First Worlder today can buy cheaply at their local supermarket like superglue and packing peanuts are considered bleeding edge and nonstandard technology on Super Earth's warships. Also, one of the upgrades you can buy is literally just giving your crew meth.
  • It's Up to You: Super Earth's fortunes in the war are entirely dependent on the actions of the players. They have no military of significance besides the Helldivers (the SEAF are barely mentioned or seen), yet also no real chain of command to make them do anything. If players decide to screw off and farm one enemy front even when a Major Order is to defend a planet on another front - well, Super Earth just loses that planet. The system of depending solely on the player while giving them total freedom instead of developing actual institutions means Super Earth's war effort is a disorganized disaster.
  • Mooks: There are a seemingly-infinite number of expendable goons for you to kill because Super Earth is constantly making enemies who they then deem Always Chaotic Evil (even when they're not) to justify their extermination. This applies figuratively (e.g. picking a fight unprovoked with the Illuminate), and in one case literally. The Terminids are only widespread because Super Earth is literally farming them, seeding them on a bunch of their worlds and giving them mutagens to make them breed faster. The stated reason is so they can harvest their blood for starship fuel, though in-game dissident broadcasts contend that the real reason is to justify having a war at all (which of course benefits a fascist militarist regime).
  • Cooldown: The ship modules offer various comical explanations for why stratagems have such long cooldowns, ranging from "the crew have to fill out new forms every time they fire one" to "the spaceship guns are literally muzzle-loaded like in the Age of Sail."
  • Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Your "respawns" are actually just new Helldivers taking your place after you die, which is barely an issue in-game because Super Earth goes through their soldiers like copy paper anyway (their training has an 80%+ fatality rate. and the in-universe average lifespan of a Helldiver after deployment is two minutes).
• Deflector Shields: Available to the Helldivers as personal bubble shields, arm-mounted projector bucklers, and static dome generators, and commonly used by the Illuminate to protect their Harvesters and landed Warp Ships. They're permanently visible, and color-coded for your convenience: yellow-gold for the Helldivers, and blue for the Illuminate. Illuminate shields also become very wavy and turn reddish-purple when close to failing.
• Degraded Boss: The "Elimination" mission type involves killing high-threat enemies which, at higher difficulties, can be found in routine patrols or wandering around the map.
  • "Heavy" enemies (Terminid Brood Commander, Automaton Striders) are bosses at Level 1, alarm enemies at level 2, and regular patrol spawns at level 4.
  • "Elite'' enemies (Terminid Chargers, Automaton Hulks) are bosses at Level 3, alarm responders at Level 4, and patrol spawns at Level 6.
  • "Boss" enemies (Terminid Bile Titans, Automaton Factory Walkers) are bosses at Level 4, rare alarm spawns at Level 5, common alarm spawns at Level 7, and static map spawns at Level 8.
• 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 Support Weapons 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 SG-225IE Breaker Incendiary shotgun fires buckshot that sets enemies on fire, and thanks to the wide spread its very effective at taking down whole mobs of flammable small-medium sized infantry — the Terminids most noticeably. It’s for those same reasons that friendly fire is easy to commit by accident, but thankfully the individual projectiles themselves don’t inflict high damage, yet they will set teammates on fire. Make sure to watch your sides carefully when using this primary firearm.
  • Team Reloading seems easy at first: as long as you're carrying a backpack compatible with your teammate's support weapon, you just need to click a button and you'll help them reload their weapon faster. It gets complicated when you consider that your team reload buddy needs to carry a compatible backpack to help you (meaning they will either run the same support weapon as you, making your squad a little less versatile, or you'll have to hand them your own backpack, which will leave you unable to reload if your teammate is away or dead), not to mention the fact that sticking to a teammate in a bad position will turn you two into sitting ducks since team reloading slows you down. A well-coordinated pair of helldivers, on the other hand, will make mincemeat of the enemies of democracy with a rapid barrage of anti-tank, cluster, flak and heat-seeking rounds, and can even turn the autocannon into an almost-endless, rapid-fire death machine^*. Add in a third helldiver with a supply pack keeping everyone stocked and your enemies won't even stand a chance.
• 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). It is implied their propaganda machines are just the flipside of Super Earth's.
• Disproportionate Retribution: As noted under Border Patrol, staying too long out of bounds brands you as a "traitor". The ensuing punishment? Immediate barrage of 380mm shells on you until your confirmed death. As noted in other sources, orbital barrages are insanely expensive to call out, so your superiors doing this on a whim shows what lengths they'll go through to keep their soldiers in line.
• 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 . 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.
• Double-Meaning Title: The "Urban Legends" warbond is both named after how it centers around gear useful in Urban Warfare, as well as how its release coincided with the return of the Illuminate to the galaxy, which had been a popular Urban Legend of Zelda among players up to that point.
• Dramatic Wind: Invoked - apparently the Super Destroyers will have their air conditioners going pretty fiercely after a successful mission, 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.
• Driving Stick: Driving the Fast Recon Vehicles added in Omens of Tyranny requires shuffling through five transmission levels, which can potentially be distracting when being chased by the alien menace. That said, it automatically switches between the basic Reverse/Drive modes for you, making it a weird manual/automatic hybrid.
• Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer: Any player can drop into an active Public mission if there are less than four other players present. The host decides 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, and a later patch added an Invite Only which means the host specifically selects which friends they want to join the game. Using a special SOS beacon stratagem in-game can also help tell players looking at the mission map that a player needs help, but if the mission isn’t set to Public then only friends can join.
• Drop Ship:
  • The Pelican dropship, which deploys special equipment (such as vehicles, or the bomb deployers used on Bug nurseries) and extracts Helldivers after a successful mission.
  • Automaton Dropships will drop off squads of infantry or large vehicles in response to patrol flares. 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).
  • Illuminate Warp Ships are much like the Automaton ones in purpose, but lack the exposed engines. Instead you need to shoot into the open warp tunnel during a fairly narrow window if you want to one-shot them. The only other thing that can drop them in a single shot are SEAF SAM sites. Landed versions are also used as their unit spawners, similar to Automaton Fabricators.
• Drop Pod: Helldivers deploy to the surface in Hellpods, as does any support equipment or resupply pods they call in during a mission. These pods can, with careful aiming, be used to crush enemies on landing. Or their teammates if those involved are not careful.
• Dynamic Entry: Hellpods are shot out of the Super Destroyer, allowing Helldivers and/or their equipment inside them to be rapidly inserted into areas. These Hellpods will kill or destroy all non heavy/elite enemies they land on and deal high damage to heavy/elites, potentially letting reinforcements avenge the deceased Helldiver they're replacing at breakneck speed - but this includes Helldivers themselves if they're not careful.
• Dystopia: More than the previous installment, Helldivers II makes it clear at every point that Super Earth is a fascist, totalitarian death cult that operates with abject cruelty, has crudely taken over humanity's legacy of true freedom, and is bringing down everybody toward a spiral of misery. That it's done in the most over-the-top satirical and blatantly absurd way, however, makes it hilarious.
• Early Game Hell:
  • Players start with a small pool of stratagems that limits tactical options. Thankfully the lower difficulties help mitigate these issues a bit, but ambitious players trying to play the higher difficulties at low levels — right after they racked up wins on easier difficulties — will be in for a rude awakening when they’re up against Automaton Gunships with only a Machine Gun to work with.
  • The Super Destroyer upgrades provide a variety of buffs for the player and stratagems, but unfortunately the resources for stronger ship modules require you to play higher difficulties. Thus many of the high tier upgrades will require playing the higher difficulty levels without the stronger upgrades at hand.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Operation Enduring Peace was a multi-stage endeavor undertook by Super Earth in late May/early June of 2024 to destroy a Terminid supercolony on the planet Meridia by injecting Dark Fluid into the planet's surface, the end result of which was the planet imploding into a black hole, instantly killing billions of bugs and permanently wiping Meridia from the Galactic Map.
• Easier Than Easy: The lowest possible difficulty is "Trivial", during which it is unlikely you will run into double digits of enemies except while doing objectives and extracting, if even then. Unlike the first game's "A Dive in the Park", you will actually be forced to play this difficulty at least once in order to unlock the next highest one of "Very Easy", since difficulties now have to be unlocked by completing an entire operation on the difficulty lower than them.
• 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 can engage in propaganda-building flag-waving exercises at their discretion.
• Easter Egg: Despite everything in the setting, Arrowhead has managed to sneak in a couple of little secrets for the observant Helldiver;
• Easy Logistics: Primarily the case with supplies. Any Resupply packs or stray ammo/grenade boxes found during gameplay will always properly restore the corresponding resource of your inventory, regardless of what type of weapons and grenades you have equipped. Universal Ammunition this is not, however, as ammunition cannot be exchanged between different weapons after the fact. The flavor text satirizes this trope; a lot of the upgrades you can buy reveal that Super Earth's military machine is a complete mess, which explains why the player lacks access to basic necessities you'd expect any decent military force to have despite in-universe propaganda extorting the efficiency and eliteness of Super Earth's military. The Donation Access License upgrade, for example, reveals that Helldivers have to crowdfund their ammo from family members. You spawn with all your support weapons at half capacity without it.
• 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 with the Battle of Malevelon Creek from February to April 2024 which was initially 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 from Automaton 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, nor can they use stratagems.
  • The Scout armor perk has the ability to detect enemies from the map pins you can place, in addition to reducing the range at which enemies can detect you.
• Enemy Summoner: All of the factions have units that can summon reinforcements, being more aggressive in doing so as difficulty increases.
  • Most Terminids (particularly Scavengers, but also frequently Hive Guards) can let out a pheromone flare that summons more enemies into the area through a Bug Breech. Brood Commanders and Alpha Commanders can also summon groups of the mid-size Warriors independent of Bug Breaches, and in the latter’s case they summon a black variant of Warriors that are much faster than normal.
  • 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, and will do so on an absolute hair trigger on the higher difficulties. The basic Automaton trooper variants can too if no Commissar is available, though not as quickly, and most of the larger units like Devastators and Tanks cannot.
  • Automaton maps sometimes have an optional objective called a Detector Tower; they scan the environment and will continually call in enemy reinforcements if they detect Helldivers in the area. They also react to loud sounds like gunfire and explosives, making stealth a high priority to destroy them, and can only be destroyed using powerful explosives. Thankfully the mission will provide access to Hellbombs in order to destroy them if a player lacks any high explosive stratagems, and the Orbital/Eagle Smoke stratagems can block the tower’s view.
  • The Illuminate have only one unit that can summon reinforcements — their Watcher drones — which renders them a bit more distinct from the other two factions where most common units can summon reinforcements. In exchange, large swarms of the Voteless will roam the area.
• Every Bullet Is a Tracer: Played straight. The Automatons' weapons... whatever they are (Fusion Repeaters, according to the Mark function), leave clear red trails through the air as they are fired. The Helldivers' bullet-firing weaponry leaves yellow tracers, switching to red tracers as their magazines approach its final remaining rounds. The Autocannon normally leaves tracers as its standard ammunition is armor-piercing high-explosive tracer rounds, but its alternative ammunition, flak, does not.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: Vehicles in the Super Earth colonies will catch fire at the slightest provocation, and shortly explode not long thereafter. The FRV is somewhat more durable, but it'll still blow up pretty good when it finally runs out of health - and anyone in it at the time will be toast too.
• Evil Is Petty: Mixed with Skewed Priorities, but while Grey-and-Gray Morality is in effect, one sure fire way to provoke a reaction out of the Terminids, Automatons, and the Illuminate is start raising the Super Earth flag in a Spread Democracy mission. It gets a bigger reaction out of them than launching an ICBM, implying they can't resist the opportunity to burn the SE flag.
• 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-like substance named E-710 for fuel that’s essential for Super Earth's Faster-Than-Light Travel to properly function. Time has not dampened that they are still a Horde of Alien Locusts - if anything, it might have made it worse.
  • 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.
  • The Illuminates, once wiped out by Super Earth for their advanced tech, have spent the last century improving their technology to include turning human civilians into horrifically transformed zombies and have scaled up their tripod walkers for some real War of the Worlds energy.
• Exactly Exty Years Ago: Helldivers II starts in 2184, exactly one century after the end of the First Galactic War in 2084 following a Super Earth victory in Helldivers.
• Explosive Barrels: Many things on the map will blow up if shot, including "malfunctioning" Hellbombs presumably left from unsuccessful missions.
• 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.

• Faction Calculus: The three enemy factions display different behaviors and tactics in their forces:
  • Terminids are primarily a close-range swarm faction. Most of their units are melee with only a few having medium-to-long range. They congregate in advancing swarms to tear Helldivers to pieces and most of their weaker units can call in reinforcements, but lack heavy armor apart from their heaviest units like the Charger, Impaler and Bile Titan. They're also the only faction whose reinforcement calls cannot be stopped once successfully activated, while the other two can have their dropships shot down.
  • Automatons are a long-range faction that primarily focuses on armor and long-distance combat, with only two of their units have no ranged capabilities whatsoever. They generally appear in fewer numbers than the Terminids, but make up for it with ranged weaponry, tactical strategies, and all their units above Troopers/Commissars sporting some form of medium or heavy armor. Like the Terminids, their weaker units can call in reinforcements, but their drop ships are vulnerable and can be shot down (although tougher forces will survive the crash with some damage).
  • The Illuminate are a technical faction that utilizes a mix of swarm/quality units, melee/range, and technical abilities. Voteless are melee cannon fodder that appear in huge swarms rivaling the Terminids', Watchers act as dedicated reinforcement caller scouts, Overseers sport both melee and ranged capabilities alongside armor and energy shields, Elevated Overseers are armored, airborne ranged combat units that aren't spawned from specialized structures unlike Shriekers or Gunships, and both Harvesters as well as grounded Drop Ships sport regenerating Deflector Shields that require a bit more strategy to take down. Their reinforcements are the most risky of the three — if a Drop Ship is destroyed before managing to beam down anything, all its reinforcements are nullified — but are also a bit better-armoured than the Automaton ones.
• Failed a Spot Check: Downplayed. Enemies can detect Helldivers at a respectable distance, but that range is reasonably reduced by going prone, hiding in foliage, or staying still. PlayedStraight by Helldivers wearing Scout armor (reducing detection distance by 30%), who can - under some circumstances - remain undetected even as enemies practically walk over them.
• Fantastic Drug: Standard issue Stimpacks, which likely contain more than just combat stimulants given how they enable Helldivers to recover from catastrophic damage to limbs and the chest immediately.
• Fictional Holiday:
  • Liberty Day is celebrated on the 26th of October as in the first game, and is a time for all of Super Earth to celebrate Democracy and revel in the execution of traitors and destruction of the enemies of freedom. Out-of-universe (and also like in the first game) the day is used as an opportunity to gift the community with newly-added weapons and equipment.
  • Malevelon Creek Memorial Day is held on April 3rd to commemorate the disastrous Fall and subsequent liberation of Malevelon Creek, one of the most important^note  battles on the Automaton front in the early days of the Second Galactic War.
  • Super Earth apparently has gained a more direct counterpart to Halloween called All Heroes' Eve in the hundred years since the first game, according to the Service Technician. This one is not celebrated out-of-universe and does not have a date tied to it.

  Service Technician: When I was a kid, I always loved All Heroes' Eve. The adults would all dress up as Bugs, and ring out doorbells and we'd have to fire 3 shots in the air and say "No Fascism here, insects!" At the end of the night, they'd re-enact the Battle of Liberty Peak and we'd all get cake.

  • The Festival of Reckoning is celebrated in late December, and is fittingly considered a commercial holiday where Helldivers stimulate the economy by earning discounts for citizens with every sponsored kill. In-game, this means players are gifted new weapons and a free medal stipend over multiple days of celebration.
• 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.
  • One of the loading screen hints tells the player to avoid touching alien artifacts. Neither that Terminids nor the Automatons had them, which made it seem like a one-off joke, but when the Illuminate arrived, their missions included Cognitive Disruptors and Monoliths that the player can walk up to and get an option to touch them. Actually doing so will get the player blown up by "Unknowable Forces".
• Forever War: On certain points of interest you can find 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.
• Four Lines, All Waiting: The way that the Galactic War works means that only one Story Arc is continued at a time via issued Major Orders, which can leave undeveloped plotlines to hang around for months until the Game Master comes back to them. It also means that because any given arc usually only concerns itself with one enemy faction (something like the DSS construction arc being a rare exception), the other two factions will politely avoid gigantic offensives with the potential to penetrate deep into Super Earth territory unless it's specifically part of the story.
• Fragile Speedster:
  • Light armor users in general. You can run faster and farther than other Helldivers wearing heavier armor, but you're much more likely to die if you get caught in an extended fight or a lucky bullet/melee attack hits you.
  • Averted by certain light armour variants: the Light Gunner grants an armour rating equivalent to a standard medium armour set while preserving the speed and stamina bonuses of a standard light armour set, while the FS-38 Eradicator grants Helldivers significant protection from explosive damage. Both are difficult to acquire, however, being only purchasable with Super Credits at the Super Store and only being available at random times in the store at that.
  • Terminid Hunters and Pouncers are quickly able to close distance to a Helldiver by jumping or dashing, but can be killed with a few shots or a melee attack.
• Friendly Fireproof:
  • So, very, very Averted, in keeping with the first game's tradition, and Lampshaded in the game's promotional materials. Helldivers have about as much a risk of being killed by their own or their teammates' weapons and stratagems as by enemy fire.

  Training Manual Tips: Friendly Fire isn't.

  • Also applies to enemies. Skilled players can exploit this to great effect, such as positioning to have Automatons infantry shoot Hulks in their unarmored backsides, or by leading Chargers to bowl through densely-crowded enemies.
  • Played straight with the stunning effects of the stun grenade and of Orbital EMS, EMS mortars and SEAF artillery static fields - when they hit enemies which can be affected by them, said enemies are rendered completely immobile and unable to act during the duration, while players instead only have stamina depleted and their movement greatly slowed, sparing from suffering a nigh death sentence if an enemy that doesn't happen to be stunned makes it over to them during the duration. Accordingly, these tools are about the safest things a Helldiver can use to aid a comrade that's neck-deep in adversaries.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • For several weeks after launch, the game had dozens of hard-crash bugs with a variety of unpredictable triggers. In particular, one bug caused players to crash on extraction every third mission exactly.
  • The Arc Thrower and Spear support weapons have intermittently been affected by bugs that cause all players in a lobby to crash when used. The Arc Thrower in particular was briefly known as the Crash Cannon, and it was common practice to kick any player selecting it in their loadout to prevent griefing.
  • In mid-April 2024, a bug affecting Automaton missions caused gunships to spawn so quickly as to be literally impossible to neutralize, soft-locking any mapgen where the gunship spawners were unavoidable or overlapped a primary objective.
  • The "Deploy Dark Matter Generator" missions during the mission to destroy Meridia in May 2024 were impossible to complete before a hotfix deployed. Bugs in spawning locations could let Terminids spawn underneath the defended objective to immediately attack, and a map generation bug could cause one of the objectives to spawn in an unreachable area or in map geometry. Even if players overcame those bugs and completed every objective, the game would still count the mission as failed.
  • The infamous 2/27/2025 incident, which stemmed from a critical bug during Arrowhead's updating of their backend code. The bug caused Liberation rates across the game to skyrocket, allowing the community to liberate several planets in hours and complete ''both'' objectives of a Major Order when only one should've been possible. The bug was critical enough to the point where Arrowhead hard paused the Galactic War (the first time to date) to fix the issue, though they let the result of the bug stand.
• 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 
  • Despite all enemy factions being intelligent 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.
  • While the game makes it clear that Super Earth is a democracy in name only with "Managed Democracy" merely being a euphemism for rigged elections and the average Super Earth citizen not actually having that many rights, in actual gameplay the Helldivers are given complete freedom to fight wherever they want in the galaxy, even on planets that wouldn't contribute anything to the overall war effort, with zero repercussions. Major Orders end up being more like suggestions that can be ignored rather than actual orders.
• Gameplay Grading: A much more complicated system than in Helldivers; the total amount of stars it's possible to earn on a mission is dependent on the mission difficulty but at higher difficulties the max is now 5 stars instead of 3, and in addition to rewarding the returning stipulation of completing every objective it now also rewards things like avoiding going past a certain time threshold, about 10% remaining, how many helldivers are alive at mission's end, and completing all side objectives. The liberation gained from missions is now the difficulty of the mission as well as the points earned during the mission calculated together and converted into a percentage of total Planet Liberation.
• Gas Mask Mooks: The Chemical Agents warbond includes the AF-50 "Noxious Ranger" armor set, the headpiece of which fittingly resembles a gas mask what with the warbond being based around chemical warfare, allowing Helldivers to fulfill this role if they so choose and even combine the headpiece with other armor sets.
• Genocide Backfire: All three of the enemy factions are the result of Super Earth not being entirely thorough with eradicating their old enemies:
  • The remaining Bugs were corralled into farms to ensure humanity wouldn't lose access to Element 710, a vital ingredient for Faster-Than-Light Travel. Unfortunately, they began tampering with the Bugs' genetics to optimize production of the resource, making the Terminids stronger and more savage until they finally broke containment and reproduced.
  • After the fall of Cyberstan, the defeated Cyborgs were allowed to "make amends" by being enslaved to labor in the mines, and it's unclear if they still exist as a culture. However, it turns out they had a contingency plan that took a hundred years to come to fruition: The Automatons, sapient machines who want overthrow Super Earth and liberate Cyberstan.
  • The Illuminate were broken by Super Earth and fled the galaxy after being forced to surrender the secrets of their technology. One hundred years later, they've returned with an Evil Makeover and an explicit desire for Revenge. They were never numerous to begin with, but it's heavily suggested that the Illuminate have been reduced to a Racial Remnant, forcing them to pad out their ranks with the Voteless alongside their usual Attack Drones.
• Genre Shift: Helldivers is a top-down twin-stick shooter with a distant, shared camera between the four players. Helldivers II is an Always Over the Shoulder third-person shooter with much larger maps. As such, the games play very differently—in Helldivers you and your squad have to always be moving together and cover each other while doing objectives because of the shared (and somewhat cramped) camera, while in II individual players have much more freedom to roam around the map away from their squad to go do side objectives or acquire collectibles, and the game is balanced around this. That said, the narrative tone of both games are identical: As a Helldiver, you are an elite, yet expendable, soldier, who shoots supposedly evil aliens, in a satirical world where you are fanatically loyal to the fascist government of Super Earth.
• Geo Effects: Planets can and usually do have multiple effects that change the way you play by necessity.
• Glurge: A key element of the in-universe propaganda's Stylistic Suck. One typically cloying example:

  (image of Automaton Troopers looking menacing)

  (silhouette of an adult playing with a child with happy giggling in the background)

  And heart is what Super Earth is all about.

  (shot of Helldivers gazing into the distance patriotically)

  Prove your humanity.

  (a family holds hands, outlined against the setting sun)

  Show you care.

  (bold ENLIST TODAY message against the SEF banner)

• The GM Is a Cheating Bastard: Helldivers II is fairly unique in that its Macrogame is run by a full-time GM^note  that can make the liberation and defense of planets more or less difficult. This also means the Galactic War can be controlled by factors like supply lanes opening or closing to direct progression, or even having liberation happen automatically if the players are particularly disorganized.
• 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 E-710, 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 and Illuminate 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.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • The difference between "standard" and "durable" damage/health. All weapons deal both standard and durable type damage, and enemies' health and body parts can be standard, durable, or a mix of both. This is why Charger rears, despite being unarmored and looking like your typical video game weak point, takes forever to destroy with most weapons that aren't explosive or anti-tank. An in depth explanation can be found here.
  • Using the Casual Salute emote near a flag causes it to raise faster, with each nearby helldiver saluting adding a stacking speed bonus. This can make the flag raising go by much quicker, and consequently deal with less enemy reinforcements.
  • When playing Grenade Hot Potato with Automaton and Illuminate grenades, they inherit the momentum of your Helldiver. While standing still and tossing them back, they'll barely even nudge. When sprinting and tossing them back, they'll go rolling quite the long distance.
  • If all outposts are destroyed, Patrols still spawn. They will heavily prefer to spawn in at the edge of the map. This is why extractions on higher level difficulties tend to have Schizophrenic Difficulty if all outposts are destroyed. If the extraction is close enough to the map's edge (or if a Helldiver stands there to block patrols from spawning), no enemies will spawn, letting You and your team have a nice 2-3 minute break. If the extraction is far enough from the edge of the map to allow patrols to spawn, it could be the most intense part of the mission.
  • One of the Loading Screen tips is "The longer you stay in a mission, the heavier the enemy presence becomes." How long a mission has gone on has nothing to do with both enemy patrols and enemy reinforcement drops. However, once the primary objectives are achieved, enemy patrol spawns SKYROCKET near the extraction point, and their ability to call reinforcements gets a very large cooldown bonus.
• 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.
• Hair-Trigger Explosive:
  • Of the Phlebotinum Overload variety. Whatever Dark Fluid is, the Illuminates managed to weaponize it into a substance that can create miniature black holes on command. However, it's clear from Strohmann News and the way your Ship Master reacts to the stuff that Dark Fluid is extremely unstable and carries a great risk of spaghettifying everyone around it if it's disturbed too much.
  • Damaged hellbombs can be found littered across the battlefield occasionally. If so much as a single pistol round hits it, KABOOM! Freshly dropped hellbombs will also explode if they're dealt enough damage while armed, but if they aren't, they'll just harmlessly fall apart.
• Hand Cannon: Several secondary weapons:
  • The P-4 Senator is a massive, heavy-hitting revolver that is one of the few non-support weapons that can pierce heavy armor. Notably, it can take down tanks.
  • The GP-31 Grenade Pistol is a single shot grenade launcher in a pistol form factor.
  • The P-113 Verdict is the size of a Helldiver's thigh, and its description names it as the largest-caliber pistol of its kind.
• Harder Than Hard: Like in the first game, subsequently higher difficulties than the highest difficulty of "Hell Dive" were added in later updates, starting with the "Super Helldive" difficulty added in Escalation of Freedom.
• Healing Shiv: The P-11 Stim Pistol lets civically-minded Helldivers heal their teammates at medium range with shots of non-addictive stims. Just make sure you have this equipped and not the Senator...
• Heavy Equipment Class: All heavy armors offer improved defenses in exchange for hindered movement and stamina, and several Medium Armors have abilities which offer the same armor rating as Heavy Armors with none of the stamina penalties. Some specific examples stand out, however:
  • The FS-55 Devastator Armor offers a 50% reduction in blast damage and covers 90% of your character's figure, including a High Collar of Doom that goes up to your character's eyes!
  • The FS-61 Dreadnought Armor has Shoulders of Doom and notably gives 50% additional limb health on a Helldiver who clearly has all their original appendages
  • The B-27 Fortified Commando Armor has the best armor rating in the game as its bonus effect, and conspicuously covers ''even more'' than the Devastator Armor.
• Hero Insurance: Destroying buildings will never negatively affect you or your rewards. Even if you drop your Hellpod directly onto someone's house while they've been ordered to shelter in place, or flatten an entire city block with a 380mm bombardment.
• Hitbox Dissonance: Averted - the game's representation of objects is in fact so anal-retentive that players can have their shots deflected by their target's armor being at an extreme angle to where the shot impacted (which is actually taken advantage of in reality by sloped armor) and find that their discarded magazines, launcher shells, or dismembered body parts can collide with and set off mines. This wasn't so much the case for enemy projectiles for a while (Automaton rockets had very generous half-meter-wide collision volumes...) but those got toned down to more model-accurate sizes, thankfully.
• Hit-and-Run Tactics: Possible to do if enemy reinforcements prove too significant or their nests/outposts are too heavily guarded - players can destroy or kill some of the defences, objectives and defenders then hightail it out to finish the job a bit later. Enemy reinforcements will despawn if they fail to see any Helldivers long enough.
• 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 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.
  • In the in-game metanarrative, the Terminid Control System was implemented as a series of planetary-scale pesticide dispensers to eradicate Terminid populations on selected barrier planets to keep their populations in check. In a classic case of "that which does not kill me only makes me stronger," this ended up creating a strain of Terminids on the planet Meridia who were not only resistant to Termicide they thrived in the stuff, proliferating out of control to the point that the planet developed into an irrecoverable Terminid super colony. Helldivers had to be redirected to a massive damage control effort to shut down the very Termicide dispensers they had helped activate earlier in order to save the remaining planets from suffering the same fate. Ultimately, due to the Meridia super colony still growing out of control, Helldivers were forced to destroy the planet by injecting Dark Fluid acquired from the Illuminiate in the first Galactic War into the planet’s crust, resulting in the planet collapsing into a black hole.
  • Hellbombs normally have a long and fairly complex eight-step input sequence of ↑↓←↑↓→↑↓. Cognitive Disruptors randomize the complexity of all your Stratagem inputs. Dropping a Hellbomb on a Monolith can become a lot easier if a nearby Disruptor has turned it into a very simple →→→. How's that focus on outsmarting your opponents working out for you, Illuminates?
  • As an evolution to combat Super Earth, the Terminids produced the Gloom which in large enough concentrations can prevent Super Earth from attacking their core planets. However, Super Earth scientists discovered that Gloom-enhanced Terminids produce significantly more E-710 than regular Terminids, and Gloom infused E-710 also happens to have the exact same properties as Illuminate Dark Matter, giving Super Earth the opportunity to research countermeasures to the weaponized Meridian Singularity. In their effort to develop defenses against Super Earth, the Terminids simply gave them even more reason to invade!
• 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. The Escalation of Freedom update adds "Automaton Bio-Processors" as a new tactical objective, all but confirming the Automatons are indeed processing humans and other organic creatures (and possibly all biomaterial, e.g. plantlife or fungi) into something they can use - likely biofuels.
  • 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.
• Hypocrisy: Some early Super Earth propaganda material had comedic animatics of an Automaton Devastator stealing a pram from Super Earth Citizens. Come Escalation of Freedom, one possible objective on Terminid worlds is to kidnap a Terminid larva, stick it in a special containment backpack, and bring it to the dropship. All so that Super Earth scientists can run 'democratic' tests on it, of course.
• 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.
  • Impalers have burrowing tentacles that will emerge and attack Helldivers.
  • Some Automaton outposts have mangled SEAF and Helldiver corpses impaled on barbed wire fenceposts.
• Impeded Communication: Some planets have ion storms. When active, ion storms jam and prevent calling in stratagems (except SEAF artillery). Automatons can also have Stratagem Jammers active in their territories. The jammers have a respectable 150 meter radius, and will prevent Helldivers from throwing stratagem balls inside their jamming radius.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: The Illuminate Overseers appear to be some of the most recent graduates of the Academy's hallowed halls, having absolutely awful accuracy with their weapons, particularly against moving targets. It's somewhat-excusable though, as the ground-based units are using a Boom Stick with no real sighting mechanism and the flyers are using a rapid-fire rifle/carbine whilst, well, flying.
• Improvised Weapon: The Hellpods that deliver the Helldivers and their supplies aren't supposed to be a weapon but they can be used to crush enemies, but only in a direct hit. A Helldiver can steer their drop pod to aim at whatever they want while, with some very good timing, the call in supplies can be used as emergency ordinance.
• Incoming!:
  • Whenever enemy reinforcements arrive on the battlefield, Helldivers amongst your squad will call them out to each other.

  Helldiver: Bug tunnel breach!
  Dropships!
  Squids!

  • If you happen to be standing within range of an Autmaton Mortar Emplacement, Mission Control will calmly inform you of this fact so that you can dodge incoming artillery fire, many times.

  "Warning, you are in range of enemy artillery!"

• 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 for 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.
• Incredibly Obvious Trap: There is a prompt to Touch if you run up to certain Illuminate structures when they're powered/functional. Go ahead. Do it. You get instantly killed by "Unknowable Forces" if you do.
• Instakill Mook: Automaton Cannon Turrets, Mortars and Tanks can instantly gib you with a well placed shot. Their Rocket Devastators and Rocket Raiders were 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.
  • The Illuminate Harvester fires a beam that near-instantly kills any player unfortunate enough to get in its way, and will toast even armoured vehicles in just a few seconds of contact. For game-balancing purposes, this beam attack is amply telegraphed and not very accurate, and is also clearly intended to evokes a little of the classic Sweeping Laser Explosion aesthetic.
• 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: At launch, the total number of primary and secondary weapons available in the Armory noticeably outnumbers the number of weapons that can be unlocked through Warbond progress, indicating that developers plan to add many more. The galaxy map was also conspicuously large for the two factions present at the time 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.
  • The Helldivers do this themselves to the Terminids in missions where they extract with mutated larvae and eggs for research; a fact that goes conspicuously unexamined.
• It's Raining Men: The Helldivers' M.O. is dropping from orbit in Hellpods, as is most of their equipment.
• 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 Stats: The Autocannon support weapon is a BFG that fills almost every need case for Helldiver missions. It has armor piercing for armored enemies, explosive rounds for small groups, is accurate enough to target weak spots, agile enough to target flying enemies, and has a high enough rate of fire and ammo reserve to hold its own even against large hordes. On top of all that, it's able to destroy enemy Fabricators or Bug Nests at long range, and can be buddy-loaded for even faster reloads. The Autocannon is broadly considered by players (and Arrowhead's Lead Director Pilestadt himself) to be the best balance of all stats and viable for almost all missions.
• Joke Item: The R-2124 "Constitution" rifle is just as bad as its M2016 predecessor, which was explicitly a mostly ceremonial and last-resort weapon; it has a slow rate of fire, small magazine and is really only effective against small groups of lightly-armored enemies. Hilariously, the "2124" designation implies it was upgraded from the (extremely out of date in 2084) M2016 and is still a horrendously obsolete battle rifle with an internal magazine 60 years out of date. Even funnier, the single upgrade it could receive in Helldivers—its Bayonet—is now a completely unique quality, since the ability to upgrade other rifles with bayonets was dropped in the sequel.
• 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. It used to be pretty noodly, but got some nice buffs during the 60-day patch arc.
• Knight in Shining Armor: Several armors have this appearance, to whit:
  • The FS-11 Executioner Armor is literally shining white and designed to resemble "futuristic" medieval armor.
  • B-24 Enforcer Armor is similarly shining white and has a more Renaissance-era armor aesthetic to it
  • The Champion of the People, Hero of the Federation, Savior of the Free, and Cavalier of Democracy armors are all themed around this, including sharing the same effect with slightly different flavors of Knight aesthetics.
• Kill It with Fire: There are numerous options for bringing Freedom's Flame to your enemies, such as the G-10 and G-13 Incendiary Grenades, the SG-451 and SG-225IE shotguns (incendiary pellets), or the FLAM-66 Torcher and FLAM-40 Flamethrower. Still not enough? Call in the Eagle Napalm Airstrike or use SEAF Napalm Artillery to put a wall of fire between you and the hordes. Want even more? The Orbital Napalm Barrage provides half a minute of continuous fire over a large area, completely covering the target zone in explosions and pillars of burning flames.
• Kill Sat: Your Helldiver's Super Destroyer functions as an orbital artillery platform during missions, capable of firing anything from single-shot precision strikes to area bombardments to ground-sweeping laser cannon barrages provided you've unlocked the proper stratagems.

• 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.
• Lightning Gun:
  • The ARC-3 Arc Thrower is an evolution of the AC-3 from the first game, having been upgraded to a support weapon Stratagem instead of a primary weapon. It occupies essentially the same role as a charged armor-piercing multiattack which fires bolts of electricity, but as a support weapon is more viable against heavier enemies.
  • The ARC-12 "Blitzer" is a rough equivalent of the first game's AC-5, being more of a "lightning shotgun" that fires electricity in a wide spread and is meant to be used against lighter infantry units.
• Logo Joke: The PlayStation Studios logo has replaced the clips showcasing their first-party franchises with clips of the Helldivers.
• Long-Range Fighter: The Automatons in general are these, especially when compared to the Terminids as a whole. Only two types of Automaton units in the Brawler and Berserker are strictly melee-range, the rest all sport some form of medium-to-long range weaponry.
• Loophole Abuse: Invoked in-universe, several ship upgrades revolve around bending regulations to the limit of breaking as a means of ekeing out marginal improvements in performance for your stratagems. Most notably with Stream Lined Paperwork.
• 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.
  • One of your Helldivers' more common fates upon dying is for their head to fly off under the weight of Terminid claws/Automaton lasers/Illuminate energy.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: The SH-20 Ballistic Shield Backpack was buffed in a later update to not only absorb ranged attacks, but to also tank melee attacks up to and including a Charger's rush or a slap from a Hulk (though you will be ragdolled as a result). Combined with a suitable melee weapon, Helldivers can replicate tactics long thought obsolete by the year 2184.
• Made of Plasticine: Just to emphasise how fragile your fascist player characters are, nine times out of ten your Helldiver will be decapitated, de-limbed, and/or de-all-of-the-aboved when killed, even on lower difficulties.
• Magic Feather: How the "Democracy Protects" armor passive works. The wearer believes so much in Liberty and Democracy that it literally allows them to survive lethal damage...50% of the time.
• The Many Deaths of You: Players can be sliced up, shot, crushed, shocked, exploded, gassed, lasered, set on fire, or fall/collide to their deaths. Their heads, torso, and limbs may be dismembered from their body as a result of these. Some of these lethal ends might even occur due to friendly fire.
• Memorial Statue: The "Spread Democracy" missions where you raise a flag while a drone capture the footage to use as future propaganda are usually next to statues dedicated to fallen heroes.
• Mini-Mecha:
  • The EXO-45 "Patriot" Exosuit is the brand-spanking new descendant of the EXO-44 "Walker", mostly armed with the same arrangement of a powerful minigun and 15 missiles. Slower than Helldivers on foot, but more heavily armored and equipped with much heavier firepower, though it's vulnerable to getting smashed to pieces by heavier units and has a tendency to malfunction and explode randomly.
  • The EXO-49 "Emancipator" Exosuit is a sidegrade to the Patriot and a direct evolution of the EXO-48 "Obsidian" DLC mech. Boasting a pair of higher-caliber dual autocannons, the Emancipator is great for tearing through hordes of lightly-armored foes. However, like the Obsidian before it, its damage falls off greatly against enemies with heavy armor and isn't expected to be used against them.
• Missing Backblast: Downplayed. Anti-tank weapons and launchers all have backblast that will knock down players but won't do direct damage. The knockback scales with proximity, though, so standing directly behind a launcher rocket will throw a Helldiver violently enough to cause collision damage on landing.
• 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. As of the 4 July 2024 patch release there are now Tier 5 upgrades that cost 200/200/20 each.
• Monster Organ Trafficking: After defeating the Bugs in the first Helldivers, the Federation realized that they produced a useful material, E-710, used as fuel that’s essential for Super Earth's Faster-Than-Light Travel to properly function. Thus the Bugs were not exterminated, but were kept in huge farms where their E-710 was harvested. Part of the conflict of this game is caused by the descendants of the original Bugs, now called Terminids, escaping containment and running wild across the galaxy.
• 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.
• Mook Maker: All enemy factions have various enemy respawn structures, either as a giant nest or a building that cranks out new enemies.
• 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.
  • A couple of weapons can change their firing mode; for most this is just toggling from semi-automatic to automatic modes, but the support-slot machineguns can outright change their rate of fire. You can either dial it down to make the weapon more controllable, or dial it up for More Dakka.
  • 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 1200 rounds of ammunition per minute from an arm-mounted minigun. For anything bigger, it's got a rocket pod loaded with armour-piercing explosives.
  • One of the Super Destroyer's armament upgrades is literally "More Guns."

    After years of research into improving the Super Destroyer's firepower, the Ministry of Science concluded that the most effective method was adding more guns.

  • The Orbital Gatling Barrage is Gatling Good in space: a 15-second hail of armor-piercing, high-explosive rounds that shred anything caught in the tight-radius target area.
• 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:
• Naval Blockade: In March 2025, to slow the buildup of Dark Energy inside the Meridian Singularity, a blockade fleet was raised by Super Earth to intercept any Illuminate ships transporting the stuff to the black hole. Of course, this immediately raised a number of questions, since High Command itself admitted that interstellar Illuminate vessels were undetectable at the time, begging the question of just how much a physical blockade would actually do. Nevertheless, even though this blockade was hastily-raised from a piecemeal arrangement of ships and short on immediate resources, the buildup of Dark Energy would indeed slow down somewhat after it was put in place.
• Necessary Drawback:
  • Some stratagem support weapons require the use of an ammo backpack which drops with it in order to reload the weapon, primarily weapons that use rockets or other greater-than-1.0-caliber munitions, which in turn denies the usage of other backpacks that could’ve provided utility and/or protection. Solo players can wear these ammo backpacks to reload the weapon themselves but they're hindered by a lengthy reload. A second player however can wear the ammo backpack and "anchor" themselves to the weapon wielder as a crew member, and much like real life will improve the rate of fire of the weapon by keeping it topped up as the wielder continues firing.
  • The "Democracy Protects" perk gives any Helldiver using armor that it has a 50 percent chance to avoid being killed by any lethal attack, but it flips that coin once for every bit of lethal damage suffered, meaning you can't abuse it as an extremely risky "get out of jail free" card if you're, say, surrounded by many enemies or standing under an orbital barrage (for one thing, you may survive being knocked into the air by the barrage with the perk and then still be killed upon impact with the ground on the way down).
  • High-damage and high-penetration weapons (like the Dominator or Senator) all have limited ammo reserves and low-cap magazines with longer reload times.
• 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 backstory for the game, 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.
• No Historical Figures Were Harmed: The Dark Fluid project which was ultimately used to destroy the Merdia Supercolony was headed by a man named "J. Roger Ostermeir", in an obvious allusion to Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of another superweapon of planet-destroying power.
• Noob Bridge: Helldivers has three hitmarker icons: white, red, and a shield. While the shield representing "armored" is intuitive, new players might see white and red as indicative of "normal" and "critical" hits, respectively. However, white hit markers indicate partial damage from a weapon's armor penetration equalling enemy armor value, and red hit markers indicate normal damage.
• No OSHA Compliance: The Fast Recon Vehicle has had its seatbelts removed, meaning Helldivers will tumble out of the car if their Helldriver makes the car flip or crash. It is also remarked upon that Helldivers (who are ~18) have had their drivers ed cancelled due to the invasion.
  • The Super Destroyer is rife with this.
    • The high-explosive ordnance for the ship's orbital cannons (including 380mm shells) is carried in exposed conveyors right above the bridge with no protection of any kind separating the crew from a cookoff or accidental detonation.
    • The Eagle fighter and Pelican dropship's maintenance bay and hangar are open to the bridge as well (the bridge does have blast doors but they are always kept open), with no airlocks or safeguards preventing accidental depressurization or mishandling of the various high-explosive warheads stacked next to the Eagle. Said ordnance is stacked right next to the fighter and there's even crew members performing welding and repairs mere inches from racks of live 500kg bombs attached to the Eagle.
    • Lastly the ship's FTL core is right behind the Eagle in view of not just the hanger but the bridge as well, unshielded nor isolated from any potential damage or mishaps from the aforementioned Eagle maintenance bay.
• No-Sell: One of the armor perks, "Democracy Protects," gives a 50% chance to survive what would have been lethal damage, up to and including standing next to a Hellbomb as it detonates.
• Nostalgia Level: Before Meridia was turned into a black hole, and after being transformed into a Terminid super-colony, it had terrain and atmosphere which was evocative of the Bug homeworld of Kepler Prime. Right down to the spore-choked orange haze coating the air, the blasted desert heaths covered with gestating eggs, etc.
• Obvious Rule Patch: You can now only call down objective-related Stratagems in a very small vicinity around the objective itself, meaning you can no longer go around calling down Hellbombs everywhere to Draw Aggro away from your squad like you can in the first game.
• Off with His Head!: One of the very many possible ends for a Helldivers - for example, one of a falling Bile Titan's corpse's legs hitting a Helldiver's head can inflict this. Helldivers can also inflict this upon Terminids by inflicting enough damage to their heads, though the Warrior and Brood Commander Terminids won't die immediately from being decapitated, and indeed will start rushing over and attacking their enemies quite furiously.
• 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.
• Ominous Clouds: From planets adjacent to the impenetrable Gloom, Helldivers can actually see the miasma from the view of their Super Destroyer.
• One Bullet Clips:
  • Averted - not only are the remaining bullets in a magazine discarded when you reload they are discarded at its starting animation, so if you interrupt it before finishing (e.g. dodging, melee attacking, entering a stratagem, or bringing up the map) your gun will be empty (though if you had a round in the chamber it’ll still be there in similar realism fashion). There's even a Super Destroyer TV video explaining the mechanic!
  • Averted by the Senator revolver's reload animation. If the cylinder is partially loaded, it will be slowly reloaded one bullet at a time; if the cylinder is empty, the Helldiver will use a speed loader to load all six shots at once.
• One-Hit Kill: The FAF-14 Spear is capable of downing a Bile Titan or Automaton tank in a single hit, if the missile strikes the victim dead center. The Recoilless Rifle is also capable of taking out any enemy in the game (unless a Harvester has its shield up) with a shot in the right spot.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Downplayed, especially relative to the first game. II removes the Downed mechanic in favor of Helldivers being able to heal themselves with Stims, meaning that while there are still attacks that will knock a Helldiver prone or put them close to death, there's an in-universe explanation for why they can recover so quickly and Helldivers now only need to worry about attacks which will instantly kill them. However, II also introduces broken limbs, which can get instantly fixed by a healing stim with little to no explanation.
• 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.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Most Major Orders given by High Command are carefully crafted propaganda pieces, calling the Helldivers to proudly attack or defend the objective of the week. The surprise reappearance of the Illuminate, however, came with a very direct, very brief Emergency Alert that looks more like a telegram. High Command was as unnerved by their appearance as the rest of us were:

  DISREGARD ALL PRIOR ORDERS

  REPLACEMENT ORDERS TO FOLLOW THIS MESSAGE

  PLANET CALYPSO UNDER ATTACK

  ALL HELLDIVERS ORDERED TO CALYPSO IMMEDIATELY

• Orbital Bombardment: Downplayed. The Ship Master claims a Super Destroyer has enough firepower to destroy a small moon. Its actual shown firepower and given stats make this claim extremely doubtful, as they're mostly using basically modern conventional naval ordnance. But said firepower can still be useful:
  • The Orbital Precision Strike launches a single explosive shot, which has a small window of time before it reaches the planet and destroys most heavily armored targets, including many buildings and structures. It is in fact seemingly the same shell type as used by the 380mm Barrage, just deployed with pinpoint accuracy.
  • The Orbital Gas Strike hits the ground with a projectile that sprays poisonous as well as corrosive gas. It’s particularly effective at controlling enemy spawn points like Terminid bug breeches, or cutting off chokepoints, for enemies exposed to it will not only take damage over time they will also be blinded and confused, making them attack wildly and possibly hit their allies in the process. It is also the fastest recharging and the impact is still strong enough to destroy structures.
  • The Orbital EMS strike shoots a non-lethal projectile that stuns and slows enemies within the strike radius, making it far safer to kill enemies while ensuring you don’t harm your teammates by accident.
  • The Orbital Smoke Strike quickly deploys a smoke screen to cut off enemy vision and escape combat.
  • The Orbital Gatling Barrage fires a stream of several smaller explosive rounds that blankets an area to eliminate multiple threats. Giving its explosive nature, it’s effective against medium-heavy armored opponents (though it cannot destroy their armor, nor cripple them, only damage them) as well as cleaning waves of basic infantry, but the shots land randomly in its strike radius.
  • The Orbital Airburst Strike fires airbursting shells that shower the marked site in waves of shrapnel, capable of destroying multiple medium armored enemy units at once. Due to firing a single wave at a time with short intervals it’s particularly effective for controlling Terminid bug breaches, but can be useful at clearing large waves of infantry as well.
  • The Orbital 120mm and 380mm HE Barrages firing multiple salvos of artillery projectiles in either small (120mm) or large (380mm) areas for a long period of time. While seemingly random, the projectiles are actually multiple predetermined firing patterns which allows some degree of control where the strikes will happen if you know how to aim them. They’re effective at crippling or outright clearing enemy bases due to the artillery being able to destroy buildings/structures.
  • The Orbital Walking Barrage fires a linear artillery barrage that moves at intervals, acting like a real life creeping barrage and destroying enemies/structures as it moves along in a somewhat straight line. Like the HE Barrages, it uses multiple predetermined firing patterns and can be predicted with a skilled player.
  • The Orbital Laser fires a giant laser that tracks towards enemies, focusing on the biggest targets in its radius. It's fully capable of destroying most structures, and serves as an excellent problem-remover. So you only get three uses per mission, with a long cooldown between each of them.
  • The Orbital Rail Cannon strike fires a single, precisely-targeted hyper-accelerated projectile at an enemy or structure, focusing on the biggest target near the beacon’s activation. It has minimal splash damage, but you can bet that whatever it hits is going to feel it.
  • The Orbital Napalm Barrage blasts a large area with incendiary shells that razes the ground with fire and denying the area from enemies, but at the cost of not being able to destroy structures. It covers an area about as wide as the 380mm Barrage, but with greater long-term area denial potential.
• Our Dark Matter Is Mysterious: Following the return of the Illuminate, a major story arc would surround their alleged harvesting of Dark Energy from planets in order to pull the Meridian Singularity closer to Super Earth and take over the galaxy.
• Our Zombies Are Different: They're blue-ish grey and stripped of their Liberty and Citizenship due to being under Illuminate control, but otherwise, the Voteless very much look and act in stereotypical zombie fashions. Their means of creation is unclear, but it can't be pure mind control given their mutated appearance.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic:
  • One of the fastest ways to defeat a Terminid Charger or Behemoth 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; this can be done against Impalers as well.
  • Any drop pod will cause massive damage to whatever it hits; it is common for players to steer their reinforcement drop pod onto the massive target that just killed, but if you are desperate to kill that Bile Titan bearing down on you while your offensive stratagems are cooling down, you can take it out with a resupply pod - if your timing is good enough.
• 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.
• Percussive Maintenance: Sometimes, objective consoles can't be interacted with due to game bugs; shooting the console can sometimes reset them into a useable state.
• Physical, Mystical, Technological: The three enemy factions play this once again, like in the first game. The Terminids are the Physical, relying on their armored physiology and Natural Weapons. The Automatons are the Technological, being machines themselves and relying on more conventional technology. The Illuminate once again are the Mystical, sporting technology so advanced to the point where it almost seems like magic, including the capability to alter and brainwash the minds of others.
• Player Tic
  • Democratically-approved ways for Helldivers passing the time include repeatedly pinging "Here?" on the drop site selection screen, repeatedly readying up and unreadying on the loadout selection screen, repeatedly going prone and standing up, and putting extra time-passing onto emoting on the Super Destroyer by repeatedly opening up and closing the dispatches to make your left arm move a lot (which rather makes the Helldivers look like they're making out if both of them do it while hugging)...repeatedly.
  • There's also the time-honored tradition of tossing a highly explosive but time-delayed stratagem on the ground right before boarding Pelican-1 at the end of a mission. While the shuttle is completely invincible, the resulting explosion still occurs during the extraction cutscene, so depending on the timing it looks like it either just barely escapes the explosion in the nick of time or emerges from within the explosion to escape unharmed.
• Play Every Day: Done via a "personal order", which is a daily objective that doles out fifteen medals upon completion. Personal orders are usually Mass Monster Slaughter Sidequests, asking you to either kill particular enemy types, or kill enemies with certain weapons or strategems.
• Pocket Rocket Launcher: The JAR-5 Dominator and R-36 Eruptor bolt-action rifle are effectively 40K Bolters in all but name. They fire rocket propelled explosives, with the Eruptor being capable of killing the user by accident very easily.
• Point of No Continues: Once the mission timer runs out, all stratagems and reinforcements become unavailable (except the SEAF artillery if you managed to activate and arm one), 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.
• Powered Armor: Downplayed, but all of the Armors with "Servo Assisted" are clearly powered and augment the wearer's strength.
• Powerful, but Inaccurate:
  • The ARC-3 Arc Thrower is a powerful, medium-range weapon that fires bolts of lightning that can chain between clustered enemies and do enough damage to take down even heavily armored foes, and has unlimited ammunition to boot. However, the lightning has a chance to arc anywhere in a wide cone over a large distance, meaning any Helldivers in front of the shooter are at risk of being killed instantly by friendly fire.
  • The StA-X3 W.A.S.P. Launcher from Killzone is this, strangely enough for a weapon with a homing feature. There's absolutely nothing stopping the rockets from blowing up on nearby trees and rocks between you and the target, so there's a bit of luck involving whether or not you'll hit your target. However, each individual rocket inflicts a ton of damage, meaning that anything that isn't tank-sized or tank-shaped is likely to die after being hit only once or twice, and even the huge enemies can eventually be overwhelmed with enough firepower.
  • The 120mm and 180mm Orbital Barrage strategems fire multiple high-explosive rounds that will obliterate just near anything they hit, but their wide spread and delayed impact timing mean they'll often hit everything but what you were aiming at, especially if it's a moving target.
• Power Up Letdown: The SEAF Artillery optional objective can provide valuable firepower from the randomized shells that can be inserted into it, but no one likes having to insert smoke shells into them, which release smoke in an area with a size that's not too different from a basic smoke grenade. These are pretty much useless against the Terminids and not impressive against the Automatons either due to the small size. The projectile itself can still kill/break something, but that's it - most players probably won't ever bother calling it in and only ever load it after scouring the area completely to make sure they're the only option remaining.
• 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 Super Credits each, whereas 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.
• Press X to Die: When right next to an Illuminate Monolith or Cognitive Disruptor, an option pops up for the player to touch it. Doing so will cause the player to explode into Ludicrous Gibs, with the cause of death being "Unknowable Forces".
• 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.).
• Propaganda Hero: The Helldivers themselves are confirmed to be this. This can be deliberately invoked by the player as well by equipping any of the propaganda armors, such as the Cavalier of Democracy, the Hero of the Federation, or the Ambassador of the Brand.
• Punny Name:
  • The Element 710 which allows for Faster-Than-Light Travel. If you rotate '710' 180 degrees, it looks like "OIL", which is exactly what it's an allegory for.
• 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.
• Putting on the Reich:
  • Anybody who is paying attention understands that Super Earth is a fascist, warmongering, totalitarian state. To drive that point further, the AF-91 "Field Chemist" armor features a stahlhelm-esque helmet and gas mask that look straight from World War 2. Less on-the-nose are the two Democracy Protects armors, the DP-40 "Hero of the Federation" and the DP-11 "Champion of the People." Respectively, they bring to mind Judge Dredd's ceremonial uniform and the higher ranking officer uniforms of The Empire, neither of whom exactly believe in the separation of powers.
  • The UF-84 "Doubt Killer" Armor is downright diabolical in appearance, looking straight out of Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade or Wolfenstein with its Red and Black and Evil All Over aesthetic and imposing stahlhelm with a skull mask.
  • The Helldivers x Killzone collaboration adds Assault Infantry and Helghast Sniper uniforms to the armor roster.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: On more than one occasion, events going on behind the scenes have tangibly affected the game's story given that it's online 24/7, usually in the form of a Game-Breaking Bug screwing with the Galactic War some which way. These events are usually described in an analogous way in-story (e.g. a routine backend update that accidentally caused Liberation rates to skyrocket was explained in a dispatch from High Command as the Automatons having been temporarily incapacitated by a routine update to their software.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Just in case there was any doubt about whether or not you're playing as the 'good guys', the Truth Enforcers Warbond equipment (and the accompanying Super Store free release, the "Doubt Killer" set) is all over this aesthetic, with black as the dominant colour, red highlights, and robotic-looking red skull decals. There's even a side of Villain in a White Suit for the "Inspector" armour set, while the Bloodhound set is all red, bringing to mind Palpatine's Imperial Praetorian Guard.
• Redshirt Army: SEAF and the Helldivers. Even on missions where the squad uses up over half their reinforcement quota, the Shipmaster can note that casualties were below average for a Helldiver operation. SEAF meanwhile has precisely zero living units in the game. Every single SEAF soldier you find is dead and often dismembered.
• 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.
• Regenerating Shields, Static Health: The Shield Generator backpack will recharge after a brief delay of taking no damage, but Helldiver health can only be restored with limited-use stimpacks.
• Renovating the Player Headquarters: As the Helldivers of your Super Destroyer collect Samples out on missions, you'll be able to use these Samples to purchase permanent upgrades for your weapons and Stratagems in the form of enhancements to your Super Destroyer, whether they're things like outfitting it with more orbital guns or improving its administrative capabilities. These upgrades also cosmetically take the form of your Destroyer getting filled up with more and more equipment and personnel (e.g. the Eagle Hangar Bay goes from being completely empty to having a pit crew constantly performing maintenance and upkeep for an Eagle fighter as well as the hanger being stocked with heavy ordnances).
• Rewards Pass: Warbonds, which are unlocked with Super Credits and progressed with Medals (acquired by completing missions and 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 and focus on the items they want.
• 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: The Automatons are the robotic creations of the partially-human Cyborgs from the first game fighting to liberate their creators from the captivity of the last war. Automaton forces are all robots in a variety of warforms, from humanoid infantry bots, to autonomous tanks, to walking war factories.
• Rocket Jump: This is somewhat difficult to do considering how easy it is for a player to just kill themselves with their own explosives unintentionally in the first place, but it's not impossible. With the aid of the armor passive Fortified, aiming directly downward (first-person is more reliable for the task) and shooting some kinds of explosive weapons right after diving (a Recoilless Rifle set to HEAT can do it...but instead will simply One-Hit Kill yourself when set to Explosive), one can actually manage to intentionally send one's self flying to a higher location and live to tell the tale.

• Sawed-Off Shotgun: The ultra-compact SG-22 Bushwhacker is a sawn-off triple-barrel you can take as a secondary weapon. Despite having a unique design rather than being a field modification of another SEAF shotgun, it has visible saw marks on its muzzle, raising the bewildering (but completely in-character) possibility that it gets cut in half as part of its standard manufacturing process. Like real-world and pop-culture sawn-offs, it's short-ranged and none too accurate, but it packs a big kick into a small package, letting Helldivers quickly get rid of Terminid Warriors and Automaton Berserkers disrespecting their personal space.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The Illuminate, who have returned to attack humanity after their defeat in the first war. They have a terrifying new way to fill their ranks: with hordes of mind-controlled, half-alien former Super Earth citizens known as the Voteless.
• Schizo Tech: Super Earth has, among other things, incredibly fast FTL, a fleet of tens of thousands of 170-meter space warships, instant-heal stimpacks, and man-portable railguns and plasma weapons. Yet the vast majority of their arsenal, both on the ground and in space, are basically just modern weapons (the first game even giving specific stats to the regular ballistic and explosive weapons to this effect), or sub-modern. Case in point, the aforementioned space warships' main armaments are regular chemically-propelled 23mm, 120mm, and 380mm naval guns firing high-explosive shells (and Super Earth still uses TNT) similar to those mounted on warships in the mid 20th century... except these ones have to be muzzle-loaded. Some of the upgrades you have to unlock at higher levels include such technological marvels as breechloading, hand carts, basic accounting software for payroll management, and "state-of-the-art cyanoacrylate adhesive" (which is literally just super glue). Another upgrade installs electronic actuators to the hellpods which are otherwise operated entirely with manual foot steering. This is all Played for Laughs due to the Fascist, but Inefficient nature of the setting, and Handwaved by Super Earth's appropriation of advanced Illuminate technology that they definitely didn't steal.
• 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 nearly every single thing they are doing, with only a few exceptions. 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.
• Self-Deprecation: In a strategic dispatch made after the well-received September 17 balancing patch, which saw the buffing and un-nerfing of dozens of weapons, High Command treats the "finding" that weapon lethality correlates with increases in battlefield effectiveness as a discovery worthy of further investigation. This seemingly reads as an acknowledgment of the past stymying of Metagame techniques through nerfs, its unpopularity, and how it only narrowed player loadouts further.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: To differentiate Deadly Gas status effects from flame weapons, caustic weapons were changed in Patch 1.001.100 to have reduced damage in exchange for causing confusion among enemy units, slowing their movements and causing them to attack randomly. This makes poison weapons perfect for causing distractions and allowing other players to come in for the kill.
• Shock Stick:
  • The CQC-19 Stun Lance is essentially a high-powered arms-length cattle prod that can be used to incapacitate weaker enemies and stun larger ones. It has a long reach (as one would expect of, well, a lance) and is quite precise, allowing the wielder to jab specific weakspots quite reliably.
  • The CQC-30 Stun Baton is a shorter one-handed version of the CQC-19 designed more specifically for fending off smaller enemies in close quarters. It lacks the reach of the lance, but has a horizontal swing pattern to its attacks that make it better suited to dealing with groups of enemies.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Averted. Shotguns are effective at realistic ranges and correctly reflect the difference in spread, damage falloff, and penetration between shot and slug rounds.
  • Invoked by the Breaker Spray-And-Pray, which is intentionally designed with massive spread to obliterate point-blank targets while having almost no range capability, and SG-22 Bushwacker, a sawed-off shotgun holdout.
• Shout-Out: Has a series-wide page.
• Shown Their Work: Given that Sweden has mandatory service, most of the developers have military experience in some form or other, and it really shows. Not only do Helldivers practice trigger discipline, and a new round chambered when a fresh magazine is inserted into a fully empty weapon (increasing the reload time), but ammo physically disappears from backpacks and weapon models as they're consumed, and even the 3D model for magazines is updated whenever their capacity is changed for balance reasons.
• Single-Biome Planet: Even though Helldivers deploy anywhere on the surface of the target planets, each mission area shares the same climate and environmental hazards. Broadly, these include:
  • Taiga Forest: A no-nonsense grassy biome broken up only by a few trees and colorful shrubbery. Night operations are punctuated by a relatively bright Wintry Auroral Sky.
  • Rocky Wetlands and Crimson Hills: Rocky and uneven grasslands with few hazards, save for the occasional ion storm on the red algae-infested Crimson Hill planets.
  • Swamp: Rainy swamps filled with tall mangroves that can interfere with Eagle-1, natural gas deposits, and copious water hazards. They also come in spookier variants with more fog and deader trees.
  • Volcanic Jungle and Mystic Forest: Tropical rainforests with deep water hazards, heavy volcanic activity, and visibility-reducing rainstorms. Mystic Forests are pink Palette Swap variants without the physical hazards.
  • Ionic Forest: Dark, low-visibility jungle worlds where plants thrive without photosynthesis, and periodic ion storms disable all stratagems. Infamously the biome of Malevelon Creek.
  • Quaking Badlands: Arid deserts surrounded by tall stone outcroppings. Periodic tremors reduce Helldiver mobility, while the mountains can interfere with Eagle-1 payloads.
  • Nuclear Wasteland: Foggy, grayed-out wastelands dotted with more damaged Hellbombs than usual. A small price to pay for Liberty.
  • Caustic Badlands: Planets filled with deadly toxins and sickly fumes that emanate from fissures and cracks in the land. Violent acid storms will decrease the armor values of both Helldivers and enemies, making both easier to kill.
  • Extreme Heat Biomes: Some biomes have extreme heat modifiers, which increase stamina and weapon heat buildup. These planets can further complicate Helldiver operations with unique hazards such as desert sandstorms, and fire tornadoes. Notably, many of these planets are only subject to heat modifiers during the day or during weather events, meaning night deployments can provide either reprieve or even a cooldown-buff as explained below.
  • Extreme Cold Biomes: Conversely, these planets are frozen wastelands that reduce the rate of fire for weapons while decreasing heat buildup. Such worlds vary from barren moons plagued by meteor showers, to classic arctic snowscapes with heavy blizzards.
  • Colonies: The enemies of Managed Democracy have rendered many of Super Earth's sufficiently funded colonies into shadows of their former selves, turning Lady Liberty's public works and residential units into tight corridors and dangerous foxholes. But these narrow streets are dangerous to the enemy as well, as they force them into tighter groupings for strafing runs and precision bombardments. Colonies are also notable for being part of any of the above biomes. When first approved for Helldiver activity, colony deployments were exclusive to the Illuminate Front, but would later include Terminid and Automaton invasions.
  • Super Earth: For record-keeping reasons only, Super Destroyers list Super Earth itself as a biome for possible deployment. As Super Earth is infallible and perfect in every way, there is no possible chance for an invasion of our beautiful home!
• Situational Sword: Some stratagems and weapons 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 hails of laser fire from the Automatons and from Illuminate plasma blasts, but will not do anything against the swarming melee oriented Terminids or the Voteless. Likewise, you probably don't want to try taking the Stun Lance or Baton against the ranged-heavy Automatons, but the Baton is great for bludgeoning your way through groups of Voteless or Scavengers and the Lance can be used to poke out the eyes of Overseers with artful precision.
• Skewed Priorities: Super Earth and their enemies seem to treat flag raising as Serious Business. On the Super Earth side, whole missions are dedicated solely to raising flags as a primary objective. They're given the same priority on par with emergency evacuation of civilians, gathering element-710 to fuel their starships, to launching an ICBM. And this isn't a fast flag raise either. A drone is deployed to play the bombastic Super Earth Anthem and record the entire two minute process. On the enemy side, they will commit a disproportionately large amount of forces to stop the flag from raising, with Bug Breaches, Bot Drops, or incoming Illuminate Ships happening throughout the entire flag raising process. The only thing coming close to this level of response is the Geological Survey, and in that case, they're attempting to deny Super Earth access to resources. Other primary objectives will only garner a response if a patrol happens to wander upon Helldivers and they raise the alarm. Heck, even the Automatons get in on the flag raising action (offscreen), setting up battle standards and stamping their symbol on Helldiver statues!
• Sliding Scale of Gameplay and Story Integration: Deliberate Integration bordering on Perfect Integration. Excepting a few common conceits like instant healing and lack of stamina consumption for anything but sprinting, the actual combat is fairly realistic, with relatively slow and fragile players (even with futuristic body armor), subsystem damage for both players and enemies, aversion of things like Bottomless Magazines and One Bullet Clips (and very detailed and meticulous modeling and animations for all the firearms), and a damage model that accounts for armor penetration, bleeding, bullet drop, angle of impact, and so on in a way few other games bother with. In fact, every projectile is simulated in-engine to the point that the wiki was able to derive every gun's caliber, velocity, and mass by pulling these values directly from the in-game physics files, and these properties affect the projectiles' flight paths and damage fall-off. Common video game cliches that are usually dismissed as a segregation of the game and story are here worked directly into the worldbuilding, to the point of Deconstructive Parody; for example, your supposedly elite soldier protagonist still has to level up their ship (and even unlock higher difficulties) and buy their own weapons because the government they're fighting for is dysfunctional and corrupt underneath its propaganda. And of course, the meta narrative is determined directly on how well the players do in-game.
  • A small but notable example: whenever a weapon has its ammo capacity expanded in balance patches, the in-game model is also tweaked to make the magazine bigger.
• Sleeves Are for Wimps: The otherwise full-body armours added in the Viper Commandos pack have exposed skin on the upper arms, apparently just to show off how absolutely jacked these Helldivers are. They must be putting some crazy supplements in the rations. As a bonus, the skin colour is randomized every time you spawn too.
• 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, leaving the enemy confused and aimlessly searching for them.
• 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.
• So Much for Stealth: Most objectives can be completed quietly, either by killing patrols quickly or by avoiding detection entirely. If an enemy gets an alarm off, though, the incoming waves of reinforcements can turn the rest of the mission into a running firefight.
• Space Clouds: Several months into the Galactic War, the Terminids enshrouded entire sectors in an impenetrable thicket of spores—The Gloom—preventing Helldiver deployment and surveillance. Even outside that development, Terminid spread across planets is (according to the party line) facilitated by interstellar spores that travel between planets to seed new larvae.
• 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.
• Space Station: A long-term Helldiver project beginning in late September of 2024 was the creation and protection of the Democracy Space Station (DSS) to provide a new base of operations in Automaton-occupied space.
• Spock Speak: The Thoracic Collision Exultation Maneuver emote found in the Freedom's Flame warbond. It is used to make another player chest bump with you.
• Sticky Bomb: The Thermite grenade from the Democratic Detonation Warbond sticks to a single target, and deals both long-term fire damage and a truly colossal amount of explosive damage after its fuse detonates. Due to its sticky nature and high damage, it can even deal with structures and tanks effectively at multiple angles.
• 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 Strohmann 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.
• 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.
• Stylistic Suck: The media you see on your Super Destroyer's TV screen is just as rubbish as you'd expect from the comically Fascist, but Inefficient Federation. It's cheap-looking, crude, soaked in Glurge, and often just plain dumb. One video proclaims that the Automatons are heartless killing machines, and that it's a fact they don't have hearts. And then it immediately does a 180 into talking about how heart is what the Federation is all about, then jumps into saying that's why you should volunteer for the Super Earth Armed Forces.
• Subsystem Damage: Both Helldivers and their enemies can suffer from this.
  • Helldivers with broken arms have degraded aim and can't throw stratagems or 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 until they die or use a stim. Their vehicles can also be affected by this - the Fast Recon Vehicle's doors can be broken off and its individual tires can be popped (the heavy machine gun, however, is distinctly invulnerable). Exosuits' individual arms and legs can be destroyed, eliminating the weapons attached to each arm while each leg is just a weak point to the vehicle that will total the entire thing if one gets broken.
  • 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. Hulks can have a leg destroyed, which will stun them for a short time and then slow further movement - and Tanks can have their treads blown up, immobilizing them, but their turrets are still fully functional and capable of killing you. There's even an achievement for leaving a mission whilst an armless Hulk is still alive.
• Suicide Mission: While Helldivers missions...are pretty much already always these kind of missions, the Deploy Dark Fluid missions on Meridia turned out to be even more lethal, as completing the mission's objective would then cause massive amounts of Shriekers to harry the Helldivers indefinitely. Very carefully prepared teams aware of this might have managed to extract alive - all the other sorts of teams would probably be lucky just to have any one Helldiver make it on the Pelican.
• Super Drowning Skills: For all the insane feats your average Helldiver can pull off, and with Super Earth's greatest military technology at their fingertips, you can be thwarted by nothing more than a meter-deep body of water as you near-immediately tire out and impotently drown. Conveniently, your dropped items also have infinite mass and drop like bricks to the bottom of ponds, making it impossible to retrieve them without drowning again.
• Super-Fun Happy Thing of Doom: The "Freedom & Readiness to Enable Effective Defense & Obstruction of Mind Influence" (FREEDOM) Act sounds very nice, but is really a transparent excuse by Super Earth's government to even more heavily monitor the behavior of its down citizens. It's also evidently based on the USA PATRIOT Act, which was also a Shoehorned Acronym that sounded much more benign than it actually was and gave the US government the right to conduct otherwise illegal surveillance on its own citizens.
• 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'.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • The physics of getting hit by a large, heavy corpse are just as lethal as they should be. Standing under a Bile Titan or Factory Strider as it dies is asking to be crushed, and many a Helldiver has met their end by killing a bullrushing Charger only for the corpse to continue sliding forward and splatter them.
  • Using a fire-spewing jetpack while wearing a cape causes the bottom of the cape to catch fire and burn away, with the damage becoming worse and worse the more you use the jetpack.
  • Meanwhile, the Dark Fluid packs propelled you with a jet of, well, highly-compressed anomalous matter. This has quite predictable effects for anyone too close to your launch point, almost like a reverse Goomba Stomp.
• Tactical Shooter: Though not a full example — the sci-fi setting and fantastic technology do limit the amount of realism present by their very nature — the game does take definite cues from the genre. Helldivers are fragile, vulnerable to friendly fire, and are restricted to three weapons (primary, secondary sidearm, and optional support weapon) and a small amount of grenades and stims. Excessive damage to specific limbs impairs their ability to function (crippled arms can't throw as far and have trouble aiming weapons, crippled legs slow you down, etc.). With limited exceptions, the priority is always on completing the mission over scoring "kills" or "points," and Helldiver teams must work together and pick their battles carefully to succeed — particularly at higher levels of play.
• 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. A loading screen tip repeats the advice from that video, since the Brasch Tactics bits don't play very often and can easily be missed if players don't hang around in the right parts of the Super Destroyer.
• Take That!:
• 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.
  • Bile Titans, Shriekers, and Chargers maintain their momentum when they die, and are thus fully capable of taking out a Helldiver with their corpses. Given their long and sweeping legs, the first of the three are especially infamous for taking out divers as they go down.
  • The Servants of Freedom warbond contains two sets of armour that have a passive ability called Integrated Explosives. This means that the armor is rigged to explode 1.5 seconds after the death of the wearer, taking down any nearby enemies (and possibly other divers).
• 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. Some of them may be shockingly basic and simplistic...
• Think of the Children!: A core part of Super Earth's propaganda — kids are constantly brought up in the war effort. The intro features a child getting horribly mauled by Terminids off-screen, and news reports on the Illuminate re-appearance is introduced with a line about how Super Earth's children were in danger of them. The community as a whole also decided to defend a sick childrens' hospital instead of defending a factory producing anti-tank mines. All of this ties into the fact that children are highly encouraged to join the military at age 16, and the vast majority of Helldivers sign up (and die) at age 18.
• 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?
• Throw-Away Guns: The MLS-4X "Commando" was downgraded to one of these compared to the first game, where it's a dedicated support weapon stratagem that comes with a support pack, fires eight homing shots before needing to reload and can be assisted-reloaded. In II, it's instead been reworked into a sidegrade to the EAT-17 which fires four slightly weaker shots with mild homing properties before it needs to be discarded and can't be reloaded at all.
• Time Skip: Helldivers II is set 100 years after the original Helldivers and Super Earth’s victory over the original 3 enemy factions.
• Training from Hell: Parodied. The “elite" training to become a Helldiver lasts a handful of minutes covering trivial tasks like "how to run" or "how throw a stratagem" or "don't stand in front of gatling turrets." It also features a rather brutal way to teach recruits how to heal using stims by way of a machine that stabs your throat. The final exam, though, is clearing a simulated Terminid nest that is defended by live Terminids. Overall, Helldiver training has a 21.3% survival rate, and the bones (or blood smears) of previous candidates are littered across the course.
• Tripod Terror: Veterans of the first war will remember how the Illuminate deployed packs of tripod walkers a bit larger than a man, armed with electrical arc projectors, for close combat. In the second war, these monsters now tower over two-storey buildings and are armed with devastating beam cannons for long-range combat. Oh, and they still have the lightning gun for anyone who gets in too close.
• Triumphant Reprise: A slightly more bombastic remix of "A Cup of Liber-Tea" plays upon victory of a mission.
• The Turret Master: Players can be this if they so choose once they've unlocked enough turret stratagems to fill out their list. Each turret has its own cooldown time so they can be paced out or all in the same area. However, its not recommended to go all in on turrets without team coordination as support weapons and strikes can save a Helldiver a lot of bother if used right and enemies tend to prioritize turrets once close enough as well as turrets not caring who's in the way, meaning that if you're not extra careful, its all too easy for Helldivers and friendly turrets to get shot by an abundance of their own turrets. Now you can even get mini-turrets for the top of your resupply pods!
• 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:
  • Players cannot check their map and input stratagems at the same time, since both use the same in-game wrist computer interface.
  • The best way to kill armored enemies isn't shooting them with small arms in their brightly-colored unarmored bits; it's shooting them with anti-tank weapons. Preferably in the head.
  • Anti-tank weapons have to be aimed properly, not just hit. Depending on the angle of impact even anti-tank rockets can ricochet, and even if they do penetrate not all parts of an enemy are vital.
  • Avoiding patrols is better than fighting them. Patrols can call in reinforcements, and as elite and heavily armed as Helldivers are, squads can quickly find themselves in situations where enemy reinforcements arrive faster than they can be killed.
  • Update 1.001.100 made the Extreme Heat and Extreme Cold weather effects able to vary in intensity based on time of day, potentially even inverting on certain planets. Desert planets will enjoy Extreme Cold during the night, but beware the rising sun; it heralds the onset of Extreme Heat.
  • Stratagems can be stopped or cushioned by terrain as is logical. Calling an airstrike or orbital strike from beneath a cliff overhead probably won't hit any enemies beneath it.
  • It's not just Bile Titans or tanks running over you being able to cause lethal Collision Damage - collapsing or propelled objects colliding with you can kill you too. Unfortunate players can even end up killing themselves by launching objects or enemies into themselves after shooting explosive weaponry at them.
• Universal Ammunition: While the amount of ammunition received varies based on one's weapons, either way - if it gives a player ammunition, it will restore at least part of their weapons' reserves no matter if they're using flamethrowers, grenade launchers, or railguns. Grenade supply boxes also work for any kind of grenade a player might be using, be they smoke or thermite.
• 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 6+ respectively.
• Urban Warfare: Following the Omens of Tyranny update, maps can spawn cities for Helldivers to fight in. While all the problems of city battles rear their heads—lack of visibility, choke points, and more arduous traveling—cities can also spawn vehicles and weapons for Helldivers to use. Plus, the narrow streets can be used to force enemy hordes into the path of an Eagle-1 Airstrike (at the expense of whatever home you just destroyed).
• Variable Mix: The music changes depending on what you're doing.
  • On the Super Destroyer's bridge, the music will change depending on what you're interacting with, such as the galactic map, loading into a hellpod, or lounging around talking to the crew.
  • During missions, breaks in the action turn down the music or remove it entirely. Engaging a patrol causes the music to suddenly pick up. If they call in reinforcements, the music switches to active combat music. Finally if an enemy Elite/Heavy joins the fight (such as a Bile Titan or Harvester), the music will shift into a more panic inducing theme.
  • The extraction theme changes on various factors, such as amount of enemies nearby, how much time is left, and if the Pelican has landed.
• Video Game Caring Potential: One Major Order had the players forced to choose between saving a hospital full of sick children trapped behind Automaton lines, or raiding a large explosives supply cache to gain the Anti-Tank Mine stratagem. The players ended up almost overwhelmingly choosing to save the children despite the lack of any advertised material benefit to doing so, which Arrowhead chose to celebrate with a surprise real-life donation to Save the Children.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: There are all sorts of ways to kill your teammates, but the one with the most potential for fun is secretly activating another teammates Portable Hellbomb.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Killing civilians during missions where you need to protect them as they move to evacuate or reach a more secure location will subtract from your rewards and prolong the mission, potentially resulting in getting overrun and failing entirely.
• Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Averted. The FLAM-40 Flamethrower has seen a massive upgrade to its effectiveness since the last game and is now able to fulfill its intended purpose of a combination crowd control and area denial weapon by burning anything caught in its line of fire to a crisp very rapidly. Later updates would even make it an effective big game-hunting weapon by granting it armor shredding properties to anything short of a bile titan or hulk (if you're brave enough to be up-close and personal). Further upgrades from the Bridge can increase the fire damage value even more.
  • However, the flamethrower is all but useless against automatons, as you'll need to get into close range to use it. The only things you'll be able to hit without getting turned into swiss cheese or giblets are Brawlers, Berserkers and Scorcher Hulks. The latter, of course, also has a flamethrower! Though you can kill them all still with a flamethrower, if you're quick about it (and maybe have fire-resistant armour). Flame War, anyone?
  • The FLAM-44 Torcher isn't too shabby against automatons if you can get close, and can even burn out Scout Strider pilots despite the front plate. This does mean getting up close to them though, and you don't really want to be in front of them at short range given how powerful their cannons are.
• 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/artillery rockets, 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.
  • Likewise, Terminids calling for a bug breach will also spawn lots of random ones to pop out and attack you, with larger ones showing up regularly on higher difficulties.
  • The Illuminate goes for a much darker path. Their actual alien forces like the Overseers are much fewer in number than the other two enemy factions, and most of their disposable reserves actually consist of the Voteless, Super Citizens that were abducted from their colonies, brainwashed, and heavily mutated.
  • 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: Some objectives are particularly challenging to accomplish if the enemy calls in an alarm for reinforcements (Bug Breach / Bot Drop / Illuminate Ships). Since only one alarm can be active and has a map-wide cooldown, a common strategy is for part of the squad to attack a patrol far from the objective and intentionally let it call for reinforcements, leaving the coast clear for the objective to be completed.
• We Will Spend Credits in the Future: The premium currency is Super Credits, which can be found in-mission or bought. Also mentioned in NPC dialogue where it is made clear it is also used as currency by the populace to buy things.
• We Will Wear Armor in the Future: Notable as despite being capable of superluminal travel speeds, orbital bombardment, flawless cryogenics, instant healing through chemical injection, etc, power armor is extremely rare and limited. The overwhelming majority of armors that provide better protection do so simply by nailing more mass to the user.
• Wham Episode: Operation Bughammer became this on December 12, 2024, which was the release date of the Omens of Tyranny update. Not only did this see the long-awaited return of The Illuminates to the setting, but for the second time in the game's history, a major order was abandoned, and after only one day^note  — the preparations for an upcoming siege by the Terminids were immediately put on hold to focus on the Illuminates making landfall on planet Calypso.
  • Super Earth High Command Dispatches always took on a bombastic propaganda tone even when addressing serious events, sometimes even with a stray joke about how Laughably Evil their society is. And the Bots and Bugs are certainly no laughing matter. But when the Illuminate suddenly re-emerged at Calypso? Dispatches suddenly take on the tone of dead-serious, desperate pleas for help.
• Wham Line: One day into Operation Bughammer, said operation was cancelled outright, with the Helldivers receiving the following notification. And said notification is absolutely devoid of propaganda.

  DISREGARD ALL PRIOR ORDERS

  REPLACEMENT ORDERS TO FOLLOW THIS MESSAGE

  PLANET CALYPSO UNDER ATTACK

  ALL HELLDIVERS ORDERED TO CALYPSO IMMEDIATELY

• What You Are in the Dark: In July 2024, players were given the choice of rescuing in-game orphans on one planet for no reward, or assaulting another planet and finally earning the coveted Anti-Tank Mine stratagem. Players overwhelmingly chose to save the orphans, to the point that Arrowhead donated to Save the Children charity in real life in response.
• Writers Cannot Do Math:
  • In May 2024, Super Earth HQ released data on Helldiver death rates vs enemies killed and bullets fired and apparently claimed that Helldivers on average fired 3 bullets per helldiver, or at most 60 bullets fired by an entire team in a single mission. In a game where your default weapon's magazine size is 45.
  • The tutorial level cutscene shows that Helldiver training has a 21.3% survival rate, which is considered "Acceptable" by Super Earth. However, as of May 2024, 223 million Helldivers have been killed in action, meaning a further 800 million Helldivers died in training. While Super Earth and its colonies may have had massive population growth by the time of the game in 2184, taking nearly a billion casualties in training alone would be difficult to shrug off, even for Super Earth's inflated population.
• Yet Another Stupid Death: Due to the game's tendency to have Surprisingly Realistic Outcome in play, several deaths can indeed be quite stupid.
  • Lean outside the Fast Recon Vehicle to shoot some enemies? Make sure the rear gunner isn't aiming on your side.
  • Reloading next to a mine? Better hope your Helldiver throws the magazine away from it or else it'll go boom.
  • Were you looking behind yourself to make sure the enemies aren't catching up? Make sure to also pay attention to what's in front of you or you may fall off a cliff.
  • Kill a Bile Titan by shooting up its underbelly? Make sure you run away when it's dead, or its corpse may squash you.
• 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. Advanced crew training for the Eagle aircraft includes training the pit crew members to simply leave unused ammunition inside the Eagle instead of replacing it.
• Zerg Rush:
  • The Terminids' entire strategy. The threat they pose from individual weapons is almost nonexistent, with even Bile Titans being fairly manageable one on one for a (properly-equipped and reasonably competent) Helldiver. But there's never just one. On higher difficulties the game notably throws a terrifying amount of the weakest Terminids at you, rather than simply replacing every enemy with stronger ones.
  • The basic infantry unit of the Illuminate, the Voteless, come in large crowds and seek to overwhelm the player in sheer numbers dwarfing the Terminids' own basic infantry Scavenger units. While they're slower and less damaging than Scavengers, they're also more durable, requiring more effort from Helldivers to thin their crowds.
• Zombie Apocalypse: Having their technology and numbers depleted, the insidious Illuminate have resorted to another despicable tactic — brainwashing Super Earth colonists and citizens and twisting their bodies into the Voteless.