ARTHUR SAYS: "Helldivers 2 is like making out with your buddies while listening to 'BFG Division' by Mick Gordon."

It all started because I wanted to buy a helmet.

For the past several months I’ve been absolutely enraptured with Arrowhead Studio’s smash-hit Helldivers 2. The co-op shooter, one of 2024’s surprise success stories in the gaming sphere, has eaten up far more time than I’m readily willing to admit, having monopolized my attention in spite of such high-profile recent releases as Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Dragon’s Dogma 2.

I picked up the game after reading Aftermath’s Nathan Grayson’s glowing review back in February, and while I have been more or less completely occupied since then owing to student union shenanigans, a sudden bout of debilitating illness, and the general burnout which accompanies desperately trying to haul oneself over the academic finish line, I’ll admit the itch to go divin’ has remained a constant source of temptation.

I am, unfortunately, a busy girl, and of my many passtimes gaming comes decidedly after more important obligations such as school and work, or more time-conscious hobbies such as tapping through the Instagram stories of women who I went on a single date with eight months ago, or opening 35 tabs on Wikipedia and eating an entire bag of Hint of Lime™ tortilla chips—you know, “hot girl shit.”

It’s a strong mark in Helldivers favour, then, that the game has gripped me as much as it does. There’s no doubt a combination of factors at play—Fortnite’s past few seasons have not been especially compelling and I lack the hardware or constitution to be yelled at in Counter-Strike 2. I’m also not shelling out $80 to play Overwatch 2—Blizzard, go fuck yourselves.

To that end, Helldivers 2 seems a happy compromise. At $49.99 CAD it costs just around half the price of most regular releases these days. Moreveover, it has a dedicated dev team who are super transparent in their aim to make the game excel as the sprawling meta-narrative of its galaxy-spanning conflict develops.

Helldivers, you see, is a game you play more or less in real time alongside tens of thousands of other active players. The conceit is simple: you are conscripted into the Helldivers, an elite infantry unit tasked with spreading “managed democracy”—largely by means of napalm, leadshot, and high-explosives—and protecting the interests of Super Earth on the galactic fringe. Think the U.S. Marines if they were just a little bit more like Imperial Stormtroopers and you’ll begin to get the idea.

The galactic war tasks you with fighting against either of two factions—the insectoid Terminids or the mechanical Automatons—in order to complete objectives and ultimately liberate planets in the name of Super Earth. After the briefest of tutorials, you’re given command of your own vessel (I christened my mistress SES Mother of War) and given free dispensation to drop in anywhere on the war front.

When I say “drop,” I do mean that literally. The eponymous Helldivers take to planetary deployment by means of Hellpods—modular, single-person craft which are launched (at full re-entry speed, mind) pointy-side-first into the planet of your choice.

​The cynical part of me understands that this is just a clever bid to hide a loading screen, but c’mon man, this kind of bonkers-ass Flash Gordon nonsense can’t help but make me grin. 

So much of Helldivers’ worldbuilding is delivered with this same equanimity. The entire conceit is over the top, yes—this is a game whose meta-narrative sees you playing the role of Space Imperialist mounting an extermination campaign against alien bugs and sentient (?) robots in the search for oil—but the humour, and a lot of the enjoyment, if we’re being honest, comes from the fact that the game plays it unwaveringly straight.

You can call down orbital laser strikes and douse swathes of terrain in napalm all by plugging fighting game directional inputs into a pop-up menu. Advanced weaponry and turret emplacements are dropped down for you in Hellpods. There’s even a little drone called “Rover” which has a FUCKING LASER RIFLE. When I say this game owns, I mean it.

On the whole, Helldivers is a simple, if robust, third-person shooter which brings just enough to a largely stagnant genre to keep people talking. In many ways, it feels like the thing I’d been waiting for since the last 3PS Co-op PVE game I played—Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End’s (admittedly excellent) survival mode—except instead of Nolan North quipping, your characters will regularly scream lines such as “How about a cup of liber-tea?” and “SAY HELLO TO DEMOCRACY!” all while screaming maniacally as you dump a whole canister of flamethrower ammo into whatever horde of giant bugs you happen to be fighting.

It’s Paul Verhooven’s Starship Troopers mixed with Call of Duty Zombies, complete with big guns, a heaping helping of heavy-handed satirical humour, and excellent ragdoll physics.

More than that, it’s a game that throws you feet-first onto the face of alien planets, hands you a fuck-off-sized machine gun and tells you in no uncertain terms to shoot anything that moves. Otherwise said, it’s a ton of fun and—like any good sexual partner—is pretty insistent on getting its hands around your neck.

Whenever I’ve had someone in my house in the past two months who even vaguely understands the controller layout of a shooter game, I’ve sat them down in front of my 4K 60FPS monitor, primed them with a selection of the meanest guns and most carnage-inducing stratagems, and said “have at it.” 

Without fail, these unwitting recruits have each been evangelized to the cause.

Helldivers begs you to beg every friend you have to play it with you because blasting bugs just isn’t the same when you’re alone. The game is at its best with a full squad on the higher difficulties, with each person lobbing stratagem upon stratagem at a seemingly unbeatable stream of enemies.

In many ways, this is the true appeal of Helldivers 2. It is in every respect a co-operative game, and it’s designed to be played as such. Sure, you can strike out on your own, though by the design of the game’s matchmaking you’re soon likely to be informed that “Friendly Destroyer has joined squadron,” seconds before a second diver blasts down onto your position to help with your present objective.

In Helldivers, you’re rarely (if ever) alone, and coordination is required to turn the tide of war both on the level of the game’s bite-sized missions, and its galaxy-spanning overarching story of interplanetary conflict. Users on r/Helldivers are constantly scrambling to plot out the best way to complete the game’s Major Orders, which are issued to all players as the overarching conflict develops.

In turn, the subreddit and other related communities have become hubs for the usual sort of activity one expects from such a breakout success—namely, memes. Jungle planet Malevelon Creek was christened “Robot Vietnam” by the community at large after provingly stubbornly difficult to liberate, with a dedicated group of players going so far as to declare themselves “Creek Divers” and mount a concerted offensive to win it back.

The subreddit is consistently overflowing with fanart of the game’s Bomber pilot, Eagle-1, and speculation abounds about what the next Major Order might be, or when another faction might be introduced. LARPing is endemic, many players taking it upon themselves to speak in character as a soldier of Super Earth, whether it’s over in-game comms or in the comment sections of posts about the game online.

While to the outside it might seem like a cult or a circle-jerk, to those in the community it’s all in good fun.

Helldivers, for all its satirizing of the ur fascist idea of “belonging to something bigger than you,” nonetheless manages to bring people together to enjoy a game on a scale I’ve not personally seen since the end of Fornite’s first chapter, or the collective bout of momentary insanity which gripped the lesbian part of Gensin Impact Twitter after that Lantern Rite line.

Unlike these fleeting moments, however, Helldivers seems to have legs. It’s a game which still draws tens of thousands of concurrent players where the traffic on other always-online multiplayer games seem to have slowed to a trickle.

It’s this sense of community that seems to afford the game infinite opportunity for moments of emergent narrative. A new diver joining your squad to help turn the tide right as the line was about to fall; a lucky toss landing a grenade right in the exhaust port which could destroy an entire enemy outpost; a Skull Admiral sacrificing themselves to distract enemies so a lowly Sergeant could complete the objective. Helldivers’ mechanics gives its players the space to tell stories about the little moments which emerge from the interplay of its systems—stories which admittedly mostly begin and end with “Man, that shit was dope!”

Back to the helmet with which this all started.

I had, by this point, worked my way up the chain of command to the rank of Master Sergeant. My arsenal was looking healthy, my ship thoroughly retrofitted and upgraded. I had braved the Creek several times, and reached a level of confidence where I could run headlong into bot outposts without so much as breaking a sweat.

For as much as I’d relished the combination of Drone Master helmet coupled with Engineering Corps. armour which had fast become my signature outfit for liberating, I had been eyeing up a new helmet for a period of time.

This was not just any helmet, mind. It was a super helmet, from the Super Store—the kind you need to drop Super Credits to buy.

I'd been ogling this particular helmet since it first came to the Super Store some four days prior. It's a nice helmet—sleek, matte, and a little evil. Like a Storm Commando and the Neuromancer headset had a baby.

I wanted it. 

I wanted it bad, man. 

However, a small problem presented itself: the same Super Credits I intended to use to purchase said helmet, I’d already earmarked to buy the next premium Warbond (the game’s Battle Pass-like progression system).

In Helldivers 2, there are two primary ways one can earn Super Credits: by shelling out (real) money, or by tediously searching mission AOs for miniscule amounts of Credits hidden in procedurally-generated crates, caches, and other minor points of interest. This exerciseexcercise can be streamlined in a few ways, but for the most part it’s a crapshoot made tolerable only by slogging through the process on the game’s lowest mission difficulty.

With a sigh, I selected “Trivial” difficulty, and hit “Quickplay.”

As luck would have it, I was matched with a newbie.

As my Destroyer made the FTL jump to the Terminid-Occupied Estanu system, my heads-up display helpfully informed me that I had joined the game of one “Little Tony,” Level 1 Cadet. This was clearly Tony’s first game—he manipulated the galactic map with an ability that betrayed a level of confusion with the finer intricacies of Helldivers’ commendably tactile level select. Nonetheless, I waited patiently for my newfound squadmate to select our drop point.

In and out, I told myself. Spawn, find as many credits as you can while he struggles to play objective, then drop an Orbital Laser on whatever the game wants us to blow up so we can extract.

Simple as, really. 

While Tony struggled to select the Orbital Strike and Machine Gun stratagems with which everyone starts the game, I loaded as many air-to-ground munitions into loadout as I could, selected my trusty incendiary auto shotgun, and selected “Ready Up.”

As we dropped to the planet below, I rehearsed my plan. The moment my Hellpod disembarked I sprinted to the nearest POI. Completely disregarding Tony—who appeared to be trying to figure out how to call in his Machine Gun—I feverishly mashed the action button on a cache of Super Credits. Credits secured, I set off at a sprint in the opposite direction from the objective to scour the rest of the map. 

Unfortunately for my attempts to evade the objective, Tony had elected to drop directly on top of it. 

Rounding the very first corner I came face-to-face with a fuck-off big and rightly ticked-off Terminid looking to take a modest chomp out of one of my limbs (or, most likely, face). I fired my shotgun out of pure instinct, discharging a whole mag of incendiary rounds until the Brood Commander was reduced to a mass of gooey green-and-slightly-charred pulp.

The HUD helpfully informed me that I had completed one of the sub-objectives, entirely unintentionally.

I put my controller down.

In spite of my best efforts to not play the objective, it felt as if the objective had ultimately played me. I watched Tony dutifully trek Northeast to the second sub-objective, though not before calling in an Orbital Strike on the corpse of the bug I’d just dispatched for good measure.

I sighed.

The universe, I decided, was sending me a message. Quickplay had queued me into this game for a reason, and by all accounts it was not to farm a fake virtual currency. That, I would leave to the crypto bros. 

Nay, my conscience screamed. Thou shalt help Tony!

I reloaded my shotgun and started after him.

The rest of the mission went swimmingly enough. Together we found the next mini-boss in a matter of minutes, and promptly I dispatched it by dropping a 500 kg bomb on top of it while Tony watched from a safe distance.

After that it was a mere hop, skip, and a jump to the extraction point, whence Tony and I were promptly returned to his Super Destroyer, ready to jump into the next mission.

I watched on the mission summary screen as Tony’s XP bar ticked up, filling, spilling over, and flashing as the game marked his progression from level 1 to level 2. This achievement—an inconsequential one, perhaps, in the scope of the game’s 100+ achievable levels, filled me with such pride that I couldn’t help but pump my fist. 

Do it for Tony, I told myself. Do it for Tony.

With renewed vigour I followed my newfound ward to the war table, and watched as he queued us for a mission the next difficulty level up.

As we stepped into our Hellpods, my Destroyer’s comms alerted me that another friendly had joined our squad, call sign “Morpho.” As we suited up, the newcomer’s voice crackled over Push-to-Talk, exclaiming “yoooooooo…Little Tony!!!”

I knew, in this moment, I had found a comrade-in-arms.

For the next hour, myself and Morpho acted as Tony’s surrogate guardian angels as best we could. I readily offered all my most imbalanced late-game support weapons to our charge, that Little Tony might get a taste of real firepower. Morpho ran about, manically scrounging samples all while pinging enemy patrols with reckless abandon. 

Between rounds, Morpho and I would emote at each other whilst Tony consulted the stratagems list, slowly but surely improving his arsenal. Periodically when we returned to our Hellpods, we’d be joined by other Quickplay queuers, themselves equally happy to commit themselves to Little Tony’s retinue. Others, however, were less collaborative.

“Quit killing Tony!” Morpho exclaimed, as one particularly noxious teammate shot our protege in the head for the fifth or so time, effectively exhausting our stock of reinforcements. For the first time in my time with Helldivers 2, I found myself compelled to pull out my Filco Majestouch Minila-R Convertible wireless keyboard, connect it to my PlayStation 5 with the push of a button, and inform our would-be mutineer, in the strongest possible terms, that he would be reported to the nearest Democracy officer upon our safe extraction.

Against all odds, we completed our dispatch, and as Pelican-1 readied to pick us up from the extraction point, I promptly shot our dissident in the head so that he might not prevent Tony from extracting. Needless to say, our spoilsport did not return.

After about an hour of intense Democratic activity, Tony had ranked up twice, and was fast bearing down on the title of “Space Cadet.” So it was that, with the balls only a level 3 Cadet can muster, Tony set our course for bot space.

Now, any old idiot can wrangle some bugs. On the lower difficulties the tiddlers can be dispatched by the simple expedient of pointing any automatic weapon in their general vicinity, whispering a prayer (should it please you to do so) and holding down the trigger. 

Bots, however, are a different story.

Tousling with Automatons is no milk run. They’ve got guns, and chainsaws, and flamethrowers, and though they do not yet have guns that are also chainsaws, it would not surprise me if Robot R&D were in the process of cooking that up. 

Automaton planets are infested with bot patrols, fabricators, automatic weapons emplacements, and secondary objectives which would make Battlefield players quake in their boots. However, where Tony went, Morpho and I seemed determined to follow, so I equipped my shiny Quasar Cannon, whispered a devotional to Lady Liberty, and strapped into my pod.

Tony, with his usual efficiency, dropped us directly on top of the objective—a bot outpost in need of quashing. After a number of minutes passed in which it became clear that our hapless charge had no idea how best to undertake this task, I took charge and called down the Hellbomb. While Tony scrounged around the base, I punched in the detonation code and Morpho and I booked it.

While we hunched behind a rock waiting for the fuse to blow, I realized in horror that Tony—not knowing what unholy manner of explosive I’d dispatched to effectuate this task—was still standing next to the ticking time bomb.

It was all I could do to frantically mash “RUN!!!” into my keyboard before the chorus of beeps reached its crescendo, and with a fwoom the bot outpost—and Tony along with it—were blown sky high.

“NOOOOOO, TONY” Morpho wailed, whilst I furiously mashed the “Sorry!” hotkey and quickly dispatched a reinforcement.

Reunited once again, I repentantly gifted Tony my Tac-Pack by way of apology. Before I knew it, Morpho had marked our next objective, and our intrepid platoon again departed. We fell into a curious rhythm thereafter, Tony taking point while Morpho and I flanked him, dispatching the occasional patrol coming up our rear, and periodically throwing air strike beacons ahead to cover our advance.

The mechanical flow of Helldivers has an inimitable ability to control the flow of your squad’s movement, incentivizing teamwork to an extent I’ve yet to see in any other PVE of the like. These people who I knew only as “Morpho” and “Little Tony,” and who knew me only as “Angel,” or “A2” had somehow formed a syncretic bond through our shaped objective of tactical unity.

So it was that for the first time in the duration of my time with Helldivers, I did something previously unthinkable to me: I pressed the comm button.

“I’ve got the Hellbomb,” I chirped. “Sorry Tony, I’ll try not to blow you up this time.”

Morpho guffawed. Tony, ever the stoic, replied only with “gg” in text chat.

The rest of our game went like butter. Morpho and I barked commands and traded witticism between one another, Tony ever methodical in his playing the objective. As we stood on the extraction platform, I doused the area in hellfire and unloaded a mag into the sky like Apocalypse Now. I felt on top of the world.

As we jetted back to Tony’s Super Destroyer, I watched his level again tick up. After hours of hard-fought diving, he had earned the title of Space Cadet. 

It felt poetic. No longer was he merely Little Tony, he had graduated to the rank of presumably-Medium Tony, or something thereabouts.

Tragically, however, all things come to an end, and having spent far more time than I had ever intended to over the past several hours of diving, the nagging voice in my head persuaded me that I should probably pay some attention to the copy edits sitting in the Arthur drive, or else the last few outstanding assignments of my degree.

“SO LONG TONY,” I tearfully typed out in chat. “IT’S BEEN AN HONOUR.”

I pressed the emote button, my Helldiver outstretching her arms in an open hug. Tony, silent all the while, reciprocated, pulling my character into a tight, leather-clad embrace. As we parted, his character snapped off a sharp salute, and with a sigh, I keyed in the command to return to my ship alone.

While I knew him only for a short span of hours, Tony’s legacy is one I carry with me to this day. Little Tony inspired in me the renewed belief that even gamers of all people can overcome their differences and the urge to call each other “fags” in service of completely arbitrary (and often quite stupid) goals. It just so happens that Helldivers 2 seems to afford them the perfect vector to do so.

In my time with the game since Tony, I’ve been far more willing to hop on mic when my teammates are particularly chatty. We trade quips about dispensing democracy, and coordinate our objectives. Sometimes we make idle chatter. When I do I’m reminded that each of us, alone in our respective rooms, are united in this moment—together apart.

Every so often I’ve been queued with an existing group of friends who welcome me with open arms. Once, one of my teammates’ open mics picked up a conversation between he and his (presumably) girlfriend in which he informed her that “Babe, I’ve just jumped on with the boys” (having been the only woman in an all-male Call of Duty S&D squad for a period of several years, I’m more than happy to be one of “The Boys,” situation demanding).

As I continued to be privy to this private–public conversation, I heard my fellow diver inform his other half that “I made you Mac & Cheese, by the way—it’s in the oven.” Maybe, I thought to myself then and there, there is yet hope for heterosexual men.

It’s astounding the capacity we have to find human moments even in that which seeks to parody and satire the patently inhuman. Helldivers gamifies some of the worst tendencies of human society, yet somehow manages to do so in such a way which has brought people together from around the world, united under the banner of definitely-not-space-fascism.

It’s an odd paradox that I find strangely compelling. Even under the most alienating circumstances, it seems guys will find a way to just…hang out.

As someone who was not a working professional when Game of Thrones was airing on television, this seems as close as I’ll get to water-cooler talks about whatever is happening in pop culture right now. You get this a bit in the anime fandom—the fervour around Attack on Titan’s final season, or the flurry of lesbians coming out of the woodwork to make Mitski-scored edits of Delicious in Dungeon—though nothing seems to compare to the extent to which Helldivers 2 has truly enthralled an unfathomably large group of people.

Unlike communities built around speedrunning, or fighting games—which tend to be small, and disproportionately populated by transgender women—very few in the Helldivers community seem to be overtly “like me.” All the same, we’re able to come together to cheer whenever a milestone is completed, such as this week’s monumental defence of ten consecutive planets under siege—the first time the community has succeeded in a defense-based Major Order since the game’s launch.

Helldivers’ co-operative impetus builds up rather than breaks down. There’s none of the name-calling and slur-tossing of COD: Warzone lobbies, and fewer of Fortnite’s screeching children, as well. The game is in many ways all the better for this—in the absence of competitive objectives, everyone tends to act nicer. It creates the space where, for instance, setting aside your own objectives for two hours to help someone starting out doesn’t feel like a waste of time, but instead feels like giving back in whatever small way you can.

This, ultimately, is what sets Helldivers apart (to me) from any other multiplayer shooter at present. As long as people are nice—as opposed to being entitled dickheads always at each other’s throats and trying to get the last word in on hotmic—players have every reason to continue playing, and it shows.

There’s a reason the game still routinely pulls 100,000+ concurrent players. In time, those numbers will drop, granted, but it helps that there is also an extremely fun, and patently good game under the hood. I feel invested in Helldivers for the long haul and—if certain outlets’ recurring coverage is anything to go off of—regular people and industry professionals alike feel the same.

I’ve yet to see Little Tony in any of my quickplay matches again. It seems entirely possible I never will. Wherever he is, out there, however, I hope he’s doing well. I’ve no doubt the little Cadet who could is well on his way to be a revered Skull Admiral, some day. Even if I myself will not be there to see it, I trust that my thoughts and sincerest best wishes will be.

Ballads like these—the stories we tell about games, which emerge from them rather than being prescribed by writers, developers, or corporations—are one of the most uniquely fulfilling particularities of the medium.

All the same, a part of me suspects I might see Tony again one day—what’s to stop me? It’s a small universe, after all.

VERDICT: 6/7 This game fucking owns, dude.

P.S. I did get that helmet, in the end. Morpho and I wound up collecting enough Credits that I had enough and then some. I’ve worn it maybe twice. Thanks again, Tony.