Practice your Stratagem input skills. Using Stratagems, especially in the heat of an intense battle, can be particularly daunting. Thankfully, there's a way to brush up on your input code skills through a unique arcade-like game machine called Stratagem Hero found along the wall, directly across from the Ship Management station.

For example, some enemies are so heavily shielded they can only be put down by explosive weapons capable of tearing through the steel, so you’ll want to have at least one player who can call down the Recoilless Rifle, a rocket launcher that’ll make short work of anything that stands in its way. It’s especially cool that any equipment summoned can be shared with anyone on the team, encouraging teamwork and allowing your friends to benefit from your untimely demise by looting your corpse.

You'll earn these by completing missions. Each time you start one, you can see the number of medals you'll receive upon completion.

There’s not only cooperative combat, but you’ll have cooperative objectives to tackle with your team as well. You’ll be able to share locations with each other and move together across the map.

Its tight gameplay loop, excellent combat, and clever squad dynamics also make it one of the best and most fun tactical co-op shooters in years. And that’s good news for democracy.

An expansive map also means more potential areas for enemies to be lurking. You’ll need to strategize on missions and work toward objectives together, as venturing out on your own could be detrimental. 

There's also a setting to adjust the level of image sharpening. At zero sharpening in performance mode Helldivers 2 looks soft and indistinct, while stepping up to the max sharpening level increases clarity at the cost of additional artifacting. Quality mode exhibits the same difference, although given its higher resolution, the effect is a bit more subtle. Helldivers' performance mode runs smoothly. We're mostly at 60fps in typical play, with a very smooth readout, especially when combined with the game's motion blur. The game can suffer from extended dips into the 50s though, typically during larger firefights. In my gameplay the worst Helldivers 2 Gameplay I saw was about 50fps, so the game does manage to stay pretty close to 60fps more generally, although it can spend a long time hovering in the 50s in extended firefights. The quality mode also manages a tight lock on its 30fps frame-rate target, but it clearly has issues with bouts of inconsistent frame-pacing.

Take part in a successful final assault on an enemy's home planet by completing at least one mission.

Instead of putting a group of players onto a dedicated server, the matchmaker simply connects you to another player's public lobby as they're preparing for a mission that matches your chosen planet and difficulty.

They really leaned into the parody of enlistment and military media, from the music and the dialogue. Weirdly enough, it does make me feel patriotic. Sound effects from the weapons and the enemies are great to say the least, and even elevates the experience.

Arrowhead Game Studios announced they were working on a next-generation third-person cooperative game back in 2020, but nothing has been mentioned since. The game is still in development according to recent job listings at the studio, one of which requires the Senior Character Artist to focus on “everything from organic to hard surface characters such as creatures, humanoids and robots.

Helldivers 2 seems like it'd be a ton of fun to play with someone via local "couch" split-screen co-op, which is why it's such a bummer that the game doesn't support this feature on PC or PS5.

, including any news released during the waiting period, all the trailers we had a look at, and even some gameplay insights which may be worth looking at if you're comparing it to the game itself. 

Helldivers 2 is a third-person sci-fi co-op shooter developed by Arrowhead Studios. Players will become a Helldiver in the name of exploring the galaxy and reclaiming planets that have fallen under enemy control back into the Super Earth coalition.