YMMV / Helldivers

• Awesome Music: Has its own page.
• Broken Base: The issue of the loads of paid DLC offering exclusive pay-gated items for the game has been the subject of much discussion amongst the playerbase. One side feels that the game is completely fine without them and even if a player feels like they really want/need them they're relatively cheap (only about 3 dollars each) and can be mass-purchased in a bundle to save money, making it easy to either snatch them all up during a sale or just pick and choose the ones they want. The other side argues that not only does the paid DLC make up around half the content in the game now (meaning half the game's items are locked off to a base game player), but many of the weapons, perks and Stratagems available in said DLC are outright direct upgrades to numerous base-game items and some of them make extremely high-level and difficult missions way easier, leading to buying the DLC feeling like a case of Bribing Your Way to Victory. This debate was only exacerbated by Helldivers II's Warbond system, which allows players to optionally purchase premium currency to unlock stuff faster but also work toward unlocking them in-game if they have the patience, leading to the second group arguing why they didn't have this system for the first game to begin with.
• Cheese Strategy:
  • For the Siege Mech, the meta strategy is to coat the arena in fully-upgraded Anti-Personnel Mines (which gives them Anti-Tank properties) and have the Mech slowly trundle over them all and catch the majority of them underneath its wide-splayed tank treads, dealing colossal amounts of damage to it very rapidly on top of any other AT stratagems being employed. The ease with which this tactic can be employed has lead to the Siege Mech being regarded as the easiest of the Master Assaults.
  • For the Great Eye, a common trick is to back everyone into a corner of the arena, let the Eye close in and then rain Thunderer Barrages^note sometimes other Orbital Bombardment Stratagems are used on it like there's no tomorrow. This not only does tons of damage but also ideally prevents its Flash Step from allowing it to meaningfully evade any of it, while also catching its Destructible Projectiles and any spawning Illuminate Mooks in the blast range as collateral. This tactic isn't 100% reliable, as enemies have a chance of teleporting in behind your squad and some of the Great Eye's attacks can still be tricky to avoid especially when packed into a corner, but it does save a lot of time compared to trying to fight it out in the open where it can attack you on all sides and employ Teleport Spam.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • On paper, laser weapons have several strong drawbacks to counterbalance their powerful advantages: They have very limited magazines if you do happen to overheat the weapon, their reload time is long, and their DPS tends to be below that of conventional weapons. In reality though, their advantages tend to vastly eclipse the few drawbacks they have: If you can properly manage their heat, which isn't all that hard to do, they effectively have infinite ammo in a game where running out is a frequent concern and can spell life or death. On top of this, they usually have very long range, perfect accuracy, and a decent fire rate to boot, which make them great for killing every faction's scouts, even on the higher difficulties. The Sickle, which fills the niche of the "assault rifle" laser weapon, and the Trident, the "shotgun" version are arguably the best examples; The Sickle, unlike most other laser weapons, has all the advantages mentioned above, but it actually does the most amount of damage of any assault rifle equivalent in the game as long as you can hit center mass, even above battle rifles. (Which due to the pinpoint accuracy and long range, is much easier to ensure than on other weapons of a similar type) It's only drawbacks are that it does very little damage on off-center shots, and overheats quicker than most other laser weapons, but with upgrades and a minimal amount of experience with it, these disadvantages basically become non-issues and you are left with a Jack of All Trades weapon that has just about everything you would want in a primary. The Trident sacrifices the Sickle's accuracy and consistency for being able to flood a portion of the screen with lasers that can easily decimate scouts and hordes in ways that even the Sickle can't do. As a result of all these factors, it's not uncommon to see entire lobbies wielding these weapons as their primary, with their heavy weapons filling the need for AT, which are about the only things laser weapons cannot do.
  • On a broader level, it is quite easy to fall into the trap of taking the same weapons and equipment against the same enemy factions over and over again, as most factions tend to be extremely weak or vulnerable to specific gear. The Bugs are arguably the best example: Bugs as a whole are fast, "heavily'' armored, and (with one exception) exclusively melee. The "Avenger," essentially a flamethrower that shoots toxic sludge instead of fire, is almost custom designed to screw over the Bugs' biggest strengths, as it not only does it come with all the strengths a flamethrower has (large magazine capacity, great crowd control, heavy damage-over-time), but it also slows everything it hits down to a crawl, making it exceedingly unlikely that their melee-only hordes will ever reach you. On top of this, in a case of Surprisingly Realistic Outcome, it completely ignores the Bugs' heavy armor as they are still entirely organic, allowing it to damage and kill even the toughest Behemoths in a few spritz's, which would otherwise take dedicated AT weaponry to kill, and usually multiple shots at that. An experienced player can easily go through even a high-level bug planet using this weapon and nothing else.
  • Static Field Conductors are crucial for high-level Bug missions, as the ability to slow large groups of enemies to a near-complete halt for a relatively long duration is a hard counter to the Bugs' predominantly Close-Range Combatant nature. You'll almost never see a level 9 or above Bug mission without at least one squad member bringing this Stratagem along.
  • All-Terrain Boots is infamous because it's an almost guaranteed perk pick for snow planets to negate the movement restriction they otherwise supply. This has actually lead to some controversy surrounding the Terrain Specialist Pack DLC that the Boots are a part of, as many disgruntled players have argued that paying for it literally gives the player an advantage over those who don't and have to contend with less-effective mechs, vehicles and jump packs to traverse snow planets quickly.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Bugs:
    • Impalers are a little bit squishier than other armored Bugs, but that doesn't make them any less of a nightmare to contend with. Basically, it comes down to a flip of the coin— either you take out the Impaler before it can start swiping at you with its tentacles or you spend precious seconds playing a game of "Where's the Impaler?" while all the other enemies in the area converge on your location and you try to dodge the potential One Hit Kills the Impaler's tentacles can deal out. This problem is only aggravated by how Impalers can sometimes attack you from so far away that they're offscreen, making it impossible to even locate the source of the tenactles before it's too late. And Liberty save you if you encounter multiple Impalers at once, as the sharp increase in the amount of attacking tentacles will turn everything in a 500 foot radius into an inhospitable death trap as you frantically try to call in a Stratagem to kill them.
    • Brood Commanders are Warriors on the finest steroids the galaxy has to offer; they can tank small-arms fire like it's nothing, they move disturbingly fast and they can slow you down with Stalker venom when they hit you so that you can't escape their melee range. Basically, if a Brood Commander closes the distance with you, You Are Already Dead. And they spawn in numbers on par with Warriors and Elites on Difficulty 9+ missions, meaning a gigantic swarm of Brood Commanders can suddenly dig up from underneath your squad and send them into a panicked disarray.
  • Cyborgs:
    • IFVs are just plain nasty for being Instakill Mooks that take nothing short of an AT Round to dispatch who can also perpetuate the Alarm like other Patrolling Mooks. They don't swarm the player down like Butchers or Berserkers and they don't have the numbers of Grotesques, but seeing an IFV spawn in right next to you is bound to make your heart skip a beat unless you already have the tools to quickly take it down.
    • Warlords are the worst kind of Smash Mook; namely the kind that can't be killed without anti-armor, which at least Hulks can be with some effort. Their cannons are also much deadlier and more precise than Hulk rotary guns, making it hard to escape their danger radius if they're firing at you.
  • Illuminates:
    • Hunters would probably just be Goddamned Bats due to their low health if they weren't able to snipe at you from outside the visible combat area and likely outside of any of your squad's weapons' effective ranges. Even if these attacks are heavily telegraphed, the fact that they One-Hit Kill you without armor means you have to completely stop what you're doing and either kill the Hunter or get out of the way (often the later as you can't see them or they're too far away of a distance to hit), which can make doing things like activating objectives and inputting Stratagem codes way more stressful during Illuminate missions than they have any right to be.
    • Obelisks have an attack similar to Hunters than can Tele-Frag you for an instant kill, but they're so much worse because they also summon an impenetrable barrier which is easily capable of separating squad members from the rest of the team, halting forward advancement in its tracks and generally trapping Helldivers in disadvantageous positions. And to make matters worse, Obelisks themselves are some of the tankiest Illuminate units in existence, making it difficult to focus them down in a heated firefight unless you're willing to spend AT stuff on dispatching them.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: While the games are largely supposed to be a satire against warmongering authoritarian governments who wage wars for profit, the vast majority of players couldn't care less about the political commentary and are more focused on such a setting allowing them to indulge in the "cool" things such as orbital drops, calling down orbital bombardments, and generally just blowing up robots and aliens with overwhelming firepower. It doesn't help that, even with the obvious satirical edge, the games themselves love invoking Dare to Be Badass at every turn, from the opening cinematic to the constant affirmation and exhortations of your Mission Control and Super Destroyer crew. Intentionally or not, the games are an excellent demonstration of how and why propaganda works.
• Evil Is Cool: Super Earth itself. It's clear to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention that they're a totalitarian state operating under the thinnest veneer of a "Managed Democracy" and that their own self-aggrandizing expansionism and exploitative practices are responsible for the nigh-constant state of war they're in, but they know how to issue a Dare to Be Badass, and people both in-universe and out have responded in droves.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The Extraction Shuttle pilot is named Frank thanks to a certain Penny Arcade comic, which later became an Ascended Meme, making Frank dubiously canonical. Fans have even hypothesized that Frank is the same character as Pelican-1 from Helldivers II, perhaps having been cryogenically frozen for 100 years due to his piloting skills being that good.
  • Bug Nests are somewhat crudely termed "bug holes", both because that's exactly what they are and because it makes every sentence involving them sound inherently funnier, e.g. "Let's blow those bug holes wide open". This has carried over to common parlance in II, where Terminid Nests are still called "bug holes" because it's just that funny.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • The games have much in common with the film Starship Troopers, and the Venn diagram of fans of the games and fans of the film have a large degree of overlap. Casper Van Dien, the actor for Johnny Rico, has had friendly interactions with the director of II and has also expressed interest in getting involved in the game in some capacity.
  • Many Helldivers fans are also fans of Deep Rock Galactic, due to them both being mission-based co-op shooters involving killing tons of alien bugs and robots with lots and lots of bullets and Stuff Blowing Up. Fanart and fanfiction depicting a Crossover between the two series (usually involving a premise like DRG leasing out the Dwarves as PMCs to Super Earth for a quick buck) is common, and both games are sometimes jokingly referred to as Mirror Characters of each other on the political compass^note e.g. "Deep Rock Galactic is the Ancap version of Helldivers and Helldivers is the authright version of Deep Rock Galactic".
  • Quite obviously, with Warhammer 40,000. 40K fans consider Helldivers to be an Imperial Guard game in all but name. The Helldivers themselves bear quite the similarity to the Tempestus Scions, whilst their tactics could be considered similar to the Elysian Drop Troopers — though the Elysians drop in rather more gently!
  • There was also an increase in Halo fans, especially considering how similar the Helldivers look like the ODSTs (who also deploy from orbit in drop pods and are canonically nicknamed "Helljumpers"), having a Twitch drop that is named after Master Chief, and the Fall of Malevelon Creek being extremely reminiscent of the Fall of Reach.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Bug Shadows (and to a lesser but still noticeable extent Stalkers) will constantly be harassing your squad by jumping at them, to the point where at the highest-level missions there is almost never a point where a Shadow isn't onscreen somewhere. And it's not like you can just entirely ignore them, either, or they'll hit you with their slowdown effect at the worst possible second and get you torn apart by Brood Commanders. Worse yet, while their health is low and they have no armor they can still take up to a second of dedicated fire to deal with, making it that much more difficult to put them down when a gazillion more important threats are coming at you.
  • Cyborg Hounds tend not to be a big issue individually but they have a habit of running straight at you while you're dealing with more serious threats. If the dogs manage to hit you with this charge, you are knocked over and stunned for about a second. This stacks, so if you have three chasing you that is potentially three seconds solid where you can do nothing but watch as your brave Helldiver avatar is turned into chunky salsa.
  • The Illuminate Obsidian Observer, which replaces the Watcher as the Illuminate's scout unit on level 13+ planets. While not able to damage the player, they release a pulse which inverts the player's controls for a few seconds when they decloak, generally followed by them calling in swarms of other enemies to attack the disoriented players.
• Good Bad Bug: Want to get the achievement for doing a mission without being seen, but enemies have been alerted at least once? Board the evac shuttle and have the host disconnect just before doing so. Everyone on the shuttle will get the achievement.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Capespinning^ExplanationDue to the game's limited communication methods, players have taken to rapidly spinning in place so that the Jiggle Physics of their cape causes it to unfurl like a flag as a way of expressing excitement or approval without having to type it in chat.
  • "The E-710 must flow".^ExplanationWhile the mysterious Element-710 created by the Bugs is obviously a transparent allegory for oil and the lengths modern governments will go to in order to obtain it, Dune fans get a kick out of how it's also very inherently similar to Melange Spice, especially since they're both key components of Faster-Than-Light Travel in both universes, meaning you can expect to hear a lot of Dune quotes substituting "Spice" for "E-710" hurled around by the playerbase.
• Misaimed Fandom: There's a segment of the playerbase that either doesn't buy into the satire or misses it completely, and celebrate Super Earth's government as a democratic utopia unironically. The over-the-top nature of the propaganda and the Large Ham lines from the Helldivers themselves are meant to be funny in how enthusiastically they're delivered, with most of the humor based on the fact that the player can clearly tell that it's all a big joke. The expendable nature of the Helldivers, the hand-waving of discrepancies in the propaganda, and the virulent culling of anyone who even slightly dissents make it clear that this is a terrible place to live with a nice coat of paint slapped on top. The majority of players who say that Super Earth is awesome are doing it in a tongue-in-cheek way instead of believing it. Still, the fact that some players miss how intentionally silly this propaganda is means that they are, ironically, demonstrating that such propaganda can actually work.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The musical cues that plays whenever you respawn or complete an objective.
• Nintendo Hard: As the difficulty level starts to ramp up and high-level enemies start appearing more frequently, the game becomes brutally unforgiving and basically requires you to either be a master of self-defense or have a competent squad at your back who are all equally capable of defending themselves. And this isn't even taking into account the raid boss-esque Master battles.
• Pop Culture Holiday: October 26th celebrates the Super Earth holiday of Liberty Day^note Chosen because October 26th, 1959 was the original publication date of Starship Troopers, which the Helldivers series takes great inspiration from, which is accompanied by an in-game celebration on the menu and (usually) new content as well as out-of-universe festivities from Arrowhead Studios, including livestreams and giveaways.
• Play-Along Meme: Community discussions of the games often feature players talking from the in-universe perspective of citizen soldiers fully sold on the Helldiver cause, complete with ironic calls for a Democracy Officer and accusations of pro-Bug/pro-Bot sympathies for anyone who points out the flaws, inconsistencies, and hypocrisy inherent in Super Earth's satirical portrayal.
• Rooting for the Empire:
  • Even many of those who don't fall under the Misaimed Fandom still support Super Earth, either in tongue in cheek fashion as the game intends, or because they see the other factions (especially the bugs) as the worse of the evils by comparison.
  • Out of the enemy factions, the Cyborgs and Automatons probably get the most backing, due to both their aesthetics and the fact they of all the factions have the most implication that they're not as evil as Super Earth claims. It helps that they remind Sword Art Online fans of the Fluctlights.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Galactic Campaign system has been a bit contentious since its inception and has only gotten controversial as the game's lifespan has gone on.On paper, it's a unique mechanic that allows every player to work towards the greater goal of liberating systems and eventually wiping out one of the 3 enemy factions for the duration of the war, relieving pressure and making the rest of the war go smoother as enemies are destroyed, leading to ultimate victory. In practicality, it tends to just artificially restrict gameplay for a few weeks; some gear unlocks are faction specific, and if the faction you need to fight to unlock it has already been wiped out in the current war, you will need to wait until the next war to get another chance to unlock it, which can take up to a real-life month in some cases. On top of this, wiping out enemies also directly leads to less enemy variety, which can cause players to stop playing until the war is over as fighting the exact same enemy faction for another week or two can get stale and tiring. ^note  For example, it's a frequent occurrence for the Bugs and Cyborgs to be wiped out in a week or two and then have the Illuminates, the least popular faction to fight, go nearly untouched during that time and eventually win the war by themselves as people eventually give up and stop playing for that war. It also doesn't help that aside from two cosmetic outfits, there is no reward (or penalty) for winning or losing the war, making it all feel even more pointless to stick it out till the end.
  • As a sub-mechanic of the Galactic Campaign, Capital Defenses are not well-liked at all because they're over in such a short period (a sparse three hours) and can cause the entire playerbase to lose control of a system just because literally not enough people are playing the game at 1 PM on a Tuesday. Not to mention you can sometimes get them back to back, causing the enemy to suddenly steamroll their way back from being on the brink of defeat.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Both titles, particularly the second one, have been hailed as the best Starship Troopers games around, at least for fans of the Paul Verhoeven adaptation (though it does incorporate elements from the book, such as Drop Pods and Powered Armor, while repudiating its themes).
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The Illuminate BGM has a melody which sounds weirdly like the main theme of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
• That One Boss: The Hive Lord is a cut far above the other Master Assaults. Whereas the Siege Mech and Great Eye have powerful weaponry but are slow and easy to hit as a result, the Hive Lord is a full-on "Get Back Here!" Boss who spends most of the fight hiding underground and only exposes itself to damage during very brief periods of attack. This would only make it a Goddamned Boss, but add in how easily it is to die in this game and how hard it is to keep track of the Hive Lord's movement and attacks amidst all the other enemies in the arena and it suddenly becomes agonizingly difficult to deal damage to it when it's exposed and not immediately die to something right afterward. It doesn't help that there's no Cheese Strategy available to you; the best advice that can be offered is "bring DLC weapons and don't die". You're going to be seeing a lot of near-squad wipes if you go up against a Hive Lord.
• That One Level:
  • Retaliation missions. They take place in an incredibly small map (one side of your screen to the other approximately) and spawn waves after waves of enemies at you. The very small space means that you will quickly get swarmed. And, to top it off, even if you manage to accomplish the mission of "Kill X enemies", you'll then have to Hold the Line against more enemies for a minute and half until the evac shuttle arrive.
  • Cyberstan, the Cyborg's homeworld is the worst of the enemy factions. Kepler Prime merely has easily avoidable Bottomless Pits, while Squ'bai Shrine has only the occasional patch of water to slow you down. Cyberstan meanwhile is almost entirely covered in deep snow. This means you're basically moving at half speed almost permanently, and you lose the ability to sprint. If you don't have the All Terrain Boots perk, expect missions to slog on forever if you are dodging patrols, or death if you are caught by a patrol due to the snow preventing you from moving quickly.
• That One Sidequest: Granted, mission objectives aren't technically Side Quests, but some are failable and they provide a bigger EXP bonus if you complete all the ones in a mission.
  • "Disarm Unexploded Ordinance" is always a pain in the ass; for starters, the range at which the ME-1 Sniffer picks up the bombs is unusually precise for this game and on higher-difficulty missions you need to disarm up to five of them, but on top of that it's very difficult to focus on locating the bombs if you're currently under constant assault from enemies trying to tear you apart. And the premise of the objective barely makes any sense to begin with; why would a military organization totally fine with carpet-bombing the surfaces of planets into dust feel the need to disarm bombs only capable of killing a single enemy at a time in a relatively small and concentrated area?
  • "Complete Geological Survey" is all the problems of the relatively manageable "Activate and Defend Launchpad" (the objective has unusually low health and enemies make a beeline for it without defensive Stratagems in the way) compounded with the defense of the geological probe being staggered out by required terminal inputs. This means you can't just focus on defending it; every twelve seconds or so someone will have to stop what they're doing and progress the terminal, which sometimes isn't feasible at all thanks to the area being swarmed with hostiles. It's pitifully easy to be trying to progress the survey only for the geological probe to get instantly destroyed by 10 Elite Mooks all swarming it at once.

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