Helldivers II

Helldivers 2 is a live service player versus environment (PvE) shooter game played primarily from a third-person perspective. It features cooperative multiplayer with up to four players, and does not include a dedicated single-player campaign. It provides optional cross-play.

Players complete operations consisting of 1-3 procedurally generated levels (missions), conducting tasks within the missions (objectives), while facing hordes of enemies. Players choose the difficulty level of their operations, ranging from level 1 ("Trivial") to level 10 ("Super Helldive").

Helldivers 2 takes place in the 22nd century, one hundred years after the triumph of the Federation of Super Earth, a self-described managed democracy, over the Bugs, Cyborgs, and Illuminate during the First Galactic War (depicted in Helldivers). Humanity seized faster-than-light (FTL) travel technology from the defeated Illuminate, and used it to conquer the galaxy during a period known as the Great Democratization. Humanity discovered that the decomposing corpses of the Bugs contain a unique and highly valuable resource known as "Element-710" (E-710) used for FTL travel. Bug farms are established on human-colonized worlds, and after decades of genetic engineering and accelerated evolution, they become known as Terminids.

Environmental storytelling is prevalent throughout the game, with various logs, notes, in-game broadcasts, and propaganda messages available for players to find during gameplay.

On 3 December 2020, Arrowhead Game Studios revealed that work had started on a project for PlayStation 5. It was confirmed that the game would be a third-person shooter. Like the first game, Helldivers 2 runs on the discontinued Autodesk Stingray game engine (originally known as Bitsquid). Arrowhead Game Studios founder Johan Pilestedt confirmed on social media that "The project started before [Stingray] was discontinued," adding, "Our crazy engineers had to do everything, with no support to build the game to parity with other engines."

On 13 September 2021, Helldivers 2 was mentioned in a GeForce Now leak. The game was teased in a TikTok post showing Arrowhead's social media manager starting their workday, which is followed by a series of posts from fans demanding them to release the game. On 18 August 2022, a 12-second clip of gameplay was leaked on Twitter, but was later removed.

Helldivers 2 received "generally favorable" reviews from critics, according to review aggregator website Metacritic. In Japan, four critics from Famitsu gave the game a total score of 30 out of 40.

Upon release, the game experienced a large influx of players, leading to server and login issues for the first two weeks of release. By the third week of release, the player cap was increased to "a whopping 700,000 concurrent users" according to Wesley Yin-Poole of IGN.