First off, I haven't played Helldivers 1. However, I did play 2. And, uh, quite a bit. I don't think I've ever gotten more absorbed into a game as I have with Helldivers 2. In gaming terms, Helldivers 2 is the Subnautica but for multiplayer games. There is a primal satisfaction in making things go very big boom that never gets old. Helldivers 2, at its core, is a multiplayer cooperative PvE shooter that tasks a group of four so-called “Helldivers” to carry out strategic tasks in heavily contested warzones to gain the edge in a galaxy-wide war. The helldivers are dropped onto planets from starships in orbit, then have to carry out tasks like “retrieve intel of a destroyed research base”, “launch a leftover nuclear missile”, “steal confidential information” or “destroy enemy outposts”, all while surviving the onslaught of enemies trying to stop them. Interesting premise, but what makes this game stand out is that it actually delivers. Besides handheld weapons, players are given support by the starship in orbit, and by supersonic fighter jets in immediate vicinity, armed with weapons ranging from orbital space lasers, barrages, hell the entire starship is one big ass, several kilometers long, railcannon. It can also send down utility items like support weapons, equipment that is necessary for objectives, or just straight up (tactical) nukes. The downside of this is that all things coming from the starship suffer from a long delay between call-in and arrival. So if you call in an orbital napalm barrage, it will be one massive barrage, but it will take a long time to arrive. For more tactical engagements, the fighter jet can be equipped with things you want to land faster. The fighter jet can lay down a field of napalm very quickly, but due to its limited size and capacity it will have less oomph. But sometimes you don't need to crater an entire block, just one street can be fine.

The way I like to rate a game like Subnautica and Helldivers is by thinking about the kinds of fantasies they play into. Subnautica is a “you're a small being in a big, beautiful but unknown world”. Subnautica is basically every person's childhood forest day, except it's even better. Helldivers is that power fantasy you've always been wanting to play. Big ass cannons, massive explosions, that kinda stuff. It turns out, a multiplayer game is perfect for this because it removes the artificiality that most single player games have that are meant to be power fantasies. GTA 5's power fantasy sections all feel very.. bullshitty. You know they're restricted to this one section in the story, the numbers are being dialled into your favor, it's not real. In Helldivers, you can't bullshit the player, since it's multiplayer. Additionally, the game has found an interesting middle ground where enemies feel strong enough to be a threat, but are still weak enough to be suspectible to big booms.

So, for me fantasy here is basically the kind of stuff games like Apex Legends or Overwatch promise. Non-stop high octane action with split second decisions and clutch plays. Your player character has a lot of abilities and each one has a serious impact on the game - or so you think… And that's the problem with those games. You at first feel powerful with that one ultimate that you have because you can just wipe the entire enemy team - but once you start to play against enemies that know their way around, you'll very quickly see the limitations of what you can do, and that big dopamine surge from killing a lot at once will become very infrequent and it will be more of an accident rather than good, skillful play.
Helldivers is different. If you're good, you can make massive plays and get a lot of kills at once. But, the game is kept interesting because you still have to capitalize on this. Killing enemies is entirely coincidental and the main target is to complete the objectives. The enemies will keep coming, so if you just kill a lot and then go back to bed, the mission is not gonna get finished. Essentially, Helldivers promises this dopamine surge you get from doing really cool things with really cool things, and then it actually delivers. And delivers. And delivers. And it just keeps coming without it ever getting boring. Helldivers basically the idea of Counter-Strike that many of us have in our heads but, unlike Counter-Strike, Helldivers is actually fun. Oh and don't let me talk about politics.

To play Helldivers 2 at a reasonable level, you need to understand a few basic principles from which all gameplay emerges. It should give you a general perspective on which priorities to set during gameplay, giving you a useful, robust structure to work around.

At its core, Helldivers 2 is a game about staying alive. It is that because, even though it might look like a game where you will just naturally die regularly, it actually gives you pretty much all the tools you need to survive at any given moment. There are some bullshit oneshots here and there, but really these should be the only deaths a player experiences (with the occasional exception of course). There are multiple tools to staying alive - it can mean shooting an enemy in their face, it can mean sending an Eagle 500kg, it can mean calling down a laser, it can mean using a shield generator backpack or using a jump pack. Or - most importantly of all - it can mean using a stim. We really need to talk about stims.

The first realization a new Helldivers player needs to have is how obscenely busted stims are in this game. When you launch the game for the first time, you get hit by an enemy and then press the stim button, it should hit you like a train just how powerful these are. In most games, regenerating health is a slow, sluggish process. Minecraft regenerates health very slowly, in other games using a healing item only restores a set amount of health, other games do it quickly but only after you haven't taken damage for a while, and only until your health pool is full. And also, any other impairments like broken limbs or various debuffs will oftentimes stick around.

Not in Helldivers. Helldivers stims make you virtually INVINCIBLE¹⁾. There is nothing in the game that deals damage faster than what the stim can regenerate. To kill you while you have a stim active would require either (1) killing you early into the stimming process when the stim didn't yet have the chance to actually heal you (2) overwhelming yourself with an obscene amount of enemies - like, you must be in a sea of enemies so large that they actually block you from going anywhere ²⁾ or (3) you must run into something that oneshots you. Don't run into things that oneshot you³⁾.

The point is, as a helldiver, you have a unique ability: You have what is essentially a temporary invincibility button. By default you can use this button up to four times (ie. you have four stims), but your number of uses can be replenished with in-game pickups. As long as you still have uses on your invincibility left, you should never die. If you die with stims left in your inventory, you did something wrong.

Taking damage will often stagger you. Staggering isn't quite ragdolling, but it will make you recoil for a moment and stop you from doing something - including stimming. This is particularly brutal with enemies that have combos (bugs, especially Predator Strain). This is where diving becomes relevant. Diving lets you escape any and all enemy combos, no restrictions. You can still take damage, you can still be ragdolled, but it will cancel all staggers and gives you back full control instantly. Crucially, it means you can also stim instantly as well. Helldivers are powerful not because they are amazing combatants or because they have immensely powerful Eagle and Super Destroyer support - it's because they have one single move combination in their moveset that lets them become invincible, no matter what happens (except when you get ragdolled).
Dive + Stim is the only reason Helldivers are feared. This seemingly inoccuous move is what makes a Helldiver scary. Use it. Dive. Dive for your life. When it says “Dive, dive again. And again. And again.”, this is what that means. “Helldivers” means using your Alt key, not being sent onto hellish planets.

So, what's the problem? You use stims all the time and you understand how powerful stims are. You understand how this works. But you still keep dying. Obviously, it's not that easy, right? Yes, you're right. It's not that easy. Stims are one half of the formula, but we spend most of our time in the game not actively getting the effects of stims. If we had permanent stim-like effects, this game would be very, very boring. With the limitation being as it is, we need to think about what to do before stimming. We don't need stims all the time, but the situation can change from “I'm fine, I don't need to use a stim” to “I need a stim right now” extremely rapidly, sometimes in the blink of an eye. Sometimes, with the wrong strategies and loadout, it can change faster than the game allows you to stim at all. The goal is to extend the amount of time we get to stim, and to stretch out the amount of time we need between stimmings. We need to have a conversation about survivability.

Survivability, simply put, is the ability of our diver to resist dying. This is more than just the amount of hitpoints our player character gets, and the amount of damage resistance they have. It's about the ability to avoid damage in the first place, it's about damage mitigation of all kinds. The easiest way to do that would be to run heavy armor and, honestly, as a beginner you probably should. Armor rating is the one easiest way to give yourself more time to stim and to avoid bullshit deaths⁴⁾. However, there is more to it. Mobility is directly linked to survivability, as mobility allows you to just, well, run away from your damage. An easy example here is the jump pack, which serves as an easy “peace out” for 90% of scary situations (if used correctly, mistakes happen).

Survivability also means your ability to take a hit in the first place - stay at max health. Being at reduced health is an idea for stim conservation - which is great if you know how the game works and have things under control, but it essentially means that you can take one or two less hits before death; a lot of time in Helldivers terms: If a hit takes an enemy 0.2 seconds, that's 0.2 seconds less you get to react to a hit you didn't see coming. And it also means that some hits that don't ordinarily oneshot you WILL now oneshot you. Stay. At. Max. Health. You can learn damage breakpoints later.

Helldivers 2 gives you all kinds of options to increase your survivability. Take a jump pack. Bring a shield generator. A walker. Bring a gun that stuns/staggers enemies. Bring heavy armor. Bring medic armor (+2 stims & +2 stim effect duration) Bring crowd control weapons. Bring a sentry. Keep your stims stocked, loot stims from POIs, learn what POIs look like and where to find stims. Heck, bring a fucking Supply Backpack for a virtually infinite supply of stims.

Additionally, use your Eagle and Super Destroyer support mid-fight. The cool thing about Dive + Stim is that it makes you invincible for multiple seconds, so you can Dive + Stim and then just stay on the ground to take your sweet ass time to punch in a stratagem code. Nothing will kill you while you're stimmed. Dive + Stim + Reinforce. Dive + Stim + Eagle 500. Dive + Stim + Laser. Nothing can bring you down, especially if your stim duration is longer with the medic armor. There can be 20 bugs behind you that will dogpile onto you during a Dive + Stim + Eagle 500 - but what are they gonna do about you? The entire horde of bugs can keep hammering into you until they're old and grey - as long as you're stimmed, you are invincible. And if you call in the Eagle 500, they will be dead before your stims run out⁵⁾. The alternative here is Jump Pack + (maybe) Stim + Stratagem. Hover Pack + (maybe) Stim + Stratagem. While midair you're unlikely to get hit, so that's a perfect opportunity to punch in a stratagem.

If you're gonna learn anything at all from what I'm writing here, it's this:
Stim Stim Stim Stim Stim Stim or
Dive + Stim or
Dive + Stim + Stratagem

on occasion you should try
Dive + Stratagem

Whichever you're comfortable with. This, at its most fundamental, is how Helldivers works. Once you start surviving your first few encounters, you'll eventually learn how to not be forced into using stims all the time in the first place. Your encounter will become more controlled and deliberate, rather than just you responding to what the enemy is doing. This is all you need. Happy helldiving!

Well. Maybe I've been lying a little bit. Maybe Helldivers isn't just about staying alive. It is true, your absolute priority in Helldivers should always be to stay alive, but if that's the only thing you do then you'll never actually get anything done. The truth is that Helldivers 2 is a walking and terminal simulator, with the occasional enemy encounter thrown in. The first and most important realization of a Helldiver player should be the absolute brokenness of stims, but up there on the list is also the realization that nobody is standing to gain from a dead enemy (except on certain mission types). There is no inherent value to killing an enemy. There is, or at least there should be, an ulterior motive behind the killing of an enemy. Maybe you want to go somewhere and you would die doing so if the enemy was left alive. Maybe you want to work on a terminal and you'd die if you left that enemy alive. Either way, it's about giving yourself room, not about the dead enemy.

Eventually the key realization should be that a game of Helldivers is just you running lines between several terminals and opening/closing some valves or operating some levers. A helldiver is never “fighting on a front”, a helldiver is either walking towards an objective or a helldiver is on an objective.

When a helldiver is walking towards and objective, there is almost never a need to address enemies on their path. Enemy breaches or drops generally do not need to be addressed, they are a waste of lives and resources. New players waste most of the team's reinforcement budget on fighting enemies they never needed to address.

Anytime you are not on an objective, your first priority is to pick a direction towards an objective. You should always know where to go next. Once that is established, go there. Ignore bug breaches or drop ships. If there is an enemy on your way towards an objective, push it out. If there's multiple, it might be worth to just take a small detour. You have places to be, you can reach your objective without engaging with these enemies. Funnily, most enemies will literally just let you walk past them. If you're scared, you can dive past them as well. As long as you walk past them with a bit of confidence, enemies will probably not hit you (with some Illuminate exceptions).

Generally, if you're at A but you need to be at B, why fight enemies at A? Just go to B. And B can be whatever. It can be the next mission objective, it can be a shiny, a side objective, whatever. It is important to have a B. As a Helldiver, there is no dawdling around, you always have somewhere to be next. Once you reach B, you will work on the objective and the second the objective is completed, you should already have a new B to go to. Don't fall asleep.

So, anytime you are on an objective, it is actually just the same stuff. Where you are is A, the next step of the objective is B. Say, the objective requires you to work on the terminal first, then that terminal is B. Push your way towards that terminal, push enemies out of your way to the terminal, then push enemies away from the terminal, but only for as long as you need to work on it. If it then asks you to turn valves, push enemies out of your path towards the valves. Ignore enemies not on your path to a valve. If the objective then asks you to come back to the terminal, push enemies out of your way towards the terminal. At any time in Helldivers, you are just creating small holes that allow you to slip through between enemies and towards the places you want to go. You don't need to kill all the enemies around a shiny, you only need to kill all enemies that can get to the shiny in less than 3 seconds, as that's the amount of time you need to loot it. Any enemy further than 3 seconds away from the shiny is irrelevant to you. Any enemy further than 5 seconds away from a valve is irrelevant to you, unless the enemy is between you and the valve. As soon as you have completed all the steps for an objective, decide where to go next. Set a new B, carve your way towards it - everything else is distraction. This is to 90% the reason why teams leave players behind, as more knowledgeable players don't want to spend 5 minutes or more of their time fighting a bug breach they already know is pointless to fight, draining resources, reinforcements, time and their nerves. They would rather actually be productive, so they're just gonna carve paths on their own⁶⁾.

It helps to learn what objectives look like, where enemy spawners are (bug holes, automaton fabricators, etc.), what the sequence of certain terminals is, where the valves are, where the connection towers are, etc. etc., because it will make it a lot easier to know where to go. If you have to search for where the valves are, it means essentially clearing the entire search area of enemies, which is costly on time and resources. This is why it's good to start on lower difficulties - they let you get familiar with objectives and let you learn navigation without too much drama. It helps teaching that there are things to do in a game of Helldivers and that you can fight enemies, but after killing them all you only have a lot of dead enemies, no completed objectives.

However: Staying alive supersedes objectives. If enemies are pushing you out of an objective, that's OK! You can always retreat and come back later. Try to hold the objective as long as you can, but if it's hopeless then a retreat is rational, not cowardice. You're trying to win wars, not battles, and by the time you're forced to retreat you've already lost the battle anyway. So? Instead of dying, win the war.

Ultimately, Helldivers also has a team aspect. There are skills you need to know for yourself, independently, which I've told you about in 1) and 2). When you understand 1) and 2), you are a functional Helldivers player who can engage with the fundamental ideas of the game, ie. you can engage in meaningful gameplay. 3), the team, is now a layer on top that you don't strictly need to complete the objectives, but which you need if you're gonna have any good amount of fun with the game.

The team can be considered to be a modifier to all the things previously discussed. It is beneficial for some things, it is detrimental to others. For example, two obvious examples are Resupply usage and stratagem placement. Resupply is one of the major sources of stims - everyone relies on them, so it is imperative that everyone gets them. If you call in supplies only for yourself, this might lead to someone else running out of stims and dying because of it. Therefore, resupplies should only be called in when a substantial part of the team is present, or only in an emergency when strictly necessary to prevent yourself from dying.

Sticking with your team is cool, because having someone close by means fire support and stim support. In the same way that you can't die when you have stims, someone else can help you not to do die when you run out of them. That means taking a serious amount of damage before you can be stimmed - ie. it's very risky - but it's still very much useful. The real problem with the team comes from stratagem placement. There isn't very much to say about this - learn SOS diving and not communicating. Always expect an Eagle 500 on top of your goddamn head at all times. You might be behind a wall and a player thinks you're further away than you really are. A player might have just genuinely not noticed. A player might have thought that you would for sure see it. A player might have gotten ragdolled. A player might just be fricken stupid. Doesn't matter. The threat is real, and you need to look out for it. Check red beacons. For sentries behind yourself. Oh, talking about sentries: Defend them. A sentry is essentially a fifth player that packs unfathomable amounts of damage. Your primary weapon can only dream of the DPS a gatling sentry can put out. Team playing means defending other people's sentries. Team playing, however, also means removing sentries behind friendly positions that are likely to cause friendly casualties. Keep an eye on the map, watch friendlies and the situations they are in. If they run low on stims, think about helping them. And don't get hit by allied player's stratagems. That really is a thing you can just get experience with. You'll get killed by friendly Eagle 500s very frequently, but you'll begin noticing them more and more over time.

Finally, the team is why the “carving paths” concept is almost never followed to the letter. You're meant to only strictly kill the enemies that are directly a threat to progress, but considering a team you have to consider human factor. Especially with that amount of enemies around, a single player cannot cover all 360 angles around him. To enable safe play, it is necessary to kill or push away more enemies than only the strictly necessary ones. I still teach “only kill strictly necessary” first because that's the basis upon which we should start learning, but the truth is that when together with other people, we need to be a bit more generous with which enemies to kill, to make sure our friend doesn't get surprised. Passing a tight alley might have worked for you, but by the time your friend gets there the enemies might have doubled in number or taken up better spots. Therefore, you should carve a path for your friend as well.