On the surface, Helldivers 2 is a simple co-op shooter. Drop onto a hostile exoplanet with a few friends, squish some giant bug-like aliens using all manner of guns and explosives, and extract before time (or your life) runs out. But go a level or two deeper and you'll start to see there's room to improve your bug-hunting exercises with a range of strategies, secrets, and tips. In this Helldivers 2 guide, we'll provide many of those for beginners and seasoned veterans alike. Here are some must-have Helldivers 2 tips.

Environments impacts weapons

Weapon mechanics are more complex than you might think in this co-op shooter. Planets can have different environments and they affect weapons in different ways. Cold planets will slow down the fire rate of some standard guns and at the same time can benefit laser weapons by keeping them from overheating as quickly, which makes sense. Mines bury themselves deeper in snow, making them harder to see, so watch out. Pack accordingly.

Creative kills

Here are a few different ways to look at killing enemies with more depth than "point and shoot."

• You can de-limb both bugs and Automatons. Automatons will chase after you after being literally disarmed, unable to do much more than a one-handed punch, and bugs will drag themselves along at a much slower pace. This is essential when tackling faster or larger bug enemies in particular.
• You can not only kill friends and smaller enemies with your drop pod but full-on bosses like a Bile Titan, as well as destroy buildings.
• Automaton drop ships can be shot down before they offload troops, saving you a lot of time running away from dual chainsaw-wielding maniacs. Do this by targeting one of their engines.

You can adjust rate-of-fire at any time

Many weapons have alternate fire modes, including how fast they fire (looking at you, LMG). It’s not immediately obvious how to do this. Hold down the reload button and you’ll get a menu of options such as turning on and off attachments, going to single or burst fire, and other modifications.

ADS can be saved for easier use

In the same menu, set your weapons to remember if they were last ADS or third person with Remember Aim Mode. This can save a lot of time when pulling out SMGs for close range vs Sniper Rifles for long-range.

Watch out for limb damage

Specific limb damage can happen, which affects your ability to aim and shoot certain weapons, as well as how fast you can run it’s just something you should be aware of if your aim goes all wobbly all of a sudden, or you find yourself hobbling around Limb damage is highlighted above the endurance bar at the bottom of the screen.

Buy yourself time

Calling in stratagems involves a D-pad mini-game that takes time you may or may not have at the moment. Fortunately, if you're fast, you can drop a Shield Generator Relay which forms a bubble temporarily blocking incoming damage. Use this time to call in bigger orbital bombardments, which can now be dangerously close.

Early ammo discards can get you killed

You know you are a compulsive reloader, you’ve gone to Compulsive Reloader’s Anonymous many times and it never worked. It’s time to make a change, citizen, because in this game, every magazine you throw to the ground only partly used is just ammo on the ground. It’s never too late to change, I believe in you. If you simply can’t stop yourself, take a tube-fed shotgun, they are incapable of ammo dumping.

Crew weapons

In animal kngdom terms, it's simple: Apes are stronger together. Some of the heavy weapons in the game drop onto the battlefield in two parts, the weapon and an ammo backpack. You or a teammate can pick these up and or drop them separately. Although you can fire weapons like the GR-8 Recoilless Rifle by yourself, there is a very slow reload process during which bugs will be looking to snack on your face. If a teammate is there with you, they can pick up the ammo backpack and reload your weapon rapidly.

Be a team player

The supply pack in particular gets overlooked and not only lets you walk up to teammates and hand them ammo to keep them topped off, but when you walk up to supply drops, it lets you store up to four supply crates and bring them with you. When your teammate's health strays into the red, you can walk and manually them with stims as long as you have some in your inventory.

Watch out for heavy armor

In general, some enemy types are very bullet-resistant. You’re more likely to encounter these enemy types when fighting Automatons, but some big bugs have the same type of resistance to regular weapons. If you shoot them, even with a stratagem dropped M-43 Machine Gun, your bullets ricochet and maybe even be a danger to your fellow citizen soldiers. To punch through, carry heavier weapons such as the Autocannon. Probably don’t wander into the automaton area without weapons that at least mildly penetrate armor.

Watch out for the rebound

Stratagems are physical marker grenades that get thrown out to request things from the ship in orbit. You can actually look up and see the ships drop items or fire from orbit, it’s a cool detail. This also means the stratagem call-in grenades rebound off enemies and redirect the strikes back at you or with larger enemies, and you should do this, get stuck on them, meaning orbital strikes will adjust and land directly on them as they move around.

Dive, dive, dive

The dive mechanic is sneakily complex. Here are a few things to note:

• The dive in Helldivers takes some getting used to. Most video games let you roll away from danger but not this game. You dive to go prone which completely kills momentum, a huge hazard when getting swarmed by bugs. Use dive mostly to get away from airstrikes quickly, get behind cover quickly, or to get low and lay down some heavy machine gun fire more accurately.
• If you need to build extra space, tap the dive button for a knee slide, and then double-tap for the extra jump.
• Diving reduces explosive damage, and gets you off of high places mighty fast with a funny ragdoll. You can also dive into the dropship in a pinch.
• Be careful jumping through random crevices; the environments are procedurally generated and might not make enough room for you to get through, leading to you getting stuck and heavily murdered.

Loadouts matter

• There can be random modifiers applied to each round and pre-planning what to take with you will make things go much smoother. You can see what modifiers you are facing in the Effects menus at the bottom right. Examples are Extreme Cold which reduces the rate of fire of some weapons and Orbital Fluctuations which increases Stratagem cooldowns by 50%. Some missions start you with less ammo during rationing. So when facing the above take laser weapons, which will be able to fire for longer, and more Supply stratagems which are weapons you can use until they run out of ammo, as opposed to airstrikes with already longer cooldowns.
• On top of different enemy types, different styles of missions will benefit from you carrying more airstrikes or more turrets depending on if the objective is to destroy or defend, and how much time you have.
• You’ll also see things like reduced visibility from rainstorms and smoke. Some of these effects, like bug-induced fog clouds, can be cleared up by destroying the right structure.

Know your limits

If you feel like you’re progressing through unlocks too slowly, consider that when you first play Helldivers 2, you'll be playing on the easiest setting, trivial, which is actually one step below the easy setting. Once you complete a mission on trivial, you jump to easy, then to medium, and so on.

There are nine difficulty levels in total, but the higher you go, the more rewards that are on the table. When navigating the Galactic War map, beneath each difficulty, it even describes what the levels alter in terms of gameplay. Keep advancing in difficulty levels until you hit a wall; you’ll know when you hit one. Take a step back, grind out some of the easier difficulty missions, acclimating yourself more to the game, and return to some of the harder missions when you are a bit more seasoned.

Maximize your time

When you jump into a mission in Helldivers, there's a lot more to do than just the primary objective. There are sub objectives to complete, enemy nests to wipe out, discoverable points of interest, and more. When you drop, you want to get as much done as possible in the time that is allotted in order to maximize your rewards. What helps out greatly with this is a strategic drop point.

Don't simply pick the main objective as the location to drop in to. Look at the map, and drop into whichever objective or sub-objective is furthest away from the evac point, which is displayed as an arrow pointing upward. From there, make a mental note of the path you want to take in the mission to knock out as many tasks as possible, and always leave the closest objective to the evac point for last.

It's highly likely that when you get to that final event, you'll be glad you're a hop, skip, and a jump away from evac, with the clock running down and your reinforcements dwindling.

Environmental storytelling

Believe it or not, the Starship Troopers-like theme carries through the entire game and it’s pretty funny. Even how casually your deaths are handled are part of the bit. You can find Communications Devices around the map that tell stories such as the "Eulogy Template" for a soldier who died from friendly fire. There are great details in orbit, too. You can look out and see ships getting shot down and realize the war isn’t going as well as you’re being made to believe.

You're not the main character in this story

This is a small but hilarious mental change you’ll need to make when playing Helldivers 2. When you get a citizen killed, they are dead, end of story, curtains close. The next person you drop in as is someone else who signed their life away to spread freedom and democracy.

Keep in mind you won’t automatically come back after you die, another player has to manually call in a Reinforcement, so make sure to do the same for them. There are a limited number of lives between the team which can be seen at the top left.

Finally, when you come back you can go pick up any gear from the last person you were, just head to where you previously died.

Don't put turrets behind you

The risk of friendly fire is everywhere in Helldivers 2, including main weapons, airstrikes, turrets, and even the dropship coming to save you. Especially when you’re extracting at the end of matches and defending the drop zone as it gets swarmed you might fall back on old instincts to ring an area with turrets.

But then you forgot those turrets care more about killing bugs and automatons than they care about you. Turrets can and will fire right through you to get to the enemy, so only put them in front of you and only in the direction where you expect the enemy to show up.

You can change your ship's name

Using the same console where you upgrade it, you can change the name of your ship. Sadly this uses the same preset list from when you first jumped into the game so, though you have lots of options, you can’t ride into battle on the Justice For BoatyMcBoatface.

Stats matter

Both armor and boosters give you stat boosts. These do things like reduce recoil when prone, give you more starting grenades, provide explosive damage resistance, or lower your odds from dying when taking lethal damage. Don’t just pick the first set of armor that looks great, consider what to wear before each mission. Scout armor can even trigger a continuous ping for enemies on the map.

Take the right strategems

Stratagems are broken down into Offensive, Supply, and Defensive categories. Offensive are things like airstrikes and orbital barrages delivering immediate devastation with pretty long cooldowns. Supply stratagems are heavy or crew-served weapons you can use until they run out of ammo. Defensive stratagems are things like shield generators, turrets, and minefields best used to defend objectives like the drop zone or deny areas to the enemy.

Make sure to take a good assortment both for your own loadout, and your wider team's loadout. You want to play into strengths, offset weaknesses, and be best prepared for the mission and environment onto which you'll land.