Helldivers 2 came out on Feb. 8th, 2024, to PlayStation and Steam. The game is a third-person shooter that takes place on “Super Earth” where you and your friends are trying to liberate the galaxy from the rising alien, robot, and bug threats. Although sales numbers haven’t been shown, user numbers haven’t staggered since the release which can help us confidently say that there have been around 8 million copies sold thus far.

This game was created by Arrowhead Game Studios as a sequel to Helldivers released back in March of 2015. The company started as a group of students in Sweden creating games for a company of 100+. This game has been widely accepted and well played across all platforms besides Xbox to fans’ disappointment.

The game has also been compared to the 1997 Sci-Fi movie Starship Troopers. In Starship Troopers, the plot was pretty much the same. We follow a young man in the future who is signing up for the military of the United Citizen Federation, an Earth world government that has engaged in an interstellar war with an alien species called Arachnids. The film wasn’t highly liked due to reviewers interpreting that the film was endorsing fascism and critics believing that the director, Paul Verhoeven, and writer of the book Robert A. Heinlein, were supporting Nazi ideologies.

Even the lead actor from Starship Troopers, Casper Van Dien, has shown interest in working with Arrowhead for potential promo material for Helldivers 2 after fans reached out to the actor on X formerly known as Twitter. 

Van Dien said in a public post that, “I can’t wait to play. Maybe we should do a crossover movie?!”.

Since the release of Helldivers 2, the memes and the overly dramatized devotion to the in-game government being 100% correct in what they do has brought back up the Starship Trooper movie as well the argument of “Is it fascism or satire?”. 

Sophia Mcclennen, a professor of international affairs at the Pennsylvania State University said, “When you combine satire and parody, you’re going to get a lot more people missing it.”

The game has very heavy propaganda, as well as a modern military-industrial complex

That can be seen or heard as you play the game. The game opens up to you watching an innocent family living peacefully on Super Earth get mauled by a terminid as a way to inspire people to want to sign up for the military to protect their loved ones. As well as the voice lines we can hear from our characters and friends while fighting are all for Freedom, Democracy, and Super Earth.

 Despite the worries surrounding the game’s themes, this hasn’t slowed down any progress for the development team and players as updates, patches, and new content are all making their way into the game frequently to keep the war fresh and interesting.