We knew the Helldivers 2 team were looking ahead to the future now that they’d largely overcome the game’s most significant server issues. But we weren’t expecting to see new additions quite so quickly, as rideable mechs have been spotted in the wilds. When are they actually being added to the game? No idea. Do they look cool as heck? Yes, absolutely.
Mech footage first emerged thanks to Reddit leaker fozzye18, who posted a clip entitled “Mechs… enjoy”. We see a player hop inside a bulky mech, wander about a tiny bit, then fire off explosive rounds from guns attached to the arms.
Further down the Reddit thread, fozzye18 mentions how he stumbled on the mech in the first place, while hinting at other Stratagems (that is, equipment, bombs, and barrages that drop from the sky) that could be coming to Helldivers 2 in the future.
“This is from a randoms game I joined last night, from what I saw he had access to theirs new weapons like an energy rpg coming, a meteorite that hits like the nuke, a group of helldivers you can call in to support you(npcs) and more.”
Fozzye18 was unsure of the mech player’s identity – perhaps it was one of the human game masters who tweak co-op fights in real time.
“He was just showing me all the stuff he was pulling out of the files he had so I’m unsure if he was a hacker or a dev but he seemed super exited to show us. Until my game crashed from everything being loaded in and then I couldn’t find his username again.”
Another clip courtesy of Redditor Klyka shows a mech being dropped into a map, except this time the mech’s kitted out with rocket launchers and a minigun. There’s no confirmation of how this clip surfaced, besides someone in the thread suggesting it could have been taken from the demo video you’d see if you previewed the mech in-game.
It comes as no surprise that mechs are arriving in Helldivers 2 – they’re shown in the “Report For Duty” trailer and also feature in the original game. As for how they work in Helldivers 1, you call them down like any other Stratagem and they aren’t as overpowered as they might seem. They are slow and lumbering, making them vulnerable to nimble critters, while their low ammo count means they are better at dealing with heavily armoured opponents who require big firepower. This Reddit thread does a nice job of summarising their key strengths and weaknesses.
Still, mechs in Helldivers 2 may not work quite the same as they do in Helldivers 1. The perspective has shifted from top-down to third-person, and the devs may want to tune them differently! Either way, I’m very, very excited for new Helldivers 2 goodies. It really does feel like a perfect co-op canvas for adding all sorts of cool or ghoulish or funny things.
