Best games like Helldivers 2 (and which are solo-viable)

By WillyB · tactical PvE + open-world since 2012 · 23 June 2026

Search “best games like Helldivers 2” and you get the same scroll every time: Deep Rock Galactic, Darktide, Starship Troopers, GTFO, lined up and ranked on how chaotic the four-player friendly-fire mayhem gets. Every list assumes you have three mates on comms. None of them answer the question I actually get asked, which is the only one that matters if your squad is just you: can I play this on my own, and do I even need to be online to do it?

So this is the solo-viability cut. I am taking the usual suspects and sorting them on one axis, can a single human carry the loop, and is it online-only or genuinely offline. Bug-blasting horde fantasy is the easy part; every game here delivers that. What separates them is whether they respect a player who logs in alone. I have checked each one’s current status as of mid-2026, because a few of these have shifted since launch.

First, the home base. Helldivers 2 itself lets you deploy solo, you can run any mission alone, but it is an always-online game, so there is no offline campaign to fall back on. The reach of it is bigger than ever, mind: it is on PS5, PC via Steam, and Xbox Series X|S since 26 August 2025, with full crossplay across all three (no cross-progression, so your unlocks stay on the platform you bought). I wrote up that whole resurgence in the Helldivers 2 comeback piece if you want the context.

The genuinely solo, genuinely offline tier is short, and it is the one to trust. Deep Rock Galactic is the king here. You play alone with Bosco, a drone who revives you, mines, and lights the dark, and the whole thing runs offline (only Deep Dives and weekly assignments need a connection). Earth Defense Force 6 is the other one I lean on: solo play, two-player local split-screen, and up to four online, all of it playable offline on PC, PS4 and PS5. Crossplay is partial, Steam and Epic talk to each other, PS4 and PS5 talk to each other, but PC and console stay apart. Remnant 2 rounds out the tier: you can set the session to offline and solo the entire campaign, it added PC/PS5/Xbox crossplay back in early 2024, and it is the most “proper game” of the lot rather than a pure horde grinder.

Then the solo-with-bots tier. Aliens: Fireteam Elite hands you two AI teammates, Alpha and Beta, and you can run the campaign solo and offline, but the bots get thick on higher difficulties, so temper your expectations. Starship Troopers: Extermination is the trap on most lists: since the 1.0 launch on 11 October 2024 it does have a single-player S.O.G. campaign with Casper Van Dien doing Rico, but it is online-only even solo, and the main horde mode still wants a real team. It scratches the Helldivers itch closest of anything here, just not unplugged.

The online-only, do-not-bother-solo tier. Warhammer 40K: Darktide is brilliant co-op and a miserable solo proposition, as of mid-2026 there is still no official offline solo mode; bots only backfill for players who quit, and the PC mods that fake it sit outside normal progression. GTFO is the harshest of all: it is online-only by design (it syncs to a backend even alone), and crucially it does not scale to party size, so soloing four-player horror with bots means four times the work. It is a co-op masterpiece you should not attempt on your own.

The short version. If you play alone and want it offline, go Deep Rock Galactic first, then Earth Defense Force 6 and Remnant 2, those three actually respect a solo session, and Aliens: Fireteam Elite is a fourth offline option if you can carry the weaker AI squadmates. If you want bot-backed horde combat closest to the Helldivers feel, Starship Troopers: Extermination nails it, but it stays always-online even solo. Leave Darktide and GTFO for the nights you have a full squad. If extraction-flavoured PvE is more your thing, I broke that down in the best solo PvE extraction shooters, and you can sanity-check any of these against current state on the Live Game Tracker before you spend a tenner. More tactical and co-op breakdowns live over in the intel index.

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