Is Helldivers 2 worth it in 2026? A solo player's verdict

By WillyB · tactical PvE + open-world since 2012 · 15 June 2026

Yes, Helldivers 2 is still worth it in 2026 even if you mostly play alone, because as of mid-2026 the standard edition is $39.99, about £34.99, on Steam with no subscription, and it is also on PS5, PC and Xbox Series X|S. It is one of the genuine live-service comeback stories of the decade, which is why I am rating it on whether a person who plays solo gets their money’s worth, and not on how good it looks in a coordinated squad montage. Four out of five from this chair, and the missing star is the night I am holding a four-body objective with one body, which is the part of the score I am leaving in plain sight.

Search this question and almost every answer comes from someone playing in a four-stack on a Friday night, controller in one hand and the mic open, which is why of course they say yes. The question I actually get asked, and the one I care about, is narrower, because it is whether the game is worth it if you mostly play alone, and whether the live-service is still healthy enough to justify dropping in this late.

Brilliant, and not built for you

Helldivers 2 is a third-person co-op PvE shooter balanced around four players, and Arrowhead have been blunt that they do not intend to balance it around one, which is the sentence I want in the room before a solo clip gets promoted into a promise. You absolutely can play solo, since you flip matchmaking off, drop in alone, and keep the full stratagem kit, and the joke still lands, while the hardcore have soloed even Helldive difficulty with stealth and a sharp loadout. I am not one of those people on a weeknight, and there are no commandable AI teammates to fall back on the way there are in a tactical shooter like Ready or Not. Solo, you are one body holding a four-body objective, and the higher difficulties feel exactly that lopsided, which is the compromise I am leaving in the score.

On lower and medium difficulty it is a tense, funny, satisfying loop, and I have laughed at my own orbital, which is the highest compliment this game gets from me. Push past that without mates and it becomes a patience exam that I, personally, keep failing, and then I queue again, because dying for Super Earth is still a better joke than most shooters manage when they are trying. If you want the setup rather than the verdict, can you play Helldivers 2 solo is the page, and the solo and duo loadout notes are there if you are going in under-gunned on purpose.

I do not wait for the recast

The launch arc matters because it tells you who is running it, and because the room has already rewritten 2024 into a tidy redemption film, which is a story I have read and do not entirely trust on its own. Helldivers 2 detonated in February 2024, hit roughly 458,000 concurrent players on Steam, and then nearly torched its own goodwill that May when Sony tried to force PSN account linking and the community review-bombed it into the ground, after which Arrowhead and Sony reversed it. Since then the studio has rebuilt trust the slow way, which is a slower story than the redemption film makes it sound. The surprise Omens of Tyranny update in December 2024 added the Illuminate as a third faction, the mind-controlled Voteless, urban biomes and the Fast Recon Vehicle, and the game won Best Multiplayer and Best Ongoing at that year’s Game Awards.

I read all of that, and I also remember what the same rooms said in May 2024, because I have a habit of loving the game in front of me while the consensus is still calling it a mess. People follow people, and I try to follow the session, so this four out of five is me coming off a drop buzzing, and also swearing at a breach I could not hold, which is not me agreeing with a trophy. I am refusing to wait until it is fashionable to say both in the same paragraph, because the buzzing and the breach belong to the same evening. If Helldivers 2 is a comeback story for you, that is fine, and if it is thirty-five quid of a co-op game you will only ever play alone, that is a fair pause, while my take is smaller than either headline. For the money, and for the health of the war, it is still worth it, and I filmed the bit where I had no idea what was going on, which is the texture of the drop and not a complaint I am filing.

Where the war sits in mid-2026

Update 6.3.0 landed on 16 June 2026, closing out the Machinery of Oppression roadmap with a new Forest (Fall) biome, a fresh Warbond, and the headline feature for anyone who plays solo, which is proper Galactic War Campaigns. They run through a new Control Center terminal on your Super Destroyer, so you can actually track the ongoing war and Major Orders as a persistent thing rather than a vibe, and that is the part of the patch I have been waiting on. It also handed real survivability buffs to vehicles and Exosuits, cut the cooldown from ten minutes to eight, and let you reload mid dodge-dive, and those two minutes are the difference between hoarding the call-in and actually using the thing. If you want the full breakdown, my Helldivers 2 Update 6.3 and Galactic War campaigns writeup goes deeper, and it is the page I would read before arguing with the patch notes from memory.

Crossplay is fully supported across PC, PS5 and Xbox, matchmaking pulls all three by default, and playing with mates on other boxes is a non-issue, which is the easy one of the two facts worth nailing before you buy. Cross-progression is not supported, so your levels, unlocks and Super Credits are welded to the platform you bought on, and I have watched people learn that the expensive way, which is why the platform choice is the sentence I would not skip. On the population, day-to-day concurrents sit in the tens of thousands now, well down from that 2024 peak, but big drops still spike it hard, and an early-2026 faction beat pushed past 170,000. Steam reviews hold at Mostly Positive across more than a million ratings, with recent reviews running Overwhelmingly Positive, so what you are buying into is settled, and settled is not the same thing as dying. Settled is what you want from a live-service you are buying into late, even if the recast prefers the word renaissance, and I would rather have the quieter number than the memory of February.

The call from this chair

Four out of five, and as a co-op game it is a near-five, while I am docking it because the solo player, who is the person I am writing for, gets a real but compromised version, and the no-cross-progression rule stings. If you have a regular crew, buy it without thinking, and if you are solo, buy it knowing it is a great game you will play on its terms, not yours, which is the caveat I am willing to put next to a four. If co-op built for teams is not your thing, my best solo PvE extraction shooters list and the should-I-buy tool are better starting points, and for the cousins of this loop, games like Helldivers 2 sorts which of them you can actually play alone. More verdicts live over in the intel index, and I keep coming back because it is funny when it is trying to be propaganda, which is still worth thirty-five quid even on a night when I am the whole squad and the breach does not care.

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