Helldivers 2 has been remarkably successful and captured that Starship Troopers imagination of gamers while remaining seemingly able to avoid some of the toxicity of other online co-op games.

Like all of these types of games, although this differs from some by not being a free game, there is a Battle Pass system that rewards your actions with pretty cosmetics and new weapons. Think Call of Duty / Warhammer 40k Darktide.

Where Helldrivers 2, which recently got a new patch changing things up a bit, differs from pretty much all of the other games with Battle Passes however is it is not an egregious cash grab, and you can pretty much earn everything the game has to offer by just playing it. More of that later. First let’s look at the different Battle Passes, which are called Warbonds here, to see what’s going on.

Helldivers 2 Warbonds

Helldivers 2 currently has three Warbonds, assumingly this will change over time as people complete them but for now, we get the free tier and two Premium Tiers which cost 1,000 each of the in-game currency, Super Credits

The free Warbond is called Helldivers Mobilize!, while the Premium tiers are Steeled Veterans and Cutting Edge. These two Warbonds contain different weapons and cosmetics from the free tier, and despite a few people saying the Premium weapons are better and therefore you can accuse Helldivers 2 of being Pay-to-Win, we don’t really agree with that as the weapons in the free tier are pretty similar in stats, and Helldivers 2 is a Player v Environment (PvE) game anyway so better guns give you no advantage over other players.

The way the Warbonds work is that as you play you are awarded medals which you can then spend in the Warbond of your choosing. The free tier has 10 pages of goodies but you have to ‘spend’ a set number of medals before you get access to the next page – you can’t just go to Page 10 and hoover up the best stuff at the start. There are a lot of games you are going to need to play before you get that far.

The Premium tier Warbonds have fewer pages but arguably cooler-looking gear.