Helldivers 2 rolls out the cyborgs as a barrage of bloodcurdling binary heralds the Machinery of Oppression update

Grab your exploding hammer if you’ve invested in one, Helldivers 2 developers Arrowhead have revealed a trio of new cyborg enemies which’ll be deploying on the battlefield as the shooter’s forever war shifts into a battle to conquer Cyberstan. Well, I say new, these metal-augmented marauders will be plenty familiar if you’re a veteran of the first Helldivers.

Following a metric tonne of teases over the past few days in the form of the game’s socials spewing out more binary than your average techie sees in a lifetime, Arrowhead have pulled back the curtain on the incoming cyborgs today.

The borg forces are made up of three unit types – Agitators, Radicals, and the Vox Engine. The former are heavily armoured field commanders who’ll direct the game’s existing automaton robo-enemies to ruin your day more ferociously than usual, while Radicals are less heavily armoured melee brutes who can whip out some “techno martial arts” to mess you up. Finally, there’s the Vox Engine, a beefy tank with rockets, lasers, and gatling guns. Good thing Arrowhead put a friendly tank stratagem called the Bastion into the game last week, otherwise it’d really be brown trousers time.

These three foes will be rocking up in Helldivers 2 tomorrow, February 10th, as part of a major update dubbed Machinery of Oppression. The update revolves around the battle for Cyberstan, homeworld of the game’s Automaton faction, whom these new cyborgs will be fighting alongside. Helldivers 2 director Mikael Eriksson has teased in a chat with IGN that, as far as the game’s “most ambitious” fight so far, with “a new type of meta gameplay” making it “much more clear now for players what the consequences would be depending on how they choose to tackle [the assault]”.

If it’s been a while since you’ve dropped into the shooter’s galactic war, this update’s the first really substantial shift in the conflict since our real world calendar flipped over into 2026. Lots of bot bashing is on the agenda in the coming weeks and months, and we’ll see which side’s been reduced to scrap once the scrapping subsides.