Twin-stick shooter Helldivers gets free weekend and difficulty upgrade

Helldivers, the twin-stick shooter from Magicka creators Arrowhead, is free to play this weekend on Steam, and has just received a major update that adds ultra-hard difficulty levels and tough new enemies.

It's free until tomorrow 10am PST/1pm ET/5pm GMT (the clocks go back in the UK overnight tonight—don't forget!), and if you like what you see, it's on sale for $9.99/£7.99, which is close to its lowest ever price.

If you were a Magicka fan, it might be worth checking out, and the new update offers something for returning players, too. You can now play on three new difficulty levels: An Exercise in Futility (lvl13), The Definition of Insanity (lvl14), and the Inner Circle of Hell (lvl15), which all sound equally horrible.

You'll fight against three new challenging foes, including Shadow, a hunter that can camouflage itself and release spores that lure other enemies to the area. You'll also get your hands on the new MGX-42 Machinegun, a one-use weapon that you chuck away after spewing out its 300 rounds. 

You can check out a gif of the weapon in action below, and click here for more details on the update.

Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.