Helldivers 2 Missions That Are Nearly Impossible

The developers of "Helldivers 2" have made no secret of the fact that the game is meant to be challenging. From telling players to "git gud" (leading to apologies from the developers) to refusing to ditch friendly fire for laughs, it's clear Arrowhead Game Studios understands the difficulty of the game and is okay with it. This becomes even more obvious when players attempt missions on higher difficulties, namely difficulty level 7 (a.k.a. Suicide Mission and above). At this point, the action is non-stop and the best way to complete a mission is often to simply run from objective to objective, fighting only as much as is needed to accomplish things like uploading data or launching a nuclear missile.

However, there are some missions that stand above the rest in their difficulty. From overwhelming enemy spawns to bugs that can make the missions feel impossible to complete, "Helldivers 2" has its share of infuriating missions. These are a few of those missions.

Perhaps no mission directive has become more infamous among the "Helldivers 2" player base than "Retrieve Essential Personnel." Not only is this perhaps the most difficult mission type in the game, but it is in every single operation when defending a planet. Basically, if you want to contribute to defense progress, you have to do them.

This proves a problem for players who prefer to play on higher difficulties, as these missions become nearly impossible. Unlike most missions, you cannot run from overwhelming enemy spawns, and your friendly fire costs you objective progress, as it can potentially killing the titular essential personnel. This leads to a bit of a Catch-22. You can set up all your sentries and use all your available stratagems to hold off the overwhelming number of enemies that spawn in the area around the evacuation site, but in doing so, you risk killing the very people you are trying to evacuate.

The most common suggestion for avoiding this is to drop into the map a bit further out and try to pull the enemies away from the evacuation site, while one or two players go and start opening the doors to evacuate the civilians. Still, enough enemies will eventually spawn on the objective that it will become overrun without the help of other players. This can lead to a situation that's impossible to escape, in which players are split up, disorganized, and overwhelmed all at once.

The mechanic that makes these missions frustrating is that it requires a player to carry one or two hard drives from one location on the map to another. These locations are usually far apart and can require a few minutes of running to reach. Time spent running between objectives is not unusual in "Helldivers 2," of course. However, a player does not have access to their primary weapon or their stratagems when carrying the hard drive, robbing them of both of their main damage-dealing tools. In order to effectively fight, a player must drop the hard drive on the ground — and hope they don't die before they can pick it up again.

This danger is further exacerbated by a trio of issues that affect the mission. The first two are both related to the map. When a player drops the drive, clicking it on the map will not create a waypoint for where the drive was dropped, but rather where it was originally located. Similarly, once the drive is picked up, the intended drop-off location is not highlighted on the map. These two bugs leave players needing to find their objectives manually on the map, which can be extremely difficult in a game as fast-paced as "Helldivers 2."

The third problem happens when a player has the hard drive knocked out of their hands by an explosion or is knocked back by an enemy. When this happens, the player is sometimes forced into a T-pose-like state that can only be fixed by picking the drive up again. A player cannot shoot in this state, leaving them defenseless. This combination of factors can make uploading data a task most Helldivers dread.

Activating the Terminid Control System towers was a temporary mission during an in-game event. Players were tasked with deploying a series of insecticide towers on several planets to stop the push of the bug-like Terminids towards Super Earth. The towers would be swarmed by Terminids and players would need to defend each of the three towers while it powered up before activating the system.

The mission, however, presented a similar challenge to the evacuation missions. Using your stratagems could potentially hurt your mission progression, sometimes damaging the towers you were trying to defend and forcing a squad to start over again. Thankfully, the enemies were not as overwhelming in number as in the evacuation missions, and they often spent their time attacking the towers rather than the players. Still, it was still infuriating to watch the power level of the towers climb towards 100% only to fail at 95%. This mission is fortunately gone for now, and it hopefully will not come back any time soon.

Enabling E-710 is a mission exclusive to worlds either controlled by or under attack from the Terminid faction. It involves turning several pumps throughout the map. This activates the flow of the titular resource to a main facility, which players must then guard while the E-710 is picked up by shuttles.

Enabling E-710 suffers from both a lack of clarity in its mission objectives and a few frustrating glitches. For starters, it can often be unclear which valves need to be turned to activate the pump systems at each location, and they can also be difficult to find. This alone would be a tolerable frustration, but it is not the only problem with this mission type.

The shuttles which come to pick up the E-710 at the end of the mission drop down a hose that needs to be locked into place when it arrives, then a Helldiver on the ground must release the hose after it is done filling up. This needs to be done once for each shuttle that comes in, but whether it works properly can be something of a crapshoot. Sometimes the shuttles do not even show up, resulting in the player being booted from the mission and gaining no experience or resources from it.