Helldivers 2 Leak Finally Shows The Illuminate In Action

The latest "Helldivers 2" update finally addressed toxic players in the game, but now the community is turning its attention toward something that Arrowhead Game Studios has yet to officially reveal. That's right; Helldivers have gotten another look at the Illuminate before the enemy faction's impending introduction.

For anyone who's not fully in the loop, the Illuminate were one of the biggest and baddest factions in the original "Helldivers." These squid-like aliens came equipped with powerful technology that could snipe Helldivers from halfway across the map. They've been mysteriously absent in "Helldivers 2," but within months of the game's release, some leaks made the Illuminate impossible to ignore. We've known they're returning for quite some time, some new leaks have given us a look at how this new generation of Illuminate soldiers will operate on the battlefield.

Thanks to Redditor and data miner IronS1ghts, players have gotten a sneak peak at the Illuminate in action. For several months, IronS1ghts has been making the Illuminate's return harder for Arrowhead to deny by digging through the game's files to show us images of their soldiers and various bits of weaponry. This time, IronS1ghts has used a modded version of the base game to actually face the Illuminate in battle. Now that we're seeing the Illuminate in fighting form, it's probably time to start worrying about when they'll make their first attack.

Until now, we've only seen character models for the Illuminate and their equipment. This gave us a good sense of their aesthetic, but very little idea about how they'd actually perform in battle — until now. IronS1ghts has shown us images of the so-called "Illuminate Guy" before, but this fresh round of leaks has shed some light on this enemy's combat abilities. The Guy can equip two to three different weapons, and he seems to favor using melee combos. He's also apparently a prolific dodger, so get ready to empty your magazines over and over again while trying to gun him down.

More concerning than the Illuminate Guy is a unit called the Observer. This little mechanized creation flies around the map and alerts other Illuminate soldiers to your presence. The Observer can attack players while the other foes come charging toward its wailing alarms. Between the Observer and the Illuminate's snipers, sneaking around during an Illuminate mission is going to be next to impossible.

The latest leaks also revealed something called a Dark Fluid Harvester, a giant laser-firing machine that the Illuminate are apparently using to gather valuable resources. This mysterious tech is almost certainly going to be tied to various mission objectives. We imagine that blowing up these things will become part of the daily routine for most Helldivers whenever the Illuminate get around to making their presence in the galaxy known.

There are definitely more secrets about the Illuminate left to be discovered, but at this point, fans may be more interested in seeing the faction's official debut than piecing together leaks. It's been a relatively slow summer for "Helldivers 2," so one might expect Arrowhead to release the Illuminate soon as a way of reinvigorating the community. We wouldn't count on that just yet, however. In the thread showing off the latest Illuminate leaks, IronS1ghts offered their perspective on when they think the Illuminate will arrive in the game. "While the Illuminate themselves may be close to completion, the devs still seem to have a lot planned until the Illuminate," they said, adding, "It may still be a while longer until we fully see them."

Arrowhead's latest update added a sizable amount of new content to "Helldivers 2." In addition to a system for dealing with toxic mission hosts, the devs also added new difficulty options and new enemies. Unfortunately, those new enemies only filled out existing factions, which implies that Arrowhead may spend a little more time investing in robots and bugs before giving us the Illuminate invasion we've all been waiting for. Regardless of how long it takes, the Illuminate are definitely coming, so Helldivers better prepare.