The Helldivers 2: Omens of Tyranny update was announced the night of December 12th during the game awards when John Helldiver came on stage to announce to all helldivers that Super Earth had just received word that the Illuminate had returned and had begun their invasion of the planet Calypso. This huge announcement at the biggest gaming event of the year lead to an immediate player with the active amount of players playing the game on steam shooting from 22,000 before the announcement, to just short of 140,000 late on Thursday night (total was 150,000+).
The Illuminate as a faction were very unique compared to the terminids and the automatons in how they attacked planets with them invading planets held by Super Earth in an attempt to kidnap as many civilians as they could to turn into voteless and then leaving. They did this instead of taking over planets to prepare to boost their current initial forces until the rest of the Illuminate arrive.
The gameplay challenges they present are also very different from the other factions with them sending hordes of voteless (zombies) to overwhelm players with their sheer numbers. The voteless are lead Illuminate overseers who are a much bigger threat than the voteless with them dealing significantly more damage to players. On top of that overseers have to variants with regular overseers firing plasma blasts from their staff which they can swing, knocking over players which makes them easy targets for the voteless at their disposal. Then there are the elevated overseers who fire plasma blasts that do significant damage and are able to defeat a helldiver in a single burst.
Along with the overseers and voteless are the Illuminate’s advanced robots the watchers and the harvesters. The watchers might seem very weak at first with them just firing a low damage lightning bolt at the player, but they are one of the most dangerous tools the Illuminate have at their disposal with the watchers being the only units who are able to call in Illuminate ships, summoning many enemies to their position, making them critical for Helldivers to quickly eliminate. Finally rounding out the Illuminate’s vanguard force are Harvesters who are the strongest units the illuminate currently have who require incredibly heavy weaponry to take down, and fire a huge plasma laser that can instantly kill almost any helldiver.
The Omens of Tyranny update was a huge update to Helldivers 2 which ended the content drought the game had been going through up until that point with it have not having received a major content update since August 6th of 2024 with the Escalation of Freedom update. The update was incredible with the amount of content that it added to the game, and how all this new content has been so fun to play through, it is clear that the Helldivers 2: Omens of Tyranny update is amazing and bodes incredibly well for the long future that Helldivers 2 has ahead of it.
