Drop, Die, Repeat: The Helldivers’ Guide to Galactic Conquest

A helldiving we will go, a helldiving we will go, hey ho the merry O a helldiving we will go.  As the war rages and the forces of Super Earth fight for democracy, the bug advance has been squashed and now there is just one planet of robots standing between us, 50 medals and shopping!!!    We dropped onto the night side of the planet, stomped around in the dark (which sucks), called in orbital strikes, air strikes, and scattered anti-personnel mines like candy across the landscape.  Found the downed pod, started the upload, died, reinforced, died, help we are being overrun.  The tips are right, if you are unsure what to do run forward with a cry to democracy and take the fight to your foes.  Of course they left out the dying bit.    They definitely need a new tip that says "When you see the scary laser cannon, run away, don't look back, keep running until you are behind a large rock (or Craig)", after dying repeatedly with the cannon unfazed by orbital bombardment, cluster bombs, airstrikes we decided we needed bigger bombs, so we should just ignore that and actually go do the mission.

For a follow up mission we went with kill them all, which sees you drop into a small area to kill as many of the enemy as you can.   This mission is stupidly easy against the bugs, and stupidly hard against the robots.  We died before we could deploy our gear, died as soon as we stepped off the reinforcement pod, died over and over again. Did I mention we died a lot.  Myles always the overachiever died 8 times.   But we prevailed, in the dark, mud and blood.   As you come back from your mission, bloodied and battered you have to wonder where all the blood on your armor comes from (as robots don't bleed).    As Myles and Craig were still not level 8 (where the good shopping starts) we decided it was time to Nuke them from orbit (its the only way to be sure).   They didn't mention in basic training that nuking from orbit requires dropping onto the planet to recover the launch codes, find the nuclear warhead, punch in the codes, raise the rocket (what there are override locks to deactivate), select a target, fuel the damn rocket, and then fire the rocket and run for cover (all whilst the robots who have an aversion to being nuked send wave after wave at you).  At last the missile reached orbit, dropped and in very satisfactory fashion blew the buggers to hell and back whilst we ran for the dust-off.

That was so much fun we decided to do a double nuke mission.   This time in the daylight.   We found a SAM site and brought it online, just the thing for blowing those robot drop ships away.  Take that you A.I f$%k3rs!!      After the first mission was a success Craig bailed, so it was just Myles and Dave pushing on, through blood and fire (literally fire, firestorms suck, also not mentioned in basic training), repeated deaths to try and find some pumps to clean and turn on. Suckiest, suck-fest of a mission ever (on par with the laser cannon of death). Do not walk in the fire, even a little - you will die faster than any bug attack

There is a bit of blow back - Stand clear please, stand clear!