Awesome Helldivers 2 Mod Lets Players Reenact Their Star Wars Fantasies

Helldivers 2 may be a video game analog for the satire of the 1997 sci-fi film Starship Troopers, but there’s an entirely different space-faring movie franchise fans have been clamoring to see in the game. That franchise is, quite predictably, Star Wars, and folks have especially wanted to see characters and situations from The Clone Wars recreated in Helldivers 2, due to some thematic similarities between the two. Well, PC players no longer have to fret over the (very slim) chances of an official collaboration, since there’s now a mod that reskins various elements of the game to resemble characters and vehicles from Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

The mod, which was developed by a modder named Toasted and their respective team, exchanges the Helldivers for members of The Clone Wars series’ 501st legion, including fan-favorite characters like Captain Rex, Cody, and Hunter. The mod also replaces Helldivers 2’s Automaton enemy force with the droid army of the Separatists. Even the massive ships that stay in orbit and function as in-game lobbies have been made to appear like Star Wars’ massive Star Destroyers. The mod pack stops shy of being a total conversion, but the results are still rather impressive nonetheless. If we’re not going to get a Star Wars shooter anytime soon, this might be the next best thing.

The more you think about it, the more it makes sense that fans of both properties would specifically want this collaboration. Whenever you die in Helldivers 2, reinforcements are called and an identical version of your character drops in, almost as if they were cloned to fill out the ranks of a fascist space empire. Helldivers are treated about as callously as the clones in Star Wars are, making them effectively one and the same. Admittedly, there’s also a lot of physical humor in the reckless tossing around of Helldivers that translates pretty well if you do a Star Wars palette swap, and the clone troopers are an especially popular bunch to put through the ringer.

The Star Wars mod pack that includes all of the extensive reskins is not available just yet, but will be in the very near future. According to Toasted, “the mods don’t work consistently across all planets and difficulties so we want to iron out the kinks before dropping them.” In the meantime, the team will be dropping the 501st legion “and other mods” on Nexus Mods individually throughout the week before bundling them all together. As an added and very neat gesture, Toasted and their mod team will also be releasing the tools they used to build the Star Wars mods so that others might use them and make their own.

It’s fortunate that Helldivers 2’s modding scene is generating some positive buzz because the game and its developers are otherwise going through a rough patch right now. Just a few weeks ago, Helldivers 2 was being pulled from Steam across the world since Sony decided to enforce a mandate requiring PC players to link their accounts to PSN, which is supported in fewer countries than Steam. After getting review-bombed by the community over the controversial eleventh-hour change, Sony ultimately backpedaled on the requirement, though a lot of damage had already been done. Since then, the studio has kept trucking along, releasing a new battle pass last week that was also met with backlash over the perceived inferiority of the weapons on offer. In other words, Helldivers 2 is in need of any kind of win these days.

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