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While getting review-bombed likely felt terrible at the time, Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead has apparently reached the point where it can laugh about the situation. After a long wait, it has finally sent all players a free in-game cape to commemorate the time when the community turned hard against the otherwise very popular game.
In what might be a first, the cape literally depicts a frequency graph of postive vs. negative reviews during the review-bombing campaign. If you squint at the image in the embed below, you can see that there are small light blue bars at the top of the cape; these are the bars for positive reviews, which are clearly and massively outweighed by the red bars representing the negative reviews. While it was announced over a year ago, the cape is finally out and available for free for all Helldivers 2 players.
COMMEMORATIVE CAPE ISSUED
In honor of their unquestioning commitment to the defense of Managed Democracy, the Helldivers have been awarded a commemorative cape. The new uniform piece will be available in all Super Destroyer Armories as soon as the rollout is complete.
This… pic.twitter.com/DOWaFHU40N— HELLDIVERS™ 2 (@helldivers2) June 27, 2025
If you don’t quite remember why so many people were furious at Arrowhead (for about a week), it all had to do with issues caused by the interactions between publisher Sony, Arrowhead, and the PC version of the game. In essence, not long after the game launched in early 2024, Sony attempted to require that PC players create or link a PlayStation Network account to keep playing. As the PC gaming culture tends to look unfavorably on efforts to mandate new accounts or launchers, players were outraged and eventually managed to convince Sony and Arrowhead to reverse course.
This decision caused an intense, albeit short-lived, downturn in Helldivers 2’s otherwise stellar reviews, driven by coordinated review-bombing. Following the reversal, players banded together to try to do a review-boosting campaign, and the game’s recent Steam reviews have fully recovered. But the outrage and temporary cratering of the game’s reputation seem to have left a strong impression on the developer.
Arrowhead has had to work hard to build back toward the heady heights of its early days, though. Recent content updates have been received quite well, with peak concurrent players reaching close to 200,000 last month. Having hit a low point back in April, Helldivers 2 has been reinvigorated by the Heart of Democracy update.
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