Helldivers 2’s Liberty Day celebrations see players inevitably fall in love with a crappy meme gun, mainly because you can stab tanks to death with it

Did you enjoy celebrating Liberty Day over the weekend in Helldivers 2? Well, if the answer’s no, you’ve missed out on being part of a horde of players falling in love with the deliberately slightly terrible in sheer performance terms gun that Arrowhead gave the divers as part of its in-game festivities.

Liberty Day, if you’re not into Super Earth lore, is a long-running in-game holiday that’s been baked into the Helldivers universe, with players and devs coming together to celebrate, er, freedom and the other usual stuff, via a day of stuff on October 26. Ok, I’ve probably made it sound a bit lame there, but there are surprise dissident executions, so hopefully that helps convince you this is a big deal for the divers.

Anyway, as part of these celebrations this year, which also included a unique 24-hour Major Order, Arrowhead gave Helldivers 2 players the R-2124 Constitution rifle and DP-00 tactical armour set. The latter’s a nice classic Helldivers getup, but it’s the former that’s instantly wormed its way into the hearts of the divers.

Basically, it’s an old school bolt-action rifle that wouldn’t seem too out of place in a Call of Duty set in one of the two world wars, or even something like Red Dead Redemption. Performance-wise, as you’d expect, it’s not quite on the same level as a lot of the more modern or high-tech ordnance in the game’s arsenal, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s excellent for two things – musketeer roleplaying and stabbing stuff.

Yep, as you can see in the clip above, folks have even been having a go at poking some of the game’s biggest enemies – including tanks – to death with the Constitution’s bayonet, because video game. Incredibly, the player behind that attempt did eventually actually manage to destroy a tank this way without being thrown into the stratosphere, posting a clip of that further down the thread.

If you’ve got the Peak Physique armour passive active, the folks in the thread reckon you’ll be doing about 165 damage per stab with your bayonet, which is pretty cool.

So there you go, a fun thing to try if you haven’t already while you wait for the next MO in the recent Democracy Space Station saga to drop and end your nice Liberty Day vaycay.