Right, where in the name of disposable infantry were you? Yes, I'm talking to you, Helldivers 2 hive lords, added into the shooter as part of yesterday's Into the Unjust update with what looks like nary a patch note peep from Arrowhead. Why didn't you unleash your big worminess on me when I dropped onto some Terminid hive worlds last night?

You missed out. I'm an easy target. Dressed head to toe in bright yellow Helldiver armour, because it's always best to be highly visible on the battlefield. Armed with the trigger finger prowess of a sleeping librarian. Sometimes alone because no one's answered my SOS beacon yet. I was right fugging there.

Ok, so your absence is almost certainly explained away by the fact that I parachuted onto Oshaune and Nivel 43 for some ops at a lower difficulty than the numerous Reddit posters I discovered you'd been terrorising when I logged on this morning. That's no excuse. I was on good enough form to take out two brood commanders single-handedly, by running in, shooting like my life depended on it, and then running away before I was swallowed up be the swarm.

I was also quite good at the new missions that tasked me with driving the GATER mobile oil rig around and siphoning a "mysterious oily substance" from spots that always happen to be bug breach-prone. I stood atop the beefy vehicle, having channeled my inner Colin McRae to drive myself and a partner through the murky dunes, acid lakes, and towering bone stuctures. I stood atop the rig having activated the drill stratagem, staring out at the massing crowd of angry bugs who couldn't reach me on this perch, and yelled 'Come on then, yous can do better than that!'.

I rebounded admirably once I'd discovered, via an explosion that fatally pinged me several hectares away, that the GATER is not in fact impervious to bug damage, as I'd assumed after the first few minutes of my impromptu stage performance. I mean, there was no one else around to see it, so you've only got my word, but once I was joined by a few more hardened helldiving teammates, I held my own. We planted a Super Earth flag in the caves that didn't quite get as deep and dark as I'd hoped.

Don't get me wrong. Both they and the surface of these new hive worlds make for wonderfully foreboding backdrops, missions feeling like walking into the ultimate hostile environment that the bugs can offer. The combination of permanent yellow piss filter, looming alien foliage that seems equally dead and alive, and the distant fire on the horizon I spotted on Nivel 43. The fact that when we ducked into the closed cave sections, we were temporarily unable to call in any of our precious strategems until we re-emerged beneath the dull, uncaring sky.

That feeling of nakedness, too, when waiting in a painfully exposed clearing that could be three seconds away from a bug infestation. That extraction or fuel shuttle better get here right quick, I think, armour still smouldering from a rupture spewer's corrosive bath. I'm sure it'll only get more prominent as I ratchet up the difficulties and get deployed deeper in search of the "spore lung" behind the game's giant space cloud, the Gloom.

Dispersing that galactic fog is the goal of the latest major order, so I guess I'd better get back to it. Hive lords, you big Dune-ish teases, I'll be waiting. Come find me. Just, if you could, please wait until I've joined a squad of folks tough enough to take you down with only distant moral support on my part. Ta.