It's one of my favorite times of the month: The new Heldivers 2 Day of Warbond. After a community vote that overwhelmingly favored not to lag behind, Arrowhead released Polar Patriots premium warbond today, adding four new guns and other goodies to the rapidly expanding co-op shooter.

While you can unlock the items on the first page of warbond, most people will find it a shiny new assault rifle, the AR-61 Tenderizer, which is another boxy bullpup design reminiscent of the AR-23 Liberator Starter rifle, but interestingly, it's not the same as the AR-23 Liberator Starter rifle. It is not an official variant of it. No, the Tenderizer is its own gun and features a bass roar and the top rail of the Helldivers 41, which is closest towards the Alien series' M2A pulse rifle. (Side note: The gun is supposed to be black, like the warbond trailer, but the texture bug made it green. Arrowhead says the fix is coming).

Looks good, sounds great — maybe you can feel the "but" coming. If you look at its statistics, the promise of bidders becomes a major obstacle. On paper, the tenderizer is very similar to the standard liberator — the Tenderizer has the same damage and almost the same recoil for each shot, except that the magazine is small and the firing speed is slow. hmm...

OK, but the four stats Helldivers2 list on the loadout screen doesn't tell the whole story. Reading its official description, the game also says that the tendalizer is a "high-caliber" rifle with "more stopping power.""I can't say for sure, but perhaps Arrowhead's gunnery is comparing it to a similar assault rifle. It would also help if Arrowhead clarified what "blocking power" means in Helldivers2.

So I took the Tendalizer for a whirl in some medium-high difficulty Terminid missions. Based on what I usually mean by "blocking power" in shooters, I was looking for a tenderizer that is noticeably superior to any of these characteristics: astounding the enemy, pushing the enemy, or inflicting extra limb damage. In my eyes, it was capable in all 3, just like the liberator. The two guns feel the same way in the field as they appear. The most noticeable difference is the amount you need to reload the tenderizer.

Not an impressive debut for one of the three major weapons of the Polar Patriots Pack. This is the most confusing I've ever been to a Helldivers Gun, but we've been here before. Last month Warbond's Star rifle, the adjudicator, raked over the coal just like the bidder, but I argued at the time that people weren't giving it a fair shake. I gave what I think is a fair shake with Tenderizer — fired it with a lot of bugs, messed up its settings and went for a headshot only — and I can't figure out what role it's supposed to play. I recorded both gun gameplay and I found that the Tendalizer didn't lag behind where you are aiming when you make sudden camera movements

So, by my best estimate so far, the Tendalizer is a liberator with less recoil, lighter magazines, and slightly better tracking...Cool I guess.

What bothers me the most is the lack of that distinction. It's not a feature of Arrowhead to make guns that don't have a clear identity. Even the most "meta" guns in the game have something neat going on. There are plenty of good examples in the assault rifle category alone:

There are some reasonable guesses that explain all the lacklustre of bidders. I've seen some players point out that the design of the tendalizer may have been finalized before the Liberator got a damage buff last week. Ignoring that buff makes the tenderizer a bit more attractive with 5 additional damage, but it still makes a slight difference.

Another possibility is that something is happening to the bidder's stats that you can't see in the game.1 As we know, Helldivers2guns has a total of 46 stats, but only 4 of them show up. Is there an invisible benefit to the tendalizer that hasn't been discovered yet?"I'm looking for, but I'll be allowed to write it down for now.