It’s a lot more fun with other players as you can handle the higher difficulties which can be a lot more rewarding. That said as a solo player medium makes for a good casual solo play and challenging offers more of a challenge but is still very doable for a solo helldiver.

I personally usually stick to friends or solo instead of doing public games as I didn’t have a great experience with my first when some guy joined as we were waiting on extraction and when the three of us got in he just mag dumped into our faces killing us and then hopped in so we lost all of our samples but that was just one game so hardly a good sampling of the community. Also the official discord is full of people looking for a group or pickup games and I imagine those players aren’t trolls.

All that said this game is absolutely fantastic and if you like shooters this is a fun one.

I agree with the others, solo queue medium (or one level above) is a nicely paced cooperative mode where you don’t have to do much more than loosely co-ordinate (by pinging map) and it’s a lot of fun. On harder difficulties you have to make sure your team is organized with complementary loadouts, etc. but rewards are better, way easier to rely on your team when you know them.