Helldivers 2

Friendly fire is always on. That is the design document. Every good thing about Helldivers 2 follows from the fact that your squadmates can kill you, will kill you, and that the game finds this funny rather than tragic.

Chaos with rules

The reason it works is that nothing is random. Your teammate did not kill you because of a bad roll; he called in an orbital strike and you ran into it. Every disaster in ninety hours had a chain of decisions behind it, and that is why the failures are funnier than the wins are satisfying.

The stratagem system is the mechanism. Calling anything down requires typing a direction sequence while under fire, which means support is always a decision about what you are willing to stop doing. In a genre where support abilities are a cooldown button, that is a real innovation.

Missions

~400

Teammates killed, accidentally

Well over 100

Teammates killed, deliberately

Fewer, but not zero

The war worked and then it did not

The galactic campaign — a shared front where the whole playerbase pushes or loses planets in real time — was extraordinary for about four months. Losing a planet meant something because you had personally fought for it the previous evening.

Then the balance patches came. A run of updates nerfed the weapons people enjoyed on the stated grounds that they were too effective, in a cooperative game with no competitive stakes, and the community reaction was immediate and correct. Arrowhead reversed course publicly and the design has been better since, but three months of momentum went with it.

Where it slips

Mission variety is thin. There are perhaps six objective types and by difficulty 9 you are executing the same three with more enemies attached. The progression also flattens hard around ship module tier four, after which the only reason to keep playing is the war, which puts a lot of weight on a system that has already wobbled once.

The verdict

Ninety-two hours, most of them laughing, and I still load it up when three friends are online. The score would be higher if the live-service layer were as well designed as the shooter underneath it — the moment-to-moment here is a nine, and the operation running it is a seven.

Play it with voice chat and people you like. Solo, it is a different and much worse game.