Helldivers 2 PS5 PC

While bringing the camera close to your character is one of the biggest changes Helldivers 2 makes from the original, a feature that remains very much the same is friendly fire. If a teammate steps in the path of your own bullet barrage or laser beam, or is caught up in a missile strike, they'll sustain damage and could die. This is treated as a pretty important feature in the Arrowhead Studios follow-up, and it can't be turned off.

The Swedish developer considers friendly fire a "central thread" that runs through many of its titles, and in the case of Helldivers 2, it's all about leaning into the comedy value. "It enhances the satire and that feeling of unpredictability and chaos. It's also a thing about mastery," said assistant game director Sagar Beroshi. "We want you to have moments where you're like: 'I was trying to get rid of this big scary robot, but instead I shot a big orbital barrage right over where you were standing.'"

Whenever that happens during playtests, Beroshi states it's always a laugh that follows rather than annoyance. "We don't want death to feel like a vast loss. In the universe, Super Earth doesn't care about your lives enough. They are just throwing human bodies into the meat grinder. So it also supports the satire. Like this idea that you work for a society that you have been brainwashed into perfectly and wonderfully loving, and yet this is how it treats its soldiers."

Luckily, each mission in Helldivers 2 has you packing with plenty of revives, so if your fellow player does get caught up in your weapon's fire, they can be brought back — the levels we played during our preview session each had roughly 20 revive tokens for the team of four to use. Will you make sure your friends "accidentally" get caught in your line of fire? Kill them off in the comments below.