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In the future, social anxiety will be weaponised. That is to say, in the future, social anxiety will have a lot to do with whatever weapons you'll be carrying around. Helldivers is a top-down shooter for up to four players, and it sees you blasting your way through procedurally-generated alien worlds as a cheery space fascist, spreading Managed Democracy across the universe. So far, so Heinlein. But this is also the latest game from Magicka developer Arrowhead Game Studios - a studio, right, whose logo shows an arrow going through somebody's head. In other words, you should expect a few quirks. The biggest of these is friendly fire: it is so terribly easy to shoot your own team-mates in Helldivers. It's so terribly easy to be shot by your own team-mates. Or stepped on by them if they've unlocked mechs. Hell really is other people.Friendly fire's what I fear when I drop into play, screaming out of orbit, gun ready, grenades primed. I'm not worried about the bug hunt, although it's relentless. I'm not worried about my part in a wider galactic war, or even the obvious ethical problems with my mission. I'm worried about the inevitable court-martial - or game boot - when I do something stupid. Stupidity can be terribly swift, too. The other day I decided to head into multiplayer, and I landed in a map just as a heroic Helldiving stranger was finishing off what had clearly been an epic one-man stand while he waited for evac. Sadly, dear reader, I squashed him flat with my falling Hellpod. It is hard to make up for something like that, so I simply leapt into the evac ship that he had called, and disappeared back into single-player as swiftly as I could.
Multiplayer is full of this stuff. Helldivers is ultimately a game about panic: your four-man team is never landing on a planet to wipe out all members of the game's three alien races and clear the map. Instead, you're there to do purposefully infuriating little missions - readying a missile launcher, priming an oil pump, escorting survivors to a bunker, protecting a rocket as it prepares to launch. Whatever shape they take, missions generally involve frantic matching of complex d-pad prompts as you interact with terminals - if you're familiar with the brew-your-own-spells system that brings Magicka to chaotic life, you'll know the kind of dexterity that's required - and then a lot of waiting around while a timer ticks down. It's all about busywork and holding territory as you fend off waves of critters of varying sizes. These critters come at you endlessly, too. You will never clear them all. You just have to plug away at them as efficiently as you can, taking them out before they raise the alarm, prioritising the bigger guys over the smaller guys, and not shooting any friendlies as you go. Total panic. If you don't take a few comrades with you when you expire, you're not really playing Helldivers as it's meant to be played.
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