Funny / Helldivers II

"No... sweet Liberty... NOOOO!"

Attention Citizens. Please observe the following PATRIOTIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: ^* Any deviation of attention or attempts to exit the page without fully reviewing the contents will be considered treason. Treason is punishable by death.

The following page and its contents have been decreed "MANDATORY" reading by the Ministry of Truth. Please read (and laugh along with) the page and listed trope examples in its entirety for the betterment of DEMOCRACY and LIBERTY! For the Glory of SUPER EARTH!

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• The nature of Helldivers' Friendly Fire mechanic often leads to moments of hilarity. Having players be instantly gibbed by gear drops, player spawns or even the evac shuttle usually results in a chuckle or two.
  • The turrets are of particular note in this regard, as the gun turrets will shoot any enemy in their line of sight, regardless of what (or who) is in the way, and the tesla turrets will kill anyone.
  • Hellpods kill (almost) anything they land on, leading to the very likely scenario of being killed by your own reinforcements. One can only imagine the conversation from command on that one.
    Command: Wait, you need reinforcements again? Didn't we just drop reinforcements not 2 seconds ago?
  • Any time that a player accidentally calls down an air strike or orbital bombardment too close to themselves or other players. Even more so if said orbital bombardment is a 500kg bomb. "WHERE'S THE GIANT, MANSLEY?!"
  • If you're killed or knocked over while holding an armed stratagem, you'll drop it on the ground...which will promptly activate it. If said stratagem happens to be, say...another 500kg bomb...ohhhhhh boy.
• One of the loading screen tooltips: "If the natives on this planet try installing democracy, shoot them. It's up to us to do that."
• The descriptions for ship module upgrades. Zero-G Breech Loading implies that they send someone out with a space suit to load in the ammunition from the front like an old-time musket. No wonder orbital stratagems have a lengthy cooldown! Authorization of hazard pay to the pit crews lets them reload the Eagle Fighter in space flight. More Guns is the result of years of research concludes that to increase the firepower of the Super Destroyer, you need to add more guns.
  • Several upgrades give insights into how dysfunctional Super Earth's technological designs are. One upgrade for the drop pods is power steering. That's right, a basic function in most modern cars is an upgrade you need to pay for. It also reveals that the drop pod steering mechanism is pedal based.
  • Even the order of the upgrades is utterly absurd. The first upgrade for your various sentry turrets incorporates Super Earth's Sinister Surveillance tech so the sentries constantly track your location, ready to fire at any moment to speed up deployment. The second involves using shock absorption gel instead of the springs they were using to protect the turrets from impact damage. And only then do they decide they should use actual quality lubricant for the turrets' swivel mechanisms.
  • In order to improve the durability of your sentries, you need some Super Samples - highly limited and rare samples only acquired from the top three difficulties - in order to apply cyanoacrylate adhesive to them to make them stronger. Sounds high tech, right? The layman's term for "cyanoacrylate adhesive" is much better known: super glue. That's right, not only is the improvement to make your emplacements stronger using super glue, but that implies that whatever was holding them together before was worse.
  • One of the upgrades has the hanger crew reload the Eagle fighter-bomber in space, saving time by skipping the process of actually landing it in the hanger. Said upgrade is authorizing hazard pay for the hanger crew, because apparently, despite Super Earth being an oppressive dictatorship that has its brainwashed troops do many stupid and dangerous things, even they feel that's dangerous enough to justify paying them extra rather than just forcing them to do it (and apparently even the incredibly brainwashed crew aren't willing to do it without hazard pay).
  • The Tier 4 upgrades include such leaps in technology and efficiency like subscribing to a live weather tracker, an 8-week training course to pack ammo more efficiently, removing "unnecessary" features like fire suppression, ejector seats, and air bags from Eagles for more bombs, and adding packing peanuts to sentries to reduce the damage they take from explosions. Then there's the upgrade to increase flame weapon damage; it includes "accelerants" such as white phosphorus (okay, fair enough), capsaicin, and allyl isothiocyanate - the compound that makes mustard, horseradish, wasabi, and other similar plants so uniquely pungent and hot. Or to use internet parlance, they're making your flame weapons extra spicy.
  • The Circuit Expansion upgrade says that it "Augments electrical weaponry by safely connecting multiple interior arc extenders into one long linear chain". As anyone with even an elementary-school knowledge of electronics can tell you, this is a MASSIVE fire hazard waiting to happen, the benefits of which probably wouldn't even outweigh the risk of a gigantic Super Destroyer-engulfing electrical fire.
• The Propaganda Piece cinematic that starts the game opens with a Glurge-filled sequence of a guy walking through his utopian neighborhood (including waving to the armed soldiers casually walking down the street) and going to greet his family... only for a Terminid to come out of nowhere and kill them as the guy screams "SWEET LIBERTY! NOOOOOOO!!!" in the most overwrought tone possible. Suddenly the video freezes and the guy from the vid steps in front of the screen, looks at his blood-soaked, despairing self, and chuckles heartily like he's being reminded of a funny joke he heard before segueing into the recruitment pitch. If that doesn't set the tone, nothing will.
  • Pausing at the start when the Super-Earth logo is shown shows a text telling the viewer that "Citizens who express opinions in relation to broadcasts including but not limited to concern, discontent, anger, doubt, fear, disillusionment, confusion, helplessness, inadequacy, or anything less than overwhelming patriotism will be punished to the full extent of the law. Serious cases may result in arrest, relocation, or termination."
  • The guy's hammy acting in the video adds to the comedy as well. Of special note is the face he makes just before the bug eviscerates his family. The guy's over-the-top and hammy expression of horror is pictured at the top of the page. Just take a good look at it.
  • Near the end of the propaganda, you have the Helldiver actor talking about spreading managed democracy while nonchalantly shooting a terminid. In the background, you have 3 Helldivers attempting to impale a flag of super earth on a bug. Once they succeed, two of the divers proceed to chest bump each other in victory while the remaining one salutes the flag.
• The 500kg bomb doesn't explode immediately on impact but has a very small delay before exploding. Not only that, but it will also embed itself into whatever it hits, be it the ground, or a particularly large enemy. This means you can quite literally make Bile Titans eat it before blowing up.
  • Since the bomb doesn't come straight down but at an angle (as one would expect from an aircraft-dropped bomb), there are many a clip on YouTube and Twitch and whatnot of the bomb slamming into the ground just a few feet away from the Helldiver who called it in. The aforementioned delayed fuse means the Helldiver has just enough time to realise how screwed they are before getting turned into an assortment of body parts scattered across a wide area.^note For those curious; unlike other Eagle-dropped stratagems, the 500kg bomb comes in from behind the player. Meaning calling one in on something at a lower elevation than you is a good way to have it land next to/on you.
    • As the impact of the bomb also does damage, there's footage of a Helldiver calling in a 500kg bomb, only for it to hit the Helldiver in the head and kill them before exploding.
• The Superstore has fake reviews for the various items it sells, complete with a disclaimer admitting they are fake reviews. Despite this, there is still a chance of a one-star review appearing... which is censored, with the reviewer in question being investigated for treason.
  Fake review: My wife said it's this or her. She will be missed.
• Your character cackles with glee whenever you mow down enemies with More Dakka.
• The tutorial presents its introduction to the basic controls as the only training Helldivers recruits receive before being shipped off to the war. That's right, a recruit basically receives 10 minutes' worth of instruction to do meaningless busywork like "crawl under these few feet of barbed wire", "jump over two or three waist-high concrete dividers" and "get mutilated by a specialized machine to show off the stim system" (the best simulation is a real simulation!) while General Brasch, who claims to be a Drill Sergeant Nasty (but may very well be just a set of pre-recorded audio), heaps praise on the recruit for their "acrobatic perfection", "flawless terminal activation", and ability to stand still (clearly unafraid after being told about the grueling "Highly Realistic Battlefield Simulator"). Suffice to say, players get a good sense of what a Helldiver is, and it mostly just consists of the cool cape they wear to show off.
  • What's even more hilarious is after being told for several minutes about how amazing and special they are, the player proceeds to get onto a rocket with dozens of other Helldivers, which proceeds to launch itself into space where you can see dozens more rockets in the background. It all really hammers in how expendable you really are and how transparently bullshit your training is. Adding onto that, the text before the training even starts shows that the survival rate of Helldivers in combat is roughly 21 percent.
  • The Helldiver "squadmates" you meet in the tutorial are not other Helldiver recruits or even a realistic dummy. They're cheap cardboard cutouts.
  • You can even shoot said cardboard cutouts yourself, "killing"' your fellow Helldiver and you aren't even penalized for it, with the trainer casually noting that friendly fire is a sad but inevitable reality of the battlefield so you shouldn't get too attached to your teammates.
  • Players that think to look around can see a human skeleton and jumble of human bones in the corners of the drop to the tutorial's first obstacle course, implying first that the training course's caretakers simply stripped these casualties of their armor and left the bodies to rot and that these would-be Helldivers somehow failed to perform the task of crouching/lying under the barbed wire obstacle and proceeded to die here, perhaps slipping off the drop and fatally hitting their heads.
  • A fellow Helldiver recruit shown in the initial cutscene of your Helldiver arriving to training that talks to you is not an available voice for the Helldivers. She probably didn't pass...
  • Failing too many times during the section where you're supposed to dive to avoid the sentry guns with live ammunition prompts a unique couple of voicelines of the Facility Operator taking note of how many recruits are dying on the section and trying to directly instruct the rest of them like they're confused kindergartners.
    Facility Operator: Uh, may I have your attention please. You may be required to dive to the ground to pass your training. Please resume.
    [Another recruit dies to the sentries]
    Facility Operator: *Ahem* So, for this next part, make sure you dive into the trench, and stay down. The whole time.
• When you reach the end of the tutorial and receive your cape, the Graduation Chamber is surrounded by black marble slabs with text. Is it a War Memorial, or a monument to Super Earth's values? Sort of. It's the Helldivers Contract of Employment, and it is filled with bangers.
  Article 1.2: ...In order to enable full and complete enactment of these Services, the Enlisted is hereby authorized to employ lethal force, non-lethal force, non-lethal non-force, and lethal non-force, to be employed at the discretion of the Enlisted.
  Article 4.2: Any damage sustained by the Enlisted, whether reputational or corporeal (including but not limited to incineration, evisceration, spinal separation, vaporization, crushing, freezing, burning, decapitation, paper cuts, explosion, contusion, removal of arms and/or limbs, addition of arms and/or limbs, dizziness, nausea, shortness of breath and/or death) shall not be considered the responsibility of the Enlister.
  Article 6.4: The Contract shall be considered binding upon being read, in whole or in part. (For the purpose of the elimination of doubt, the Enlisted spending 1 second within 15 meters of a copy of the contract shall be interpreted as the contract being read.)
  • A particular bit of dark comedy arises from the fact that as enumerated above, reading the contract in whole or in part binds a new Helldiver to its terms and conditions — but reading it in whole without explicit written consent from the Helldiver's commanders is itself a breach of the contract as stated in Articles 3.2 and 3.3.
• The animation for Helldivers being flung through the air is nearly as comically hammy as their actual dialogue what with how they rapidly flail their limbs, so players unfortunate enough to see this for very long get plenty of time to start chuckling at the sight before their Helldiver lethally hits the ground.
• The voice lines Helldivers can shriek when breaking their limbs, getting set on fire or otherwise severely injured are so bombastically deliberately overacted that they lose any Nightmare Fuel they could have generated and loop back around into being hysterical, not unlike some of the more Bloody Hilarious moments in Starship Troopers.
  Helldiver: SWEET LIBERTY, MY LEG!!!
  Max0r: [cracking up] Is this game fucking Spongebob?^note "My leg!" is essentially the catchphrase of recurring character Fred
• One of the consequences for failing to succeed in the Terminid front involves delayed C-01 forms. Cue the Helldivers fanbase complaining that they can't have sex.
• Leveling up comes with new ranks after certain milestones, going from "Cadet" to "Super Cadet" and eventually "Skull Admiral". What ranks do you get at Level 140 and Level 150^note Level 150 is the current level cap.? "Private" and "Super Private" respectively. That's right, you get demoted.
• Shriekers were secretly added in an update, leading to many players freaking out and posting their findings online about "flying bugs", Word of God responds to the feedback in-character:
  "I've heard rumors of flying bugs in @helldivers2. I want to officially refute such preposterous claims. Everyone knows that "Bugs can't fly". And I'm not alone in thinking this. The Ministry of Truth agrees that this is propaganda from bug sympathizers that want to brainwash good people. #Lies"
  • Many days later, Word of God responds again in confirmation of their existence:
  "I want to be very clear: I have always believed there to be a possibility of flying bugs. Everyone knows that "Most bugs fly" and it was only a matter of time before this strain would evolve naturally."
• Very rarely, an Automaton Trooper may survive having its gun arm blasted off. The result? A very panicked Trooper backing up as fast as it can. Approach it in melee, and it will deliver a hilariously weak punch that hits more like a weak bitch slap, than the expected damage a metal fist would do. Even light armor wearing Helldivers can withstand more than ten punches at full health — a Terminid Scavenger can kill you with less attacks!
  • Other, more dangerous Automaton units are not exempt from this. It can be quite amusing to watch a Devastator or Hulk try to close to stomping range after being literally disarmed (from a safe distance — unlike the poor Trooper, these units can and will still kill you if you let them get close). There's even an achievement for extracting from a mission after shooting both arms off a Hulk but leaving it alive.
• Somewhat amusingly, the general Red and Black and Evil All Over aesthetics of the Automatons mean that the faction-specific common samples found in their bases look a bit like so-called "gamer routers".