Killing Floor 2 provides a familiar flavour of zombie wave defence or "Zeds", as the game calls them , tasking you and five other players with welding doors shut, swinging katanas and removing heads with panicked shotgun blasts. What weapons you start with depends on the class, so while assault rifle equipped characters might be able to pick off Zeds at range, the Support class needs to stop undead that get close by removing half of their head with some buckshot. What makes Killing Floor 2 so great is the feedback: weapons punish trigger-happy players with recoil, body parts fly from enemies with each impact, and claret glistens on the ground, a bloody reminder of each skirmish.
Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead. You can play through the whole of Vegas 2's brilliant but flawed campaign with a friend, rappelling down walls, breaching windows and taking out terrorists in unison. While that will keep you busy a while, it's Terrorist Hunt - a mode where you team up with three buddies to hunt down a set amount of enemies across large sandbox maps - that will keep you coming back. Guns are powerful and fast; death comes faster. This makes methodically creeping through the maps as a unit, covering corners and assaulting defended positions, an incredibly tense affair.
This only ramps up when your squad inevitably gets picked apart on the harder difficulties, right up until three of you are sat watching the lone survivor, the whole success of the mission pinned on them scraping through. It could even be down to you and you'll feel the tension ramp up as you suddenly become aware of being judged. Borderlands 3 is classic "bigger is better" sequel design: everything you liked in Borderlands 2 still a great co-op romp in itself but with more.
More gun variables, more character abilities, more locations, more vehicles, more rifles that grow legs and run around as a lead-spewing sidekick. The only thing it has less of is Claptrap, which is a blessing. And so it makes sense that co-op is the way to go in this bombastic FPS game.
At any one time one friend could be ordering a giant battle ant into the fray while another hops into a Titanfall-ish mech suit, a third activates a drone and a holographic double and the fourth performs psychic powerbombs in the middle of it all.
The way these character skills can be further differentiated means you never really know which version of each character you'll be rubbing shoulders with, turning co-operative sessions into a showcase for builds.
Of course, the main takeaway is always: I want my own battle ant. Importantly, it's a friendlier co-op game than Borderlands 2, too. With instanced loot drops, players don't have to fight over the same spoils of war, and the difficulty scales to each combatant, so a casual dabbler can comfortably leap into an old pro's game.
Divinity: Original Sin let you create a character and then suggested it might be fun if you took a friend along. It was fun, because you got to do all sorts of silly things. Divinity: Original Sin 2 wants you to consider the possibility of playing with multiple friends. It supports up to four players but rather than simply increasing the size of the party, it does something far smarter and more insidious.
This time around, Divinity wants you to consider what might happen if your friends were no longer your friends. They're colleagues, perhaps, and sometimes they're rivals. And thus the competitive-cooperative RPG is born. You can take on quests with contradictory objectives, kill that one NPC your best mate really needs to talk to if she's ever going to get closure on her character's personal backstory, or poison all of the health potions and then share them with the party after the next battle.
It's a brilliant game however many people you play with, but it's at its best when you're playing with a group of your very best frenemies. Monster Hunter: World is arguably the best and slickest Monster Hunter game yet.
This is a game that made a concerted effort to smooth out previously obtuse mechanics and controls and move from partitioned monster arenas to open playpens that encourage exciting chases and allow surprise clashes as angry bits of the ecosystem butt heads - all without sacrificing the weapon mastery or crating trees that keep you playing for months.
When hunting alongside friends, you're rewarded for teamwork. Some weapon classes offer extra support, like blowing a stat-buffing boogie on the hunting horn or blasting friends with a bowgun's healing shots, but really it's about everyone knowing their tool and beating down the monster at every opportunity. What elevates it above most co-op games is the way it taps into the camaraderie of real-world team activities.
Not just the main event, but the rituals that build up around them. Meeting in a tavern, having a slap-up meal prepared by a giant cat , comparing the latest hobbyist gear Also: the incredibly fussy lobby system, with its invites and quest noticeboard, feels a lot like dads trying to work out the intricacies of Facebook.
It's well worth muddling through the archaic kinks. While many are purists when it comes to From Software's masterful action RPG, refusing to summon help or forcing themselves to equip just underwear whilst wielding only an overgrown twig, Dark Souls is fantastic in co-op.
You can jump in with a friend, with a bit of planning, taking turns to help each other through each section. Even without friends, though, Dark Souls will have you forming bonds with silent strangers. There's an unwritten etiquette to the Souls games that sees people treating each other with respect, bowing to each other once summoned and waving each other off or cheering after a defeated boss.
There's nothing quite like the feeling of relief when a summoned co-op partner helps you finally beat Ornstein and Smough - the only thing that comes close is paying it back later, becoming the saviour in someone else's story. Adam said it best in our review : "It's superb, populating an already haunted world with phantoms and memories, and providing an eventual gateway by which to become an all-but anonymous hero or villain.
Spelunky is a moreish 2D platformer with roguelike elements that kicks your arse until it straightens your spine. Although the geometry might be constantly shifting with each frequent death, the rules that govern the enemy types remain constant.
After a while, reflexes handle the enemies of The Mines - it's like peeking into another dimension, but instead of losing your mind you become Neo.
Can you dodge bullets? Co-op changes the rules, making it perfect for seasoned players to team up. You might think things would be easier with more health and attack power, but stunning, whipping and blowing each other up will be a regular occurrence in the claustrophobic confines of the levels.
More players only add more complication and four player co-op is chaos, creating more hilarious ways to fail. Timing, as ever, is key. Now see if you can make it to Hell with friends. Diablo 3 is a beast of a game and it's playable from start to finish with three friends. Not only is it absolutely huge, but there's replayability in the different classes and combinations, not to mention the difficulty levels.
On lower difficulties it's kind of meditative - you just explore colourful environments bashing things as the world reacts to your destructive force and you pick up sweeter gear.
Like this, it's one of the best social games around, requiring little in the way of planning while you chat to your friends and get on with bashing skeletons. Crank it up, though, and your party is in for a world of hurt if you're not planning, talking about the fight and working together - providing buffs, healing and prioritising targets is essential to victory.
It's easy to pick up, difficult to master and even harder to put down. Los Santos is a gorgeous playground, each bend in the road bringing you level with a postcard view - every angle feels scrutinised. Trace a route from the peak of Mt Chiliad, driving down through the dusty plains of the Grand Senora Desert, snaking by the hilltop mansions of Vinewood Hills, cruising on through the twinkling city itself and finally coming to stop at Vespucci Beach - all this, including the skies above and the sea beyond, is your online playground.
Grand Theft Auto Online is stuffed full of co-op scenarios, but the best experiences are found in the Heists. These multi-part missions ask you and three other players to take part in everything from the setup - casing the joint and grabbing getaway vehicles - all the way to the caper itself.
While not all of them are literal heists, each one does an incredible job of making sure all four players are busy. Everyone has their own job to do, sometimes all together, sometimes in pairs and sometimes alone. This, along with the randomness of the open-world's systems, gives each one massive replay value. The only real downside is that you really need to play with three friends to get the most out of it.
With each heist taking a couple of hours from setup to execution, it can be as difficult to organise as an actual heist. Nobody knew how huge Minecraft would be when the alpha released in , but there were hints of it even from the first few hours, when the game's initial players started building rudimentary shapes and sharing screenshots of what they'd created.
Today, Minecraft is played by people of all ages. Part of its appeal, aside from its openness, is the social aspect. Whether helping your child stave off monsters as you build a fantasy land together or collaborating with a group of adults to make a working hard drive , there's something for everyone. You can even play it as an RPG, killing mobs with your co-op partner, levelling up and building equipment to grow stronger, with the eventual goal of taking on the final boss, the Ender Dragon.
Minecraft is whatever you want it to be and you can play it all with friends. Panicking with friends can be sublime. That shared fear and desperation, the yells and shrieks of people facing the same horde, each convinced they're moments from being overwhelmed.
In a sense, they already are. Horror games reach into your lizard brain and convince your amygdala that you're in trouble. Left 4 Dead 2 is one of the best, because it's built around saving your friends from that state.
When the necrotic tongue of a Smoker comes grasping for your mate, you get to save the day with a well placed shot. When a Hunter pounces on your pal who's straggling at the back, there you are with a punch and shotgun blast.
Deep Rock has found its groove, and hopefully keeps on growing. Release date: Players: Link: Humble. You're a truly fragile nobody. There are no map waypoints to guide you where to go, and no level-ups to raise your stats and make you stronger.
You can't fast-travel across the world. You have to navigate by landmarks and play as cautiously you would in a real adventure across the world, and that's a really fun experience with a friend by your side. As Chris wrote in his review : "It makes minor setbacks feel like major obstacles to overcome and it makes small victories feel like utter triumphs.
Outward is harsh and occasionally frustrating, but it does what so few games do. It requires you to put real thought into the choices you make, and it makes those choices feel like they really matter.
The latest Total War is a lush representation of Chinese history, and blurs the line between traditional total War and the fantasy Warhammer games by letting you play a mode focusing on the larger-than-life heroes of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Thankfully, it also overhauls Total War's stagnant diplomacy systems, making it our go-to Total War recommendation today. As in past games, you can play a two-player campaign, but this time around you don't have to hard commit to competing or co-operating at the start.
Instead, for co-op play, you can choose to share the "mandate of heaven" during the campaign to bind your fates and win conditions together. Until you do that, it's open-ended how you play with or against one another. If you're hankering for fantasy, though, Total War: Warhammer 2 is still the way to go. With Warhammer 2, Creative Assembly also tried to solve a longstanding series problem: Campaigns growing stale in the endgame, as they drag on towards total map dominance.
It's not as robust as the new Three Kingdoms, but sometimes you just want to make giant armies of lizardmen and ratmen fight each other to the death.
Stardew Valley multiplayer arrived in , adding co-op for up to four players or more with mods sharing the same farm. It's a pleasant place to spend time together, dividing up the endless farm chores and watching your overgrown homestead slowly morph into a thriving veggie plantation. Multiplayer works pretty seamlessly: You share money but otherwise have your own houses, inventories, and relationships with the townsfolk, so your whole crew can mostly do their own thing, then come together for special season events.
While you become the master of planting, I'll be over here catching enough fish to keep us in money during the winter. This sequel to Vermintide confidently expands on the Left 4 Dead-alike formula, adding a whole new faction of enemies to fight in addition to the Skaven, and more robust class leveling and loot systems.
It still feels nice and meaty when you smash in a rat man's face with a giant club, and there's a welcome build variety now with the game's five characters. Switching characters or even classes makes levels easily replayable a dozen times over. If you loved Left 4 Dead but have simply played enough of it for the past decade, this is where you should redirect your attention.
It's good for a few dozen hours of bloody melee carnage. It's also gotten a lot of free and paid post-release support, adding quite a few levels to an already substantial campaign. Destiny 2 contains a good Halo-esque campaign, a ton of playful side missions, a growing number of strikes aka dungeons , and some trying six-person raid activities.
Now that it's also free-to-play, it's even easier to tempt your friends into playing with you. That's all nested in one of the best feeling shooters on PC. Destiny 2 has dozens of hours of co-op shooting within, from brainless fun to challenging endgame encounters. That's more than enough fun to squeeze out before the Eververse even becomes a concern. Overcooked is chaos incarnate. Overcooked 2 shares the same penchant for destroying relationships, but before you hate each other, you'll love playing this game together.
The sequel adds new maps and new complexity. You can play multiplayer locally or online. Now you can make sushi, and there's teleportation involved. Just like your standard kitchen, really. Release Date: Players: Link: Steam. But Warframe shines as a co-op action game , creating the perfect digital space to hang out with your buddies while tearing through hordes of baddies.
You can lose yourself in upgrade planning and crafting component wikis until the sun comes up. You can all play at your own pace, and then cross paths in a Grineer spaceship from time to time.
Release date: Developer: Link: Humble. Cuphead doesn't become a breeze just because a friend can have your back in co-op. Crowding the luscious animations with another body and even more bullets complicates this side-scrolling arcade shooter, you see, making the two-player option a challenge for only the absolute ironclad best of friends.
But in the same way your brain and hands meld into a higher power after enough failure, and gradual pattern recognition hardens into pure instinct, bridging that rapt attention between two brains is a mild telepathy.
Friend telepathy for the purposes of finishing a cartoon game. Release date : Players : Link : Steam. Klei fought shy of adding co-op to its brilliant game of goth survival whimsy for a couple of years, reasoning not unreasonably that the addition of other people might break its esoteric spell, which relies on feelings of isolation and discovery. The mutual blame when a Deerclops stomps through your camp, ruining days worth of winter prep, is a strategy game in itself.
Chilling out on Discord or a Skype call with a friend whilst pooling your resources to try to keep each other alive against the increasingly brutal effects of the seasons. Release date : Players : Up to 32 Link : Steam. Download an assortment of weird maps, hop in Discord with five or six of your buddies, and lose yourself in hours of retro-weirdness, laughter, and awkward platforming. Grabity is an arena brawler where players take the role of a robot that controls a unique gun.
Through this gun, players can pick up random objects to use as either a projectile or a shield. Fortunately, the gameplay is pretty easy to get into with the developers using a twin-stick approach. Meanwhile, the gameplay will allow up to four players in a local or online match. In this game, players can work together as part of The Fellowship during their quest to destroy the One Ring.
Being a Lego-based game, the narrative is toned down for a wide audience. Meanwhile, the gameplay mixes in button mashing to defeat enemies along with solving puzzles that are scattered across the campaign. Additionally, this game condenses the entire trilogy storyline. Again, this is just an example of a Lego-based video game title you could pick up, but overall the gameplay mainly remains the same throughout all the various titles.
Meanwhile, players control a scientist named Wilson as he must make his way through the night with monsters and supernatural enemies hot on his tail. Throughout the game, players will have to search and scavenge the world during the day to gather supplies for firewood and food to survive nightfall. Within Rayman Legends, Rayman finds a mystical painting that can transport him into a new mythical world.
This title will allow up to four cooperative players to jump in and control the party of this narrative adventure through the different mythical worlds. The Witness is nothing but a puzzle game, players are dropped on an island filled with puzzles that only get more complex making you think about how to complete them.
Because the puzzles can become quite complex, you might find this game to be a bit less baffling with the help of another player. Unfortunately, this is a single-player video game experience but even then the game is all about looking at the puzzles and visually trying to comprehend how to complete them. Genre: Stealth , action.
This indie title puts players into heist based missions to acquire loot, avoid attention, and escaping with the goods. The gameplay is set up in a top-down perspective as you get a basic visual of a map that lights up with color and life from where your character is located.
Each mission is also set up differently which will prompt players to change up their strategies. For instance, the game features a variety of playable characters such as a locksmith that can unlock safes faster. As a result, the game encourages players to swap between characters when a mission may call for a particular set of skills.
Likewise, since this game features up to four-player support, if planned out these heists can be completed without a hitch or they can become a chaotic mess. Genre: Hack and slash , role-playing. If you enjoyed the original Darksiders games then you might want to dive into Darksiders: Genesis as it throws players into a prequel. In this game, players take on the role of Strife, the last horseman who is given the task of hunting down Lucifer.
As well this is the first time for the franchise to receive a cooperative multiplayer mode. Players can go through the game together both online or locally in split-screen. Genre: Action Games , Casual , Indie. Pummel Party is an excellent game to play if you were a fan of the old Mario Party titles.
However, this is a more adult version of Mario Party with players going through board games and participating in a slew of mini-games.
Up to eight players are allowed to join a game both online or locally. Genre: Platform , roguelike.
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