With the Steam Summer Sale ending, what are your favorite Co-Op games?

Jessica@lemmy.world to Games@lemmy.world – 71 points –

I am looking to make some last minute purchases to play with one or more friends, and I have poked around Steam's Co-Op page. I'm curious what new co-op games everyone on Lemmy is playing.

I just picked up Raft and Deep Rock Galactic the other day, but you can never have too many new (never played) games!

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It takes two

I’ve heard nothing but good things about this one. Definitely checking it out

It's a fantastic game! Since it requires co-op to play, one neat thing the dev did was require only one person to own a copy (you friend can play free).

They did you with their previous game, A Way Out, as well. That one was also great!

Alright, I'll say something not good about it. The story is really messed up.

It's fun as heck though. I wanted full games from some levels.

Here are some that our group has enjoyed:

Project Zomboid: amazingly vast and deep Zombie long-term survival isometric game. If you're into this, you'll play for hundreds of hours. The cost-playtime ratio is off the charts.

Heave Ho: super crude 2D graphics, but absolutely hilarious gameplay

The Ascent: beautiful cyberpunk-themed isometric shooter

Broforce: very entertaining pixel-art 2D platformer/shooter (think in the style of Contra, but funnier) - we played this through to the end, which is rare for us

Overcooked: very entertaining 3D co-op cooking isometric game (you're running a restaurant kitchen)

Unrailed: similar to overcooked, but you're keeping a train running instead of cooking

SWAT 4: old 3D FPS, but still good. I think this is only at GOG, not Steam

Honorable mention: Hidden in Plain Sight. While not a co-op game, it's relatively friendly, funny, and not heavily slanted to make better players run away with it because it doesn't rely heavily on reflexes and coordination. Check it out if you can. Works great for couch play too (everyone playing on the same computer/monitor).

Edit: all of these handle at least 4 players, which was a requirement for us. Some of them, like Zomboid and SWAT, can handle more than 4. I'm not sure how high the others can go.

Edit 2: check https://www.co-optimus.com/ too, if you're not already familiar with it.

The Ascent keeps going on sale for $9 so I'm mildly tempted to pick it up, but the reviews for it are horrible. Notably, people talk about frequent crashes and losing all progress. Have you noticed these as serious issues in your time with the game?

Yikes! Thanks for letting me know. We have not run into that yet. Good reason to rotate save games each time we play. We enjoy it though. Worth the money for sure if you enjoy the genre and art style.

I’ll second this. About 25 hours in and thoroughly enjoying it. No save killing crashes yet

My wife and I have been playing a ton of Valheim lately, it's been super fun!

We just started it too! Not far in, though, should be almost at boss #2.

We played that one as well! We almost beat it I think. I will probably never forget the mosquitoes in that game because I found a beach with them a bit earlier than I should have and I proceeded to die more times than I can count trying to get my stuff back lol.

My group just finished Remnant From The Ashes, which was a pretty fun souls-lite with guns, and the sequel is due in a couple weeks. Other games we enjoyed as a group that I didn't see mentioned already are Gunfire Reborn, Divinity 2, Wildermyth, Division 1/2, Escape Simulator, and Helldivers. All on sale for under $20 each

Helldivers looks interesting. Based on the trailer on Steam I’m getting a starship troopers vibe.

Big Starship Troopers vibes. Do you like accidentally killing your friends with grenades, mines, rocket launchers, driving over them with tanks, dropping drop pods on their heads, all in the name of killing bugs? Then this game is for your.

My partner and I spent hundreds of hours playing this couch coop on the PS4. Great gameplay, with a good unlock system.

Broforce is great fun with 2 players, plethora of playable characters, destructable terrain and pretty good campaing mode.

That is a good one yeah! Very silly and over the top

Can't go wrong with Stardew Valley for something chill and Terraria is among the best games ever made.

A big one I haven't seen mentioned here yet is Plate Up. The best way I know to describe it is roguelike Overcooked with more agency and a slower curve into the stressful moments. We much prefer it as a result. It's been getting free content at a pretty solid pace, too.

GTFO with some caveats.

  1. You need a good group that can work together, coordinate, plan and work through challenging rooms.
  2. You like stealth mixed with action. You're gonna spend most of the time sneaking up on the sleepers with bursts of action if they wake up or when you have to unlock an alarmed door.
  3. You're gonna get your butt kicked. This is a difficult game that can end a run in under minute if you get too sloppy or cocky. But that's half the fun.
  4. You can set aside a good chunk of time for each game. An easy map will take an hour. There aren't that many easy maps. We've gone 3 hours and failed a run multiple times. We also use the time to catch up with each other. We've spent 5 to 10 minutes in front of a door chit-chatting before clearing a room.

It's bloody good fun, but you need a good group for it.

GTFO is fucking incredible but borderline as hard as a DnD group to get the same people to regularly show up for.

Not a new one I'm playing, but the Trine series are great 1-3 couch (or online, I believe) coop games. Only note is that the third game is pretty different from the rest, and also suffers from some over-ambition and under-delivering. It can safely be skipped, but I personally also like it, despite it's flaws.

I think i played trine 2 with a friend some time ago. Good fun, but i solved most puzzles by spamming the cube

I have fond memories of playing Trine 2 with some online friends. We haven’t gotten around to #3 yet with all the shortcomings

Biped, Temtem, Portal 2, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, Borderlands, Destiny 2, Escape Room Academy, any Telltale (or similar) game is fun to play together.

We actually just looked into Destiny 2 the other day, and it seems the game is taking a pay to win nosedive. +1 for Portal 2 and Borderlands. I’ll take a look at the others. Thanks!

Yeah, I've seen people say that. I'm not sure I follow the logic. It's not a free to play game. It's more "free to try". Most of the content is locked behind the purchase of an expansion or season. There's nothing you can outright buy to get a permanent advantage, especially if we're talking co-op. I guess you could level the seasonal battle pass by paying for it, but the advantages that offers are so miniscule in PvP, and make no difference to the PvE portion of the game.

Pay to win isn't the right label, you're just paying for access to the content and all games with expansions do that. The main issue for newcomers is how the content is broken up and sold. If you want access to all the content in the game then you need to buy

  • Lightfall ($25 on sale, $50 normally)
  • The Legacy Collection ($24 on sale, $60 normally)
  • The Forsaken Pack ($7 on sale, $20 normally)

And if you want access to all the dungeons you'll have to buy

  • The 30th Anniversary Pack ($10 now, $25 normally)
  • $20 for last year's dungeons
  • $20 for this year's dungeons

And then there's the season pass for $12

That's over $100 even on sale, $200 at normal prices.

It's just an enormous barrier to entry for newcomers and it's really not clear what you're even supposed to buy.

Source: I play Destiny 2 a ton and have tried throughout the years to get friends into the game with varying degrees of success

Well, I never said it was cheap or straightforward. Just that it's not pay to win and it's a fun co-op game.

  1. a lot of mods are locked behind rank seven, which is a forced season buy just to get them, even if you have all the dlc's,

  2. dungeons are not included in seasonal content, you have to buy them separately

  3. you can buy a campaign skip so you don't have to grind

  4. pre-orders of the lightfall DLC gave access to an exclusive exotic months in advance

  5. you can complete the season pass, which includes equipment drops and exp boosts day one, with money, ofc,

it goes on and on, it's fully pay to win at this point, and only getting worse

I don't really consider any of that pay to win. I'm not sure what you're "winning". You're just describing buying content. Buying expansions and seasons gets you the content contained in those expansions and seasons. That's basically how every game works. Paying to skip content or getting preorder bonuses isn't pay to win. Destiny 2 is not a free to play game. You're basically just saying you have to pay for the game...

this depends on your definition of pay to win itself, as a looter shooter, the loop of the game is
kill mob-->gain loot -->repeat
there is no win condition in destiny 2, which means by definition you can not have pay to win.
However that changes if your win condition is gaining loot.
If my win condition is gaining better loot, then speeding up the acquisition of loot is by definition paying to win.
You can sit there and say there is no pay to win by definition, but by the same metric, nearly all mobile games sit in the no pay to win category as well.
It's a slippery slope, and saying "Paying to skip content or getting preorder bonuses isn’t pay to win." is no different than saying "My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars".
Technically both true to the person speaking, but to the rest of us, not so much.

Me and my friends started yet another Terraria campaign together and it's still probably the greatest co-op game we've ever played.

Always a good one! We also just played through that again recently. :)

I've been playing Bread and Fred with a friend, it's pretty fun but we can only play it in short intervals

I love hopping on Brawlhalla with friends, it's so easy to pick up and have quick game 😊 free too 😉

Finally bought Hunt Showdown and a few Friends followed. Lots of fun but for sure a time sink if you want to get gud

I found hunt showdown to be way too serious and difficult lol. I’m trying to stay away from pvp shooters as well. Great game if it’s what you’re looking for though

Vermintide is a decent melee focused co-op game. Payday 2 is another (older) popular co-op first person shooter.

For both games as long as 1 player has the DLC, the whole party can play the maps.

V Rising. similar to valheim, but vampires instead of vikings. fight bosses against the sunlight to unlock abilities, structures, crafting.

Halls of Torment. similar to vampire survivors, but with a very diablo 2 feel.

Gunfire Reborn. similar to dead cells/hades, but it's a FPS.

Hyper Jam. the single best multiplayer arena brawler I've ever played. no decent matchmaking so you need a friend or 3, but it's $4 aud in the sale. get your host to disable the confusion perk.