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As much as we PC gamers love the quiet isolation of an RPG or the thrill of a competitive shooter, nothing beats the joy of playing games cooperatively with friends. For many, our most memorable gaming moments are only meaningful because someone else was there to laugh, cry, or celebrate with. With that in mind, you'd think co-op games would be more common, but it's rare to discover a game that everyone owns, everyone likes, and everyone has time to play.
The best co-op games on PC are often ones that have been around for years that you're just finding now. Here's our most up-to-date collection of the best co-op games for PC—the kind of games you can get all over with pals.
Read through the list and you'll find deep, seemingly bottomless games like Warframe and Destiny 2, breezy co-op FPSes like Back 4 Blood, time-erasing survival games for groups, and plenty of more casual co-op games anyone can get into. Valheim doesn't reinvent survival games, but it gets rid of all the stuff we don't like about them.
This relaxing, but punishing PvE camping trip to Viking purgatory will never let you starve to death, and you'll never need to pay a dime to repair your items. All the busywork is gone, replaced by a gorgeous, threatening world, and an elegant crafting system that lets you make everything from ugly lean-tos to the flippin' Eye of Sauron.
Teaming up with friends to plan adventures and build a home together makes the experience even better. In his Early Access review , Chris sums it up nicely: "Valheim is an utterly engrossing experience that blends thoughtfully-designed survival systems with exciting RPG-like adventures, where each small nugget of progress sets the stage for the next. Read more: Valheim is making me love survival games again opens in new tab. No Man's Sky has been a fun redemption story to watch unfold.
Developer Hello Games has spent the last four years updating its galactic exploration-survival sim with expansive new features like base building, guilds, and most importantly, online multiplayer. In , No Man's Sky is some of the most fun you can have in a co-op survival sim.
The game still occasionally buckles under the weight of annoying bugs, but it's worth powering through for the joy of discovering planets and bizarre creatures with friends. If you're looking for a space-faring survival game with a bigger focus on building, you should also check out Astroneer opens in new tab.
Read more: No Man's Sky's settlers are the most miserable bunch of creeps I've ever met opens in new tab. Of course Minecraft makes the list. You probably don't need us to tell you Minecraft is very fun with friends, but on the off chance you've never experienced the joy of creating a little settlement or exploring miles-deep caverns with of your best buds, now's a better time than any.
The Minecraft of today has hundreds of hours of stuff to do or thousands if you're a natural builder. If you want the quickest, easier route to multiplayer, Minecraft Bedrock Edition is the one you want. You can host a game with up to four players or rent an official Realms server that supports up to 11 players at once. If you're aiming bigger and want to explore the endless world of Minecraft mods opens in new tab , then you'll have to start a third-party server the old-fashioned way in Minecraft Java.
Stardew Valley multiplayer opens in new tab 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. Read more: The Stardew Valley Expanded mod feels like a proper expansion opens in new tab. Satisfactory gives the first impression of a galactic survival sim in the vein of No Man's Sky, but play for five minutes and you realize that it's actually a very pretty, very satisfying cooperative logistics game.
Players start from the ground up gathering resources and building machines that will help you build more useful machines and automate the whole process. This can be fun alone, but in group play you really feel the benefit of extra pairs of hands.
Eventually, you can make fully automated planetary factories with AI assistants, self-driving delivery trucks, miles of conveyor belts, and train networks. Read more: I'm obsessed with building more elaborate, more efficient factories in Satisfactory opens in new tab. 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 with a friend whilst pooling your resources to try to keep each other alive against the increasingly brutal effects of the seasons. Read more: Don't Starve Together — the first five days opens in new tab. Back 4 Blood proves that there's more life to squeeze out of co-op zombie shooter. Turtle Rock's spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead drags the genre into the s with modern conventions like aim-down-sights, sprinting, mantling, and a card-based progression system.
Amazingly, it all works pretty darn well. Back 4 Blood is perfect for a crew of four that's tired of playing through Left 4 Dead 2 for the billionth time, but what it gains in depth it loses in simplicity. There is really good, mindless zombie shooting to be had here, but only after spending a few minutes fiddling with cards and deciding on a loadout.
Read more: How Turtle Rock Studios righted itself after rolling on its back opens in new tab. The Halo series may have the most replayable FPS campaigns ever.
Each game has a handful of levels that put you in wide open spaces, free to tackle enemies when and how you choose. Steal a ghost or warthog and careen around the map running over Covenant enemies are they dive out of the way.
Seek out a rocket launcher to blow them to smithereens. Hide behind cover and ping down their shields with headshots. Harder difficulties are made easier with a co-op partner, since as long as one of you is alive, there's a chance to respawn. In the Master Chief Collection, you can even toggle on a scoring mode and modifiers that tweak enemy behavior or make them explode into confetti.
It's a good time. Now that every game in the Master Chief Collection has arrived on PC and has crossplay with Xbox, it has become one of the ultimate co-op packages in games. And of course, all of the games are on Game Pass, too. Somehow Risk of Rain 2 managed to transform a loot-heavy 2D roguelike into 3D nearly flawlessly, retaining the fun of its character classes despite the totally new perspective.
It's a simple game about blasting enemies over and over again until you inevitably die. The joy of it, what keeps you coming back, is the potential for insane builds. You'll collect dozens of items through a run, things that make you move faster or heal when you get kills or shoot electricity out of your body or hit enemies with a flame tornado or jump so high you're airborne for 10 seconds The loop can hook you solo, but play with three friends for maximum mayhem.
Read more: Risk of Rain 2 is the co-op game I keep coming back to opens in new tab. Deep Rock Galactic is like procedurally generated Left 4 Dead with bits of resource management and open-ended exploration.
It had its issues when it launched in Early Access in , but developer Ghost Ship Games has spent the last four years bulking it up with new weapons, biomes, enemies, mission types, and challenges. Where before missions felt pointless, you now always have weapon unlocks on the horizon that change up the playstyles of its four dwarf classes. It's a casual game to go spelunking in together.
The shooting feels great and its voxel-based destruction never gets old. Deep Rock has found its groove, and hopefully keeps on growing. Read more: Deep Rock Galactic is a doorway to infinite co-op adventure opens in new tab. Release date: Developer: Fatshark Players: Steam opens in new tab. 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 one place you should redirect your attention. There are newer co-op games these days, like Back 4 Blood, but Vermintide is great 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. Release date: Developer: Bungie Players: Humble opens in new tab.
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.
Read more: Destiny 2: The Witch Queen review opens in new tab. But Warframe shines as a co-op action game opens in new tab , 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. Read more: Warframe's The New War update delivers spectacle, twists, and personal stakes in style opens in new tab.
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. Four players team up to conquer a series of story-like missions that involve each team member performing a different role building up to a bigger heist. When all four players come together in the finale of each heist, making a dramatic escape from the cops as a collective is incredibly exciting and rewarding—more so than anything found in the main story.
If only Rockstar would make more of them. Read more: Grand Theft Auto's greatest controversies opens in new tab. It's really saying something about the strength of Valve's terrific zombie shooter that it's still clawing its way onto lists like this one after so many years.
A fanatically balanced, cleverly written shooter, Left 4 Dead 2 is built on the strength of four survivors working as a team. As it throws zombies at the team, the group must coordinate their movement and help each other out of danger or death with last-second heroics that give each campaign a story worth retelling. Left 4 Dead 2's active modding community is also a huge part of why this game comes so highly recommended, as it has produced new campaigns, like Lord of the Rings' Helms Deep castle , which have kept L4D2 fun even after the base campaigns grew old.
Plus, you can play as a velociraptor , which clearly warrants our highest praise. Read more: Left 4 Dead 2 mod turns Jaden Smith's tweets into strangely appropriate graffiti ravings opens in new tab. According to our reviewer, Divinity: Original Sin 2 is "a sprawling, inventive adventure and one of the best RPGs ever made.
Chaos and player agency reign supreme in such a reactive world, meaning one friend could piss off a guard or reveal their undead identity at an inopportune time—but that's exactly what makes Divinity 2 so great with friends.
You're no longer dealing with a loyal party of characters you shape over time.
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