Best cooperative games steam

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Community Discord Steam curator Chat on Discord from the web, your desktop, mobile or all three at once! Here's our most up-to-date collection of the best co-op games for PC, the kind of games best played together.

Dig in and you'll find complex, seemingly endless games like Warframe and Destiny 2, time-deleting RPGs that make tables seem ever so quaint, and plenty of more casual co-op games anyone can pick up and play.

Release date: early access Players: Link: Steam. 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.

Even in early access, Phasmophobia has become a serious co-op hit. Armed with pro ghost hunting tools like EMF readers, flashlights, salt, crucifixes and oh so many other items, you and your co-op partners will have to enter haunted buildings to determine what kind of spirit is running amok. You can each only carry a few tools at once, so you'll need to divide and conquer to collect clues about its identity.

Ghosts will mess with you by turning off lights, locking doors, and popping up to give you a fright or outright murder you. Oh, and they'll listen to you talk via Windows voice recognition, so be careful not to go shouting their names too often.

A good ghost hunting team can work together to figure out which kind of ghost registers an EMF reading of 5 paired with freezing temperatures and escape with all their heads in tact. Proximity voice chat paired with walkie-talkies for distance makes exploring each dark locale a tense adventure for friends who are willing to put their communication to the test.

It's almost just as fun if you and your friends are terrible at your jobs though. Here's why we think it's the best ghost game ever made.

Release date: Players: Link: Steam. Rare's swashbuckling sandbox makes for a decent co-op game but it really shines as a co-op hangout. Sea of Thieves is one of the most stunningly beautiful open world games and it can be completely undemanding—board a ship with your friends, pick a direction, and just sail around drinking grog until you barf, playing musical instruments, and firing each other out of cannons.

Or just chat for an hour while you cruise around taking in the picturesque sunsets. The Anniversary update adds a series of quests that are sometimes frustrating but frequently serve up some thrilling Goonies-esque moments of adventure, and will make you feel like a brilliant crew of swashbucklers.

For excitement you can chase down other crews for some bracing ship-to-ship combat, hunt for buried treasure, or take down a skeleton fort, but it's just as enjoyable to treat it like a chat room with beautiful waves and the occasional Kraken.

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. You can play through all of Monster Hunter solo, or with random strangers from the internet, but co-op is where this game truly shines. Combat channels the combos of Capcom action games like Devil May Cry but feels more risky and deliberate, forcing you to learn the attacks of these giant beasts.

Tougher monsters force you to collaborate and stay constantly on your feet, and fights go much better when you and your hunting party specialize with different weapons. And grinding for the rare drops you need to make gear out of monster parts is just so much more fun with a few friends in Discord. The Iceborne expansion, released in early , adds tons of new monsters to fight and new abilities that encourage teamwork.

It's a good time to go hunting! 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 of a guard or reveal their undead identity at an inopportune time—but that's exactly what makes OS2 so great with friends.

You're no longer dealing with a loyal party of characters you shape over time. You're dealing with three other stubborn people, all vying for different outcomes.

It's a beautiful role-playing mess set in one of the most lush, engaging RPG worlds ever. The first Divinity: Original Sin is a great co-op experience, too, if you need another hundred hours of RPG adventuring. Go fishing. Comb the beach. Or, if you want, mercilessly compete to see who can optimise profits. It's your farm. It's a simple pitch: a group of dwarven friends with class-based skills walk into an asteroid, mine for materials, and fight back the critters who fancy them for dinner.

What complicates matters is the need to leave again: once their pockets are full, the dwarves have got five minutes to down pickaxes and reach an escape pod before it leaves without them. This is even more complicated than it seems, because the asteroid's tunnels and caverns are a twisting warren interspersed with enormous drops. Re-trace your path inwards in reverse, in a rush, and it's easy to get lost - and those drops are now, of course, climbs. If you thought to make your ad hoc constructions two-way when you threw them up on the way in, then no problem.

If you were hasty, or if your platforms were destroyed by explosive enemies, then you're going to need to construct a new route. The adrenaline rush of your extraction is a thrill with friends over voice comms all panicking together. If you've never played Payday 2 or its predecessor, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was about perfect planning, stealth and crowd control. The reality is a bit different, and it usually goes like this: the four of you excitedly chat about how you're going to approach a heist, you split up, someone fudges it almost instantly and every police officer in the world turns up to shoot you all in the head.

It's more wave defense than precision stealth, with each player setting up traps, sharing ammo and trying to keep the police at bay as a timer ticks down. It's chaotic and messy, but the shooting is weighty enough and the skill trees are satisfying to advance through. It's possible get through each of the heists without raising an alarm, but it's bloody hard and you stand very little chance until you've unlocked some of the more advanced skills.

Still, the possibility hangs there like a 24 carat carrot, nudging you all to have another go until you've perfected every scenario. Streets of Rogue is a chaotic playground at the best of times. Adding more players makes it more so, but not just by mindlessly multiplying the destruction.

While players are on the same 'side', the NPCs treat you all as separate entities - another person like them, not a faction they can magically recognise. Combined with its systems-driven design already present in single player, it means that instead of blocking each other out, your options overlap to create more opportunities. The usual friction between players who want to do things in different ways is reduced, as you can opt out of getting involved, or even exploit the other players' behaviour to give yourself more options.

You died, but someone playing as a shapeshifter possessed a hacker, then reprogrammed a slot machine to improve its odds while a third player tried to win enough money to pay for the resurrection. And even if you're all going full chaos, the rippling reactions to your rampage produce as many laughs out of sitting back and watching the aftermath. None of us know how we ended up with a loyal gorilla minion who joined a gang.

The best example of asymmetry in co-op. It involves at least two players - one of you is defusing a bomb with judicious mouse clicks and cautious wire snips, the other is giving instructions from a bomb-defusing manual. Neither player can look at what the other is doing.

It's one of the most perfect set-ups for the destruction of a healthy relationship and a fantastic example of leaving the screen itself behind.

You don't have to print out the manual to read from it you could just read the PDF file from a laptop but we think it's the best way to play.

You flip hurriedly through pages, trying to decipher the theory of these explosive devices. Then comes the challenge of communicating the quirks and symbols of the page in a way that won't be misunderstood. As the bomb handler, you're consistently double-checking and second-guessing your team mate as they stammer out their directions.

In the end, you've just got to trust them. Arma 3 takes place on a pair beautiful fictional Greek islands. It does have a single-player campaign, but it's that island, the vehicles, guns and mechanics, and the painstaking attention to detail, that makes Arma 3 great. It's a platform for the community to create their own games upon, and there's enough community made content that if you get into it, you could be playing Arma 3's cooperative mode to the exclusion of any other game.

There's something about Arma's design philosophy that makes it especially well suited to playing with other people. Partly there's the realism, which obviously lends itself well to the kinds of genuine squad tactics you can enact when playing with some dedicated friends or a committed community like ShackTac.

Partly it's the way in which the islands are designed in spite of you, not in service to you, making your steady journeys across the landscape with another person feel more satisfying than overcoming a set of contrived obstacles.

Hopefully one of you is a good pilot. Now available for free to anyone who already owns Don't Starve, Don't Starve Together lets you try and survive its Burton-esque nightmare wilderness with friends. While you might think it would be easier to survive with someone to huddle up to by the night's fire, cooperation here won't just see you chopping up firewood twice as fast - the more players you have, the more competition there is for food.

The trick is to work together instead of fighting over scraps: one of you can cook while another places traps; someone else can be chopping wood ready to stoke the night's fire. With six players, there's plenty of scope for creating a sustainable base, so long as everyone sticks to their roles and shares resources.

Don't Starve was already a brilliant story generator and the stories only get better when you've got people to share them with by a campfire. 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. Uniquely, this memorable game stresses local split-screen play , as many of these actions require discussion and knowledge about what your fellow prisoner is currently up to. One for horror fans, Labyrinthe is unique, combining fan-favorite survival horror with some classic puzzle-solving as you seek to escape a creepy children's hedge-maze together and hopefully survive the bloodcurdling horrors calling it home.

Labyrinthine was built for cooperative play between four players, and plays like a classic puzzle-solver - everyone must know what they're doing and work together in order to uncover the dark secrets lurking around every corner and all escape the maze in one piece.

A journey for two players, Dyo has you assume the role of two Minotaurs both trapped on either side of a split-screen who must work together to escape the cursed labyrinth they've been trapped within. You each need to control your Minotaur and use your ability to hop over the split-screen to mix up and manipulate levels, working together to solve platforming puzzles and carve out a path to your freedom.

There are no enemies and no time limits, so sit back, get puzzling and try not to yell at each other as you both attempt to solve this maze's tricks and traps together. Tick Tock: A Tale For Two is a game where playing solo is not an option, as you'll need both of you working in unison to escape this escape room-style game together.

The story is based on Scandinavian folklore, creating a beautiful if not slightly eerier setting. The key to freedom is in cooperation, with you both needing to share information in order to get the full picture of what's going on and solve the story's mysteries in tandem. We Were Here is unique, having you and your partner separated and needing to work on puzzles both independently and together through your communicative walkie-talkies in order to work out your locations and hopefully escape.

We Were Here plays as an immersive first-person cooperative adventure, with both of you needing to discover useful items and communicate well in order to solve each other's puzzles and reach the end. It's great for those looking for a short escape room style of adventure game, and with a trilogy and fourth game due to be released, there's no time like the present to be picking this title up. An older entry in the cooperative puzzle genre, but one still going strong as a two-player co-op adventure for you and a friend to spend hours upon hours puzzling over.

Portal 2 's co-operative mode offers an entirely separate campaign mode; with a unique story, portal mechanics, and two new characters to play as. The trick to success is teamwork, as in working together you'll discover new ways to use portals, and hopefully create a means of escape from the test chambers before Glados turns you against one another. Ibb and Obb is the delightfully cute and creative cooperative puzzle game using gravity-changing mechanics to have you working together to move past obstacles and have some innovative level-solving fun.