The Game Awards - which featured quite a few co-op titles this year - be damned: The biggest highlight of December for most of us was Path of Exile 2 entering Early Access. Even in this early state it seems to successfully scratch that itch the lukewarm reception of Diablo IV left behind. Hopefully it can keep up the momentum until release.
When we look at our release calender, its fascinating to note that even in this digital age without any retail restrictions, there's still one day in the week most of the games are released: Thursday. What's more, almost everyone agrees that Saturday and Sunday are off limits for new releases.
While October saw a great amount of survival horror titles released (not only, but especially) on the Steam store, the actual new hot thing™ in the co-op meta seems to be shop games. You know, those titles like Old Market Simulator where you have to manage a supermarket together with friends and make all those customers happy. Luckily, this month also saw a ton of other, perhaps more desirable releases - for example, Ys X: Nordics, the newest entry in the long-running JRPG series.
Can you believe this is our thirteenth year of me bugging you to join and donate to the Co-Optimus Extra Life team? It seems like just yesterday I Jerry-rigged a poor excuse for a streaming setup and streamed Xbox 360 games for 25 hours from my living room. While 25 hours is a pipe dream at our ages, our faithful Extra Life team will be streaming a good chunk of this Saturday morning and afternoon for your delight!
Looking at the release calender for September, it has become clear to us that we and our friends somehow need more time to play games. Way more time. It's just not enough to carve out a couple of hours in the evening/night on the weekends to enjoy all that co-op goodness. So if you vote for us in whatever election is coming up, we hereby pledge
When it comes to co-op gaming, audio quality can make or break the experience. Communicating effectively with your team, being immersed in the game's world, and hearing every subtle cue can drastically improve gameplay. I've been using Turtle Beach's headsets now for the past few years, with both the iterations of the Stealth 700 Gen 2 tested on this site. But is the Gen 3 enough of a difference? Let's dive in.
August started slow in terms of new co-op releases - very slow. For a hot minute, we feared we would have nothing to play and would need to go out into the summer heat and enjoy life or something. Luckily, publishers and developers came to the rescue releasing long awaited titles like World of Goo 2 (sadly only the Switch-version has co-op), Cat Quest III, and another (excellent) re-release of DOOM and DOOM II. Meanwhile, Petroglyph's newest RTS, 9-Bit Armies: A Bit Too Far left Steam Early Access together with Core Keeper, a "mining sandbox adventure." Additionally, Gunpla-fans can once again enjoy virtually building and battling their Gundam thanks to the release of Gundam Breaker 4.
National Cat Day is one of the finest and furriest holidays of the year. You can celebrate it by playing co-op kitty titles like Cat Quest III and Cats on Duty, or you can celebrate with the fresh single-player demo for Gori: Cuddly Carnage from Wired Productions. Gori is a surprisingly stylish 3D action game starring a cat on a hoverboard who has to grind rails and slice up lots of cutesy zombies.
At least to the surprise of us, 7 Days to Die finally reached version number 1.0 in July. After twelve years of public development, the open-world zombie survival mix is finished - at least on paper. Even after reaching the milestone, the devs don't show any sign of stopping after all. Meanwhile, our review is now over seven years old. Maybe it's time for an update?
Holy mackerel, what a month! It felt like every publisher and developer on Earth announced a new co-op title, resulting in 235 new entries to our database. Still, looking back at the last four years since our Database Master joined us, June 2024 was actually on par with previous years. His overwhelming feeling of "there's too much stuff!!!!" was just based on the literally hundreds of games he had to wade through in order to find all that co-op goodness. So many showcases happened during Summer Games Fest 2024, and then directly afterwards, Steam Next Fest June 2024 started. It was definitely an insane month for us gamers.
Back when the 3DS still had an eShop, it was home to a series of downloadable games called The Denpa Men. That series will soon live on in the form of The New Denpa Men, an upcoming free to play game for Switch. While most of the game will be a single-player RPG, it does promise to have a feature in which 4 online players can team up to catch special Denpa Men.
Some folks, like me, are variety streamers, playing all kinds of different stuff. Other folks like to play wacky games that are pretty much designed for streaming. Pantless from Pebbles Games is one of those games. It's a 3D platformer in which pants-free players try to jump and climb as high as they can in an insane world. The free demo has arrived on Steam ahead of the game's July launch, and it supports online multiplayer (which might be co-op).
