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).
Another 106 entries were added to our database this month. We now feature over 14,000 (active) co-op games, and this number will certainly continue to climb. That's most likely more than anyone can play in a lifetime, but I'm sure we are all trying our best. So before Geoff Keighley bombards us with another three hours of ads and announcements next week, let's take a quick look back at May.
...and another month has gone down the drain. So what happened in April? Well, Toaplan-fans on PC were able to rejoice as Bitwave Games released their final volume of games. Truxton II, Grind Stormer (no co-op), Dogyuun, and Twin Hawk can now be enjoyed on modern systems with a handful of quality-of-life improvements. Don't despair, console users! You finally got access to ArcRunner, Cook, Serve Delicious! (yes, the first one), Hammerwatch Anniversary Edition, Hammerwatch II, and PERISH. Oh, and on PlayStation, you can now feel like a true pirate thanks to Microsoft's Sea of Thieves hitting the platform just yesterday.
What's up with the gaming industry ? Seems like most of the hyped up releases in the last year hit the streets and got immediately dumped in the "Mixed" (at best) reviews category for everyone to soon forget. We won't name any names, but it is sad to see - especially for co-op titles that depend so much on an active player base.
While we do our best around here to play nothing but cooperative games, from time to time, a non-co-op title slips in. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes from developer Rabbit & Bear Studios and publisher 505 Games is a JRPG that's too exciting to overlook. It was directed and produced by Yoshitaka Murayama, the creator of Suikoden series, who sadly died in February. The game promises to be a spiritual successor to Murayama's beloved series.
After a surprisingly quiet January, our release calendar was once again filled with quite a bit of co-op fodder this month. Our team's favourite was by far the democracy-simulator, Helldivers 2. Despite the initial server-issues, we just keep coming back to it time and time again. Also of note, quite a few titles like Sons Of The Forest, Smalland: Survive the Wilds, and Timemelters finally left their Early Access state behind, which is always nice to see. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Skull and Bones, on the other hand... well, although they also finally hit store shelves, it doesn't seem like the wait was really worth it. Always sad to see - especially for co-op titles.
January 2024 was a... strange month. We've counted only 20 co-op releases across all platforms. Yes, this time of year is usually a bit more on the lighter side with all publishers and developers preparing the big spring push. But still: This is the lowest amount of new titles we've seen in a January in a long time. Perhaps everyone was just too afraid to launch in the same month as Palworld? A bit less Pokémon with guns and more traditional open-world-survival-crafting as it turns out but still a very huge success with players.
Here it is: 2024. And with it, we're leaving behind 2023: a year that is already considered by many to be the best 365 days for gaming in at least a decade. Granted, not all expected blockbusters hit the mark. This was especially hard on us when the title featured a solid co-op option (Redfall anyone?). But there was way too much good, cooperative stuff released to keep us complaining for too long about these mishaps.
