Co-Operative Gameplay makes games great. Co-Op makes any game over a billion times better. Anyone who disagrees is clearly a fool and should never play any games again.
Rainbow Six: Vegas is made all the more enjoyable by the ability to play through the entire campaign with 3 friends, or play through Terrorist Hunts. It’s fun, great fun.
Halo 3, too, is incredible amounts of fun. Put 4 guys in a few vehicles and pretty much stuff will explode, to much hilarity. The ability to play through every mission with chums and experience the Halo storyline as a team is just unsurpassed. Playing through Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 was great fun in co-op, and 4-player online co-op in Halo 3 is brilliant.
I have fond memories of Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike. Not only was the adversarial combat great fun, but the co-op missions were the icing on the cake, especially with the huge selection of weapons at each player’s fingertips.
Operation Flashpoint or Armed Assault are prime examples of massive co-op battles. 60-odd players on a massive map makes for unsurpassed co-operative gameplay, however this is a world apart from the small-scale, 4-player battles of Vegas or Halo 3.
Kane & Lynch, too, has co-op, although only locally, which is a damn shame. One of the game’s standout moments occurs on the 3rd-or-so level. Lynch splits from Kane, to go and monitor the unconscious hostages in the gas-filled reception room of the bank, wearing a gas mask, while Kane goes downstairs to break the vault and get what he came for.
In singleplayer, you make your way back up to Lynch to see him slaughtering hostages, having completely flipped. In co-op, this takes on a new turn, as on Lynch’s screen you see the hostages as cops, and have no choice but to fire on them, while Kane sees them as unarmed hostages. It’s a real genius moment and something I’ve never seen before in a game like this, and another example of how the game plays with the player so they become the characters and are not simply in a cutscene.
Co-Op made Gears of War fun, with the ability for drop-in drop-out Co-Op, as the second player becomes the character of Dom. The regular “split-up” sections add challenge to the Co-Op, but are generally frustrating because if one of you dies the game is over, whereas in the normal sections you can be saved by your partner.
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory had short but cracking co-op action, and was something well worth waiting for. However, Double Agent (The X360 and PC versions, anyway) lack this, something sorely missing. However, the old-gen versions (Xbox, PS2) have co-op. Strange world.
Army of Two looks to be quite exciting. I’m not overly excited about it, but as long as the gameplay is done well, it’ll be a hoot. Hopefully there’ll be a demo on the XBL marketplace which will have me in love with the game in no time.
Let’s not forget, however, that having more people is always more fun. Crackdown is a brilliant co-op game, and is utterly great fun – but for some reason, seems to be lacking 4-player co-op, instead only having 2. I have no idea why.
The interaction between the players in Army of Two is very interesting, and an obvious reason why there’s only 2-player co-op. But there’s no reason that interaction couldn’t be extended to 4 players, 2 teams of 2 working closely together.
The announcement of 8-player co-op in Resistance 2 has me interested in getting a PS3 (Currently my only reason for buying one would be MGS4). 8-player co-op certainly sounds intriguing, providing the gameplay itself is good. I’ve not played Resistance: Fall of Man, so I have no idea about the gameplay for that or the sequel.
Games which would be 10x better if they had co-op:
- Bioshock – Imagine double-teaming a Big Daddy, each one of you specialising in a plasmid/weapon role!
- Assassin’s Creed – Imagine double-teaming an assassination, or diving across rooftops together.
- Hitman – The thought of simulataneously pulling off a timed kill or action as a team.
- Mass Effect – This one’s pretty obvious. 2/4 player battling across the galaxy? Yes please.
- Call of Duty 4 – Once more, pretty obvious. Why wasn’t this in CoD4 in the first place?
- Dead Rising - Slice through the zombie hordes as a duo!
There’s something I’m drawn to about Co-Op. Maybe it’s because I don’t like getting my ass kicked by 12-year olds on XBL. Maybe it’s because I like to have the freedom of working with a friend without the limitations of enemy players killing me all the time. Maybe it’s because the slower pace of a co-op game makes for greater fun and laughs.
Or maybe it’s because the enemy AI doesn’t teabag me when they kill me.