12 Co-op games like Deadtime Defenders that you should try

Fast melee-and-guns combat with a genuinely good katana feel, built around procedurally assembled open levels and four-player co-op. Movement is quick and mobile. The procedural generation is the cost: environments repeat visibly after a few hours, and the loot-driven stat progression sits awkwardly on a game whose shooting is otherwise built on precision.

The entry the series is measured against: the best-written villain in the franchise, gun variety that finally delivers on the procedural promise, and four classes that play genuinely differently in co-op. The endgame is a grind — the raid bosses assume a full group and hours of farming, and playing solo makes the later difficulty tiers a slog.

Tighter than the first game: better enemy variety, more readable encounters, and a Washington that changes as factions take territory. The gunplay holds up over long sessions. The story is forgettable, and the gear system asks for a lot of inventory management — you will spend real time comparing marginal stat rolls between fights.

The gunfeel is the benchmark the genre is measured against, and the raids are among the best cooperative content anywhere. Seasonal storytelling keeps it moving. The cost of entry is high and getting higher — expansions stack, campaigns have been removed from sale, and returning after a break means relearning systems that changed while you were gone.

Low-gravity movement and oxygen management change the shooting more than expected: fights become vertical and you commit to jumps rather than strafing. Shorter and lighter than the numbered entries. It reuses a lot of assets and enemy types, and the oxygen meter becomes a chore once the novelty of bouncing around the moon wears off.

The original loot shooter: four classes, a procedural gun system, and enemies that soak damage until the numbers line up. Co-op is where it makes sense. It shows its age in structure — quests are almost entirely fetch-and-kill, the story is thin, and the last stretch leans hard on repeated arena fights before an underwhelming finish.

The best-feeling guns in the series by a wide margin — movement is faster, weapons have real mechanical variety, and the four classes branch further than before. Where it drops off is tone: the villains are grating in a way that undercuts the campaign, and several planets pad their length with backtracking through areas you have already cleared.

A cover shooter with an RPG damage layer, set in a snowbound New York that is the strongest thing about it — the environmental storytelling in empty apartments does more than the plot. Bullet-sponge enemies are the persistent complaint, and at launch the endgame amounted to running the same few missions at higher difficulty.

An aggressive cover shooter that punishes hiding: most classes only heal by killing, so the loop pushes you forward constantly. Powers are on short cooldowns and fire often. The gear system is where it frays — endgame tiers scale enemies faster than your build improves, and long stretches come down to rerolling stats rather than playing.

Borderlands looting with a tabletop-fantasy skin: spells replace grenades, melee matters, and the class system lets you mix two trees. The overworld map is a genuinely different way to move between areas. It is short by series standards, and the endgame collapses into one repeatable dungeon that gets old well before the loot chase does.

EDITIONS BREAKDOWN About the Game Embody the superhuman skill and brutality of a Space Marine. Unleash deadly abilities and devastating weaponry to obliterate the relentless Tyranid swarms. Defend the Imperium in spectacular third-person action in solo or multiplayer modes.

Combining fast-paced action with strategic battle planning, Darwinia features a novel and intuitive control mechanism, a graphical style ripped from 80's retro classics like Tron and Defender, and a story concerning a tribe of nomadic sprites trapped in a modern 3D world.