Every game is better with friends, but some games are the most betterer of all. These are the best co-op games you can play on PC in 2020. Whether you want to survive against zombie hordes, fell giant monsters, or fling your physicsy forms across chasms, there’s a game for you below.

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Back when I reviewed Arma 3 s campaign, I whined like a hungry cat about how Bohemia never quite used the world to its fullest potential. I craved a mission that left me on my own to explore and adapt. Well, a mere five years on they’ve added something very interesting to the Steam Workshop. Arma 3 Apex: Old Man is an experimental, open-world, single-player scenario where you re given a goal and a few hints, and then told to have at it. If you have Arma 3 Apex, it’s free. I think I ve found my Christmas present.

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Right now, there s a room in Buffalo Grove, Illinois that’s as quiet as a grave. The power is off, the robotic limbs are becalmed, and the once thumping presses are depressed. The Steam Controller assembly room is assembling no more, and with the recent Steam sale clearing out all the stock, the grand experiment is over.

It s the final part of Valve s great Steam Machines undertaking to be shut down. They d hoped to convince you to have a PC in the living room, or a small box for you to stream your library from your main PC. The Steam Machines never took off, the Steam Link box was discontinued a year ago, and now the Steam Controller will no longer be made. Gone, but not forgotten.

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The Arma series has a bit of a double identity. On one hand, you’ve got a hard-as-nails military sim shooter, pitting the fallibility of human senses up against a world populated by laser-accurate AI. On the other hand, you’ve got the ultra-moddable sandbox that spawned DayZ and (in turn) the battle royale genre as we know it. The Apelegs are connected to the Arma bone, apparently.

Arma 3, with its Steam Workshop integration and flexible tools has given players the means to create whole new worlds of conflict. With Bohemia Interactive finally focusing on future games, leaving the game in its player’s hands, here’s some of the biggest and best mods that Arma 3‘s community are field testing today.

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The best shooters endure. While other genres warp beyond recognition, there is something solid about the first-person shooter that makes it as dependable as a nice big AK-47. Maybe it s the gung-ho simplicity – look down a barrel and pull the trigger. It’s as fun to fire a double-barrelled shotgun from an early 90s FPS as the slick shotties of today. For that reason, this list runs the gamut from genre classics to those released in the last year. There’s bound to be something for you in this, our list of the best 50 FPS games on PC. Let s lock and/or load.

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Livonia. The Baltic frontier. These are the voyages of gruff digital army cosplayers. Their continuing mission: to drive tiny robot trucks. To seek out new assault rifles, new combat arenas. To boldly go where… hold on, is that a ruddy alien? Sergeant, there’s a bloody great extraterrestrial in my area of operations. I’ve seen films before, sir, you can get this one yourself.

Grab your tinfoil hats – Bohemia’s dead-serious war simulator Arma 3 has gone interstellar in its latest expansion, Contact.

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In Vectorpark s Sandcastles, you build fantastic towers and watch the waves erase your work every 10 seconds. It s a very direct metaphor for the global climate crisis that threatens to flood coastal cities and exacerbate natural disasters. Sandcastles confronts us with our totally predictable watery doom, but we also find fun and expression in our totally foreseeable destruction. When the planet dies, at least we ll be entertained.

Before you commit to starving and drowning, you should probably understand how and why it ll happen. To imagine this nightmarish hellworld, readers can flip through climate fiction novels ( cli-fi ) and movie-goers can watch a big unprofitable climate disaster blockbuster every few years. But us mouse-clickers, we obviously don t read books or watch movies. Instead, we play with climate. Behold, the climate crisis game.

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The straight-faced military simulation of Arma 3 will get a little weirder with its next expansion, named Contact, where serious soldiermen will encounter and investigate aliens. Expect strange lights in the sky, unknown aircraft, strange energy signatures, glowing orbs, the lot. It doesn’t look like some kooky Stalin vs. Martians nonsense, mind, treating first contact with a suspected alien species seriously. Which sounds pretty great to me. It brings a big new sandbox map, with 163 square kilometres of kinda-real-ish Eastern Europe, for regular Arma activities too. Anyway, here, come meet some aliens in the announcement trailer.

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There’s a major new Arma 3 expansion launching next Monday, April 29th, bringing the military sim back to its Cold War roots. Impressively large as it looks, Global Mobilization isn’t by Bohemia Interactive, but the first release from their “Creator DLC” commercial mod program and produced by small team Vertexmacht. Mods going commercial isn’t a new concept, but it has backfired for a few studios, including Valve’s own failure to get the idea off the ground with Skyrim, and Blizzard’s swiftly-abandoned premium mods for StarCraft 2. Still, Bohemia’s approach seems more structured, at least so far.

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Arma 3 might be in the tail-end of its time, but there’s life left in the old military sandbox. Today, Bohemia Interactive rolled out Warlords, a free new multiplayer mode based on fan-favourite Capture The Island. Two teams (or one against AI, or just a solo player, even) start in bases on opposite sides of one of Arma 3’s big maps. Between them lie towns and bases populated by neutral enemy NPCs. Clear out camps, capture territory and gain resources to spend on new units and push further into enemy lands until one home base falls. A trailer for the new mode is below.

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