Hi
Sorry if this isn’t the right place to post this. Basically I’m looking for recommendations for a game I can play against my 2 brothers. We live in different cities and hardly get to see each other but are we all into games.
We are all in our late 40s and haven’t gamed against each other since way back when I had a few networked PCs in a squat where we played unreal tournament. I am well out of the gaming loop, i just finished bioshock a couple of months back, now I’m playing doom & death loop. I’m crap at both!
We were thinking we’d like to play a shooter just against each other, kinda like unreal tournament, or something we can do cooperatively. We are definitely not ready to go up against the kids online. Maybe doesn’t have to be a shooter if it’s fun to play together. Most of us have kids and none of us has loads of screen time.
One brother is on an Xbox One is on a PC One is on a steam deck with WiFi hotspot.
I’m grateful for any suggestions
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Pummel Party, Stick Fight, Space Marine 2, For the King, Borderlands are would be my recommendations.
Seconding Space Marine 2. It’s built for three-player co-op, crossplay works smoothly, and it’s a super satisfying shooter
Great cheers I’ll check it out
Space marine 2 could actually do the trick.
You will need games that have crossplay between PC and Xbox One so you can play together across different platforms. Multiple people have suggested Left 4 Dead 2, but that doesn’t have crossplay. Most of the shooters I personally play don’t have it, but there definitely are shooters with crossplay.
Here are my recommendations that have crossplay:
- Borderlands 3 — Collect wacky guns, travel the universe, and shoot bad guys together. The previous games in the series don’t have crossplay.
…Yeah, that’s it for crossplay shooters I recommend. For crossplay games that aren’t shooters:
- Overcooked! All You Can Eat — Chaotic co-op cooking. Work together to prepare, cook, and serve food in increasingly absurd scenarios: in the middle of the highway, on an iceberg, in a hot air balloon that crashes into a different restaurant.
- Ultimate Chicken Horse — Platformer where you build the levels together and then race to the finish. You only score if someone died, so you need to make the level extra dangerous.
- Moving Out 2 — Goofy co-op game where your group plays as a ridiculously reckless moving company. Carry furniture from the house and shove or throw it into the truck. No one will notice if you break all the windows.
If everyone is on PC, things will open up a good bunch. Old-school networked games generally still work. You can go FFA deathmatch in your old favourites or in newer arena shooters, like Warsow or Disco Dodgeball.
The Borderlands 1 GOTY Enhanced edition has cross play I believe, and so does Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, which imo is actually incredibly fun to play. Halo has cross play now, MCC and Infinite.
I believe Sea of Thieves has cross play, but I’m not entirely sure how much mileage they’ll get out of it.
Another vote for deep Rock galactic.
Rock and Stone!
Worms?
Lol we actually played worms Armageddon against each other before. If it still has stuff like exploding sheep etc it be a good game to play with their kids
There’s loads of Worms games now though they’re all the same sort of thing. I think they just announced an “anniversary edition” of Armageddon, which looks basically the same as the Steam version but ported to modern consoles. Still a banger 25 years on!
Halo Infinite has free multiplayer that is cross-platform between PC and Xbox, and works on the Steam Deck. There are lots of competitive and co-op modes available, both in official playlists and community made Forge modes.
You can make private matches until you’re comfortable joining public ones.
The campaign is also online co-op, but must be paid for.
First thing that comes to mind is Warframe. It’s a co-op third person looter-shooter, with full crossplay, so you can all party up across your platforms. It’s all very controller friendly, with lots of shotguns, SMGs, melee weapons and space magic that are all really forgiving of imprecise aim. It cares less about twitch reflexes and more about movement.
The scifi setting and “space ninja” aesthetic may or may not be to your taste, although I promise if you take the time really sink into the world it’s actually one of the most refreshingly different and unique scifi settings out there. There’s a lot of weirdness, but as you dig deeper into the story that weirdness all makes sense. And, like, it’s the good kind of weird if you get me? Stuff that makes you go “Holy fuck I want to know what the deal with that is!”
It does have a lot of MMO elements, so it can get grindy at times, but in my experience it’s a really solid game for hanging out and chilling on Discord together. Plus the game itself is free, with no paid DLC or add-ons, and for an adult with an income a few bucks here and there skips a LOT of grind, especially if you check out the third party market website where players will sell you a lot of the rare drops you’ll want for less than a dollar.
Added bonus, it’s made by the original developers of Unreal Tournament, Digital Extremes (there are actually a bunch of UT references squirelled away in the game).
Thanks, I’ll check it out!
Bit of a nightmare to learn without a Sherpa.
If not for the fact you said one’s on an Xbox, for a co-op experience I’d recommend Helldivers 2. However, a similar game to HD2 is Deep Rock Galactic, and it’s on Xbox as well as PC. Fantastic co-op shooter with some very funny humor, much like HD2 you can tell a lot of love went into the game; and much like HD2 the developers actually give a shit about it and their community. Since you said you don’t have a load of screen time, you should know a full mission is usually about 20-30 minutes.
For a PVP experience, you said you have two brothers – three is actually the perfect number if you wanted to get Sniper Elite 5 and play through the campaign with Axis Invasion enabled, you can invite one to play co-op and for the other, you can invite a specific invader. Two players would be playing as allied snipers infiltrating various locations in France and taking out Nazis, and the third would be an elite German sniper hunting them. It’s supremely fun to hunt people (as well as be “hunted” – though with two players you can really flip that on its head). And a mission in SE5, depending on how you play, can either take as short as 15 minutes or as long as 45 minutes, though probably on the longer end if you’re doing invasion – you do not play it like COD if you actually want to survive against a hunter.
Both of those have crossplay and should work on a Steam Deck, as well; although I’ve noticed Sniper Elite 5’s anti-cheat, when run through Proton on Linux, doesn’t like the game being installed on an external drive and won’t let you play online if it’s not running on the same drive the OS is installed on, and I imagine that’d probably extend to SD cards. So, if you go for SE5, make sure that brother installs it to the Deck’s internal storage or they might run into trouble.
I’m forwarding this whole thread to my brothers, we’ll agree on something. I like the look of sniper elite 5, thanks!
Wait til SE5 goes on sale if you do decide to get it, I’m wagering they’ll discount it somewhere around the release of SE6 in January. Probably for Christmas.
I’ve just wishlisted it, so yeah I’ll keep an eye on it. Cheers mate, that looks like a good un
The Borderlands series might work. Also I believe L4D2 might run on all those, if y’all wanna coop some zombies?
Hmm left for dead 2 seems possible for steam deck at least. I’ll check with the others. Yeah we could do co-op, but I don’t think we wanna play against other humans. Just something we can catch up an have fun for two or three hours each week
Going to go out of the shooter box here and say Valheim. I am pretty sure it’s cross compatible with xbox and pc/steam deck. Might not be the thing though if you are just all wanting to pvp, but thought I would throw it out there.
Civ 5 was great for this. Me and another old fart in our 40s played it against each other.
Here’s a full list of crossplay Xbox and PC games. I figure if it’s on the pc, there’s a good chance it could be played on the steam deck as well.
Notable mentions in there that I’ve played and enjoyed are Destiny 2, Overwatch 2, Remnant 2, Left4Dead 2, (I’m seeing a pattern here), and Deep Rock Galactic.
Thanks mate, appreciated. Yeah I also seen a recurrent pattern in peoples’ suggestions, just what I was hoping for when I posted the question!
Enshrouded, Chained Together, Payday 3, Risk of Rain 2, Helldivers 2
I’m a huge fan of Borderlands so would recommend that and I’m also a huge fan of Halo, the Master Cheif Collection is an absolute bargain considering what you get. Your brother with the Xbox will need to get Game Pass of some sort to join in for any games that are not free to play. Halo Infinite is free to play and has a PvE game mode, if that tickles your fancy.
Portal 2 is only two player, but it’s my favorite game and it has a co-op mode with puzzles that require both people.
Palworld is another kind of game playable multiplayer on xbox/pc.
