A nice evening in, just you and your friends being together, enjoying each other’s company. Perhaps you might play a game or two, laughing and working together. While this just might sound like a perfect evening, but for those of us who prefer yelling at our friends instead of creating “bonds” and “happy memories” co-op games that are kind of competitive and rage-inducing are the real way to go.
Some co-op games are designed to do nothing but make you and everyone involved hate each other. Sometimes the most bonding experiences are the ones that almost ruin friendships.
10 Cuphead
That hard video games are frustrating is something most people can agree on. While having a friend can certainly help make the experience easier, and in the case of Xbox exclusive Cuphead, it does, but having another person to blame when things go poorly can create some heated moments. When you can only blame yourself the frustration is internal but having another person to blame lets that frustration run rampant. Add the fact that having a second player makes the already overstimulating and chaotic screen of Cuphead that much more chaotic does not make the game that much easier.
9 Halo (Legendary Iron Skull)
Normally, playing any Halo title with friends makes the experience easier because it doesn’t get reset to a checkpoint when only one person dies. Now throw in the Iron skull, which makes it so the game does reset to the last checkpoint whenever a single person dies. Now any single person can ruin the current progress by making a mistake and everyone can yell at that person for their incompetence. While the more modern Halo titles aren’t too hard on legendary, the Iron skull adds some extra frustration for those who want it.
8 New Super Mario Bros.
Back in the day, Super Mario Bros. co-op meant each person taking turns running through levels, which eventually gets boring due to all the downtime. The big solution to that in New Super Mario Bros. is for everyone to run the level at the same time, which is a chaotic nightmare for anyone trying to actually complete the game.
Constantly bumping into each other, jumping on each other and even throwing each other makes this mode feel more like a Super Smash Bros. match than a co-op platformer. If you like a challenge and hate being able to platform uninterrupted, this is the co-op game for you.
7 Supermarket Shriek
Supermarket Shriek is intentionally nightmarish in its cooperative setup. The game involves navigating different stores with a shopping cart, a shopping cart controlled by making a man and a goat scream. These controls are difficult to master by yourself, powering different halves of the cart to steer. In co-op the controls get split, meaning one person gets the man and one gets the goat and nobody gets anywhere they want to go. Completing a single level, let alone an entire game, is enough to drive two people insane.
6 Portal 2
It’s time to find out who is the dumb friend in the relationship with the puzzle co-op mode in Portal 2. The physics-based puzzle game involved solving problems with two portal guns and four portals. It also requires some strong communication and brainpower to get both parties through each level. It also does an excellent job of informing the sensibilities of your friends and how aware they are of their surroundings. A single-player puzzle game tests your knowledge. A co-op puzzle game tests the lowest common denominator.
5 World War Z
Like Left 4 Dead before it, World War Z pits four players against an insurmountable horde of the undead. It takes a village to fight your way through these campaigns at their hardest and dragging along a weak link makes the game that much more difficult.
One person can screw up the whole run for everybody, dragging everyone else down as they try to save them. It makes for a frustrating experience when one person can’t keep up with the rest of the squad. If a real zombie apocalypse broke out you probably already know which friend is getting left behind.
4 Payday
There is a reason that most heist movies involve betrayal at one point or another. It’s because robbing places is hard to do correctly and one person can mess the whole thing up for everybody. In Payday and Payday 2, the majority of heists can be done completely in stealth, without the police ever knowing you were there. These also give the best rewards and make for an easy getaway. However, one person can easily make a mistake and tank the entire operation, leading to a shootout with the police. Nobody likes that person. Nobody wants to be friends with that person.
3 BattleBlock Theater
Described as a comedy platformer, BattleBlock Theater can be very challenging in its platforming. The game also features some co-op, which takes a considerable amount of coordination to get through. As with any tough co-op game, blame can quickly begin to be thrown around leading to some tense situations. As the game continues to mock your failure you can quickly begin to question the basis of your friendship. Why would you be friends with someone that incompetent anyways?
2 Mario Party
The sometimes competitive, sometimes cooperative roulette machine with extra steps known as Mario Party has been destroying friendships for a long, long time. The game is designed in a way that rewards the forging of alliances and the subsequent destroying of them. The game also forces tempory co-op in some minigames, which can be abused if intentionally losing those games benefits you.
The only way to stand a chance at winning is committing acts that are probably against the Geneva Convention. At the end of the game, a winner is chosen at random, only leading to more hate and frustration into a game that pretends to be happy.
1 Overcooked
A chaotic mess of a cooking game, Overcooked and Overcooked 2 invite four people to enter a kitchen out of Gordon Ramsay’s nightmares and attempt to cook food in a timely fashion. Tasks must be divided up and everyone needs to play their part efficiently. That’s in theory, anyway, but it normally results in the screaming of orders and everyone’s little chefs running around the kitchen shoving each other, trying to do every step of the cooking process themselves because nobody knows what they’re doing anyway. The chaos causes some people to even shut down at of overwhelming stress. So like a real kitchen but with no actual consequences when it catches on fire.
NEXT: 10 Multiplayer Games That Don’t Have A Solo Campaign, But Need One
