So, choose your classes, your loadouts, your flavour of horde, and, for goodness sake, do your best to keep your medic alive. If you’ve had your fill of genre mainstays, it can be hard to find others to scratch the itch, but we’ve got your itchy back, like a giant back-scratcher made of words. ‘Left-likes’, ‘Dead-likes’, and ‘4-likes’ are three descriptors literally no-one has ever used before and will never use again because they’re all terrible, but you probably get what we’re talking about by now. Usually featuring teams of up to four players, complimentary classes with varied abilities and skill trees, and sporadic hordes of some horror or other trying to ruin your day, these games all share similar DNA. Co-op is one thing, but there’s a certain elusive subgenre – arguably codified by Valve’s 2008 shooter Left 4 Dead – that just scratches an itch other co-operative games can’t. What are the best games like Left 4 Dead and Payday 2? Having a group of friends alongside you can make even bad games bearable, so when a game is great in the first place, you can end up with something truly memorable.
