In Viscera Cleanup Detail you take on the role of the mighty janitor. Armed with little more than a mop, a bucket and a trusty boom-box - your task is to clean up after various horrific sci-fi horror events. Viscera Cleanup Detail is a first-person experience which sees you trying to mop up blood, pick up trash and incinerate body parts and you can play all stages in the game solo or co-operatively.

In this episode we review Viscera Cleanup Detail from an online co-operative perspective. You can pick up this title for download on Steam for €12.99, although it’s been out for a few years now so you will often find it on sale too. VCD supports split-screen local co-op and when you play online you can share a game with up to 31 other players.

Bismo and Plom were forever connected by a freak scientific accident and so Ben and John step in and take control to help these two jelly creatures navigate through this platform puzzler. Shift Happens is a co-op exclusive platform game which sees you take control of two characters who can shift their mass with the push of a button. You must work your way through 4 worlds of devious puzzles which require you to make use a range of mechanics you unlock along your journey.

In this episode we review Shift Happens from an online co-op perspective. We get a chance to discuss some of the highs and lows of this cute puzzle game.

Shift Happens was released by Klonk Games and is available for download on PC, PS4 and Xbox One for around €15. Shift Happens offers both local and online 2-player co-op and plays best with a controller. A standard play through will take you between 4-6 hours, but unlocking all of the stars and a full playthrough could take up to 8-10 hours.

John and Ben grab their daggers and start vomiting over food as they get sneaky in the guise of vicious little goblins in Styx: Shards of Darkness. Styx: Shards of Darkness is the second game in the Styx series and it gives you a chance to sneak through huge open environments in a fantasy setting with a friend, while stealing important objectives and assassinating anyone who gets in your way.

Styx: Shards of Darkness feels like a hydrid of Hitman, Thief and Assassin’s Creed in a classic fantasy setting. The game sees you sneaking through streets and climbing around buildings with a third-person camera. Listen to our latest episode to find out more about how Styx plays with a friend.

Styx: Shards of darkness was developed by Cyanide Studio in France and published by Focus Home Interactive. It is available for download on PC, PS4 and Xbox One and is available for around €40, depending on the platform you purchase on. Originally released in March, 2017 - Styx: Shards of Darkness can often be found on sale on Steam or the Humble Store.

John and Ben hop into their planes and take to the sky to rain down fire and destruction on all in their path in Sky Force Reloaded. Skyforce Reloaded (2016) is a remake of the 2006 vertical scrolling shooter which was originally released on Symbian, Pocket PC and Palm WebOS - bonus points if you remember any of those!

Sky Force Reloaded has been recreated from the ground up in glorious 3D with flashy explosions and a gorgeous, coherant and vibrant art-style. After recently meeting up in the UK in real life, we had a chance to play this local-only archade shoot ‘em up on the Nintendo Switch. Find out what we thought in our latest episode.

Sky Force Reloaded is developed by Infinite Dreams in Poland and is available on Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch and Steam for anywhere between £7-12. You can also download a free-to-play version for iOS and Android. While the mobile version only supports single-player gameplay, it’s a good way to get a feeling for the game before diving in on another platform.

We take up the roles of Vincent Moretti and Leo Caruso, a pair of hardened criminals who have been incarcerated and imprisoned for murder and grand theft respectively. A Way Out is an exclusively co-operative third-person action-adventure game with a strong focus on story and the relationship between the main characters.

There is no single player game mode in a A Way Out and it must be played co-operatively in split-screen mode - either online or local. We discuss our experience having played through the game on our YouTube Let’s Play Show (see https://shyguys.io) so you can decide whether you want to pick up A Way Out or send it to the cooler.

A Way Out is available on Origin (PC) for around €29,99 and for a similar price on PS4 or Xbox One. You only need to purchase a single copy of A Way Out to play with a friend - even online. The second player needs to simply download the trial version of the game and join a host who has previously bought the game.

John and Ben grab their grog, take to the high seas and try their hands at a pirate life full of fighting, plundering and treasure hunting in Sea of Fetch Quests, aka, Sea of Thieves. In Sea of Thieves you embark upon a journey to become a pirate legend. In a shared world filled with other players, you embark upon quests to find chests, merchant wares and skeleton skulls in a colourful and stormy world.

We talk about the game mechanics which make this game unique and interesting and share some stories of our time on the choppy seas. Ultimately however, while the PvP moments and stories we share made for some fun and interesting game play, we found Sea of Thieves to be somewhat lacking in content and it gets repetitive quick. Check out this episode to find out whether you should call up your friends and share the rum or make Sea of Thieves walk the plank.

Sea of Thieves is available on the Microsoft Store on Xbox One or Windows 10 for €59,99 or you can pick up the Microsoft Game Pass and play it as part of your subscription on PC or Xbox One. If you’ve not tried the game pass before, you can try it out for free for 14 days and give Sea of Thieves a whirl.

We prepare ourselves for the inevitable zombie-ridden apocalyptic future by honing our skills in Versus Squad - a dual-stick shooter featuring hundreds of zombies and base-building action. Unfortunately, if the zombie apocalypse plays out like this, death will be a sweet release from our frustrating and awkward lives.

Versus Squad is a mixture of a sandbox defense game where you get to build the stage that you will be defending and a fast action dual-stick shooter with the usual array of weapons and pick-ups. While the core gameplay and concept is solid, we struggled to find enough in Versus Squad for it to really satisfy our needs. Tune in to hear about how it plays so you can make your own decision on whether this game is for you.

Versus Squad is available on Steam (Windows and macOS) for €7,99 and can be played alone or with up to 3 friends in online or local co-op.

Here at Connecting to Host we like our dungeons twisted, winding and mysterious. As Dark Souls was too scary for Ben, John decided that we should try out Necropolis instead to get our fix of brutal and hard-core combat while exploring the depths and hunting for treasure.

Necropolis is a third-person action game with rogue-like dungeon-delving with brutal and hard-core combat. Every time you play the magical deathtrap dungeon reconstructs itself with new challenges and mini-quests to explore. With dozens of enemies, tons of loot and a crafting system - Necropolis has a bunch of features to keep you busy. But do the dungeon halls have the ability to keep calling you back for more?

Join us to find out more. Enjoy!

Necropolis: Brutal Edition is available on Steam for €27,99 and is also available on PS4 and Xbox One. You can play alone or with up to 3 friends.

Lost in the frozen arctic, Lord John and Peasant Ben stumbled across a medieval castle. Upon entering, the two split up (because that always works out well) and ended up trying to escape through a sequence of chambers which required the sharpest wits and the strongest co-operative puzzle solving skills to overcome.

We Were Here Too is an online only co-op adventure game in which two players are split up in a medieval castle and need to try to escape. What makes this game unique is that each puzzle the players are faced with will see one player have to do the mechanical work of solving the puzzle while the clues and information to solve that puzzle are seen only by the other player.

Join us to find out more about our experience with We Were Here Too and whether it’s something you want to pick up to play with your mates.

We Were Here Too is available on Steam and was developed by Total Mayhem Games in Rotterdam. Released 2nd February 2018, We Were Here Too is built to be played exclusively by two players and is available for around £7 or $10.

Just like most weekends, John and Ben don their druid robes and witches garb to explore a mystical, Mesopotamian-inspired world - this time, the world of Issaria in Moon Hunters. In Moon Hunters you set out alone or with up to 3 friends to solve the mystery of why the sun has stopped rising over Issaria and attempt restore balance in just 5 days, before King Mardokh and the Sun Cultists declare war.

As the world of Issaria is procedurally generated every time you play, Moon Hunters offers multiple playthroughs. In each play through you can unlock new character classes, areas and abilities that will benefit you in future play throughs. Moon Hunters pegs itself as a ‘co-op personality test’ as each time you start the game you’re free to develop not just the stats but also the personality of your characters based on the decisions you make along the way.

Join us in our latest episode to find out how we developed our characters during our time with Moon Hunters.

Moon Hunters is available on Steam, Xbox One, PS4 and Nintendo Switch and supports local and online co-op for up to 4 players. Note. As of February 2018, we still had some stuttering with online multiplayer in Moon Hunters. It was intermittent, but still a little irritating. Check out our episode to find out more.

Human: Fall Flat is an open-ended physics-based game riddled with puzzles in a highly interactive environment. While John and Ben don’t really need any help to look stupid, we’re certain that was one of the major design goals of this game as we hilariously struggled to flail, wobble, stumble and jump our way through a number of puzzles in floating dreamscapes. After failing to RTFM we had a lot of hilarious fun trying to catapult each other around the various maps and environments.

Join us in our latest episode as we talk through our experiences with Human: Fall Flat. Ben went into this game with an incredibly open-mind - “it looks shit, but I guess we can give it a shot”. Find out whether it lived up to the expectations or exceeded them!

Human: Fall Flat is available on Steam, Xbox One, PS4 and Nintendo Switch and now supports local co-op and online multiplayer. When playing online, you can get together with up to 7 of your friends as you try to work your way through this sandbox-esque physics-based puzzle game.

Now that PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is approaching 30 million sales and has topped 3 million concurrent players, John and Ben thought it was probably time to give it a shot. If you somehow haven’t played PUBG yet, want to hear about the changes in version 1.0 or just want to listen to us rant about the things that annoy us, then we’ve got the podcast for you!

In our latest episode we talk about the two maps that make up PUBG version 1.0 and talk about some of our best and worst moments while playing PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds over the last couple of months. Hear what the game is like from the perspectice of two players with a good helping of cowardice and big dollop of ‘lack of gunplay skills’…

To round up 2017, the year of the Battle Royale, John and Ben get excited for some of the best co-op and multiplayer games that are planned for release in 2018.

With more information out in the public about games announced at E2 2017, and with some new games on the roster since then, 2018 is looking like it will bring an interesting and varied set of co-operative games. Some of the games we discuss include;

A Way Out: An exclusively co-op only story-heavy action-adventure game being developed by Hazelight and Josef Fares.

Red Dead Redemption 2: Slated for Q2 2018, the sequel to the highly acclaimed Red Dead Redemption will put you squarely back into the open-world Wild West.

Far Cry 5: The latest game in the Far Cry series brings the usual over-the-top FPS action to Montana - which plays home to a fanatical doomsday cult known as Eden’s Gate.

State of Decay 2: Where the original was a single player only experience, State of Decay 2 will bring co-op to the zombie survival and base-building experience featuring permadeath for your community’s characters.

Download the latest episode to find out more about these games and many more upcoming titles we’re looking forward to during 2018!

After much arduous gaming time, countless disconnects and failed attempts at screen-sharing across Europe, John and Ben have put together a list of their favourite co-op and multiplayer games that were released during 2017.

In time honoured tradition, we’ve reviewed and rated our top 6 games of 2017 that you can play with your friends (or your enemies) online or in local co-op. If you’ve been following our podcast throughout the year, you might just recognise some of the names in the top 6, but there are some new ones to boot as well.

Tune in to find out what we liked the most, just in time to put some new games on your wishlist ready for the upcoming sales that will undoubtedly hit over the Christmas period!

Invisigun Heroes is a 2D, single-screen, stealth-focussed battle arena game in which all of the players are invisible! Join us as we try our best to explain a game in which most of the time your character is invisible, even though every player has exactly the same view of the pixel-art styled game arena…

While it might sound crazy on paper, Invisigun Heroes provides an interesting experience with a good level of strategy for weeding out your stealthy opponents without putting yourself into too much of a dangerous position. We had some hilarious moments during our time with Invisigun Heroes - so join us in our latest episode and find out more about the game and how it plays.

Invisigun Heroes offers a guest edition which you can check out completely free of charge! The guest edition even allows you to play online with your friends, with a limited number of game modes, heroes and stages. So if you like what you hear on this episode of Connecting to Host, head over to Steam and download the Invisigun Heroes Guest Edition by clicking on “Download Demo”.

Overcooked is a chaotic couch co-op cooking game for one to four players. In this episode John and Ben share stories of how they did their best to work as a team to serve up a number of tasty dishes as fast and furiously as they could. How do the ingredients of this frantic local co-op only game stack up?

Overcooked features a number of interesting dynamic environments and an evolving set of recipes and rules to keep the game fresh as the players progress. Having recently met up in Stockholm, we were able to put this game to the test. Join us in this episode to hear what we thought of Overcooked on PC.

The Mushroom Kingrom has been torn apart by a mysterious vortex, but fear not because John and Ben are here to save the day with a Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle co-op focussed review. After meeting up in Stockholm we put the local (only) co-op campaign to the test to find out whether it’s worth making a journey to a friend’s house to play this game on the sofa together.

Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle offers a number of co-op specific stages which are designed to be played by 2 teams of 2 units by a pair of players sitting back in the same living room (or sitting next to each other on the same flight). Each stage can be played in easy, medium or hard mode and the stages unlock as you progress through the single player game. You’ll be using the characters you’ve built up from the main game to work through the co-op quests.

Join us for this latest episode to hear how Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle holds up as a co-operative experience.

It’s a good day for a swell battle and with traditional hand-drawn cel animation and an original jazz soundtrack, Cuphead has turned out to be pretty swell as well. John and Ben talk about their experiences fighting bosses and collecting coins while playing Cuphead in local co-op on PC.

Cuphead is a classic run and gun action-platformer heavily focused on boss battles. Inspired by cartoons from the 1930s, Studio MDHR have created a fantastic opportunity to revisit an old-school style of game in a new and classy way. Beyond the gorgeous visuals and audio, Cuphead provides a decent challenge and an addictive experience. In short, it’s a great slam and then some.

John and Ben hop into their Sidewinders and make their way through a tiny fraction of the 400 billion star systems that make up the huge world of Elite Dangerous. We take some time to fly as a wing through the expansive galaxy basking in the light of many suns while we destroy pirates and smuggle goods between different star systems.

Whether it’s trading, smuggling or bounty hunting, we take a look at what it’s like to play Elite Dangerous as a co-op experience. We put the features released as part of the Elite Dangerous: Horizons expansion to the test and join up to form a single crew hunting bounties as a team. Last but not least, we also talk about the VR support in Elite Dangerous.

Similar to how the Imperial Blizzard Forces descended upon Hoth, Star Wars: Battlefront 2 will soon be overrunning our hard drives, so we decided to revisit the Multiplayer FPS Star Wars: Battlefront from 2015 in it’s final form on PC. Join us as we talk about our favourite game modes in Star Wars: Battlefront and the issues we hope they will improve in the upcoming sequel.

Holy Cow! John and Ben have finally peeled their fingers away from their Xbox One controllers long enough to go for it and bring you their round-up of Rocket League. With over 600 hours combined behind the remote controlled wheels, we resisted “One. More. Game” and we’re in position to share the highs and lows of this vehicular sports game. So, if you need boost then why not take the shot and download this Siiiiick episode? Thanks!

While originally released at the end of 2016, Respawn Entertainment recently added the horde-mode like Frontier Defense to Titanfall 2, which inspired us to go back and revisit this highly mobile FPS which we never got around to reviewing after it launched. With over 600 hours of gameplay between us in the original Titanfall, Titanfall 2 has a lot to live up to for us. Join us as we chat about what’s changed for the better and for the worse in the latest installment of Titanfall.

In this episode we get fresh an take to the front lines with our splattershots and curling bombs in an effort to ink as much turf as possible. A Nintendo Switch exclusive, Splatoon 2 is a team-based third-person shooter where the primary game modes feature 4v4 matches where the goal is to ink as much of the stage as possible in a short 3-minute match. Splatoon 2 also introduces a new co-op “horde mode” like experience called Salmon Run where you team up with up to 3 other friends in order to fight off waves of Salmonids and steal the bosses eggs before the time runs out.

Released in 2013, ibb & obb is specifically designed as a two player cooperative platformer game set in a puzzle filled world where gravity goes both up and down. You need to work closely together in order to succeed and you can play in either local co-op or online co-op with a friend.

ibb & obb travel through a world divided by a horizontal line - above the line gravity goes down like normal, but below the line gravity is reversed and pulls you back up. Momentum is conserved and the world is filled with enemies and objects, which leads to a number of interesting puzzles and scenarios for ibb & obb to work through.

Tune in to find out what we thought of ibb & obb so you can decide whether it’s something you to pick up.

We don our racing suits and hop into our go karts as we race alongside Mario, Wario, Samus and Toad through Haunted Mansions and Rainbow Roads in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Whether kicking back in front of your TV or enjoying lunch in the park, it’s easy to pick up the latest Mario Kart installment on the Nintendo Switch and enjoy a race or two around a bunch of familiar tracks with familiar faces.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe offers 48 beautifully crafted tracks and 42 characters. You can play local split-screen in your living room or relive the Nintendo Switch adverts by playing with up to 8 players in wireless mode. You can also play online and invite your friends to join you as you race against others playing Mario Kart around the globe.

We evaluate our highs and lows from a co-op gaming perspective, so download this episode to find out what we thought of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

With the dust settled and the Xbox One X on the horizon, we provide a concise review of our favourite co-op games that were on show at E3 2017.

From Far Cry 5 to Sea of Thieves, we were excited to see a good range of co-op and multiplayer gaming at this year’s E3. On top of that, there were some really interesting looking fresh ideas - ranging from split-screen only prison break action in “A Way Out” to using mobile phones for local players to vote on how the story should advance in “Hidden Agenda”.

We discuss the following co-op and multiplayer games from E3 2017…

• Star Wars Battlefront 2
• A Way Out
• Far Cry 5
• Anthem
• Sea of Thieves
• State of Decay 2
• Mario and Rabbids Kingdom Battles
• Hidden Agenda
• Deep Rock Galactic

Grab a coffee and enjoy!

We suit up and hop into our anti-grav vehicles as we race through sci-fi landscapes at breath-taking speeds. In this episode we take a look at Fast RMX, an F-Zero / Wipeout inspired track-based racing game that’s available on the Nintendo Switch. Find out what we think of this high-octane racing game that does a great job at showing off just what the Nintendo Switch can deliver with a solid 60fps in both handheld and TV mode.

Fast RMX offers up local or online play for up to 8 players. The game is built on top of FAST Racing NEO, so if you’ve yet to get your hands on a Switch you can still pick up a very similar experience on the Wii U.

When is it not fun to loot, shoot and level-up with friends?

This week we’ve gone back in time to revisit the classic co-operative FPS/RPG game - Borderlands 2. Whether you somehow missed it back in the day or you just want to reminisce about a game you know and love - drop in and join us. We talk about our highs and lows from our favourite in the series while keeping our fingers crossed that Borderlands 3 will one day deliver more of this classic action.

John and Ben grab their axes and head into a deep, dark dungeon to hack and slash their way through hordes of bad guys in the 2014 remake of the arcade classic - Gauntlet.

Gauntlet is a co-operative, top-down, hack and slash dungeon crawler game, developed by Arrowhead Game Studios which offers online and local co-op for up to 4 players. While Gauntlet doesn’t tout any revolutionary features, it offers some relatively mindless fun and with a decent mix of variety and progression which we discuss in this fortnight’s episode.

Gauntlet is available on Steam and PS4 and it currently costs €20 on Steam, although it has been on sale many times now for much less.

We share our experiences of playing a preview build of Jawns - an upcoming 2-player strategy board game inspired by classic board games like chess but with the speed of checkers. Jawns pits two players against each other, each armed with 15 tiles on a 9x5 board. Jawns gives you the option to choose from multiple game modes, each with different rules, and a game of Jawns lasts anywhere from 2-10 minutes.

We got a chance to play Jawns before release via the Humble Bundle Monthly and we take a look at the five core game modes before moving on to discuss the wide range of game rules open for players to tweak. Grab a beer, pull up a chair and join us while we chat through our review of Jawns!

Join us as we discuss THOTH, a challenging 2D twin-stick shooter that supports two-player local co-op. With minimalist graphics and an unnerving soundtrack THOTH stands out from the crowd by regularly introducing new game mechanics throughout the handcrafted stages. By introducing interesting new challenges and mechanics throughout the core 64-stages, THOTH almost has a puzzle-game edge to it where you have to figure out the ins and outs of a stage before you can defeat it.

Videoball is a 2D minimalist sports game with a bright visual style which sees up to six human players compete in two teams to shoot projectiles at balls to knock them into the opposing team’s goal. We review the PC version of Videoball after spending some time playing the game in person via local co-op. Check out one of the few episodes we’ve been able to record in person about this interesting but, unfortunately, underplayed game.

Join us as we give a short review of Snipperclips. Snipperclips is a Nintendo Switch exclusive 2D puzzle game designed for 2-4 players in local co-op. Featuring paper-based character Snip and Clip, players solve shape or physics based puzzles together by cutting bits out of each other and moving around with platformer controls. Find out what we think of this game and whether it’s worth picking up for the game-anemic Nintendo Switch!

The Switch is Nintendo’s seventh generation gaming console which can be played in tablet mode, docked with a TV or standalone in tabletop mode. While everyone is talking about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, we decided to take a look at how the Switch will perform as a co-op gaming console. We take a look at the launch titles and upcoming titles with multiplayer and co-op gaming support for the Nintendo Switch.

Winner of the Steam 2016 “Boom Boom” award, DOOM returns as a brutally fun and challenging modern-day shooter experience. While the single player campaign is universally accepted as amazing, we take a look at the competetive multiplayer experience that DOOM has to offer.

Forza Horizon 3 is an open world racing game based in Australia. With access to over 350 cars and a map twice the size of the previous Horizon title, the latest game in the series puts you in the position of “Festival Boss” who must win races and perform stunts to make the festival bigger and unlock more events. Forza Horizon 3 features co-op multiplayer where up to 4 players can play through the majority of the main campaign together, as well as racing competitively or in teams.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is an exclusively multiplayer game where one player is trapped in a virtual room with a ticking time bomb they must defuse. The other players are the “Experts” who must give the instructions to defuse the bomb by deciphering the information found in the bomb defusal manual. But there’s a catch: the experts can’t see the bomb, so everyone will need to talk it out – fast!

To celebrate the New Year, and kicking off a new regime of fortnightly episodes of Connecting to Host, we go through our top 6 co-operative games of 2016. Find out what we played the most of during 2016, including many titles that we have yet to review on our show.

Don’t Starve: Together is a multi-player version of Klei’s rogue-like wilderness survival game Don’t Starve. Join up with your friends and try to survive the long dark nights while exploring the world around you and trying to craft together scraps. Most importantly however, Don’t Starve!

Join us as we discuss the online co-op mode in the frantic third person shooter, Sunset Overdrive. Chaos Squad sees you team up with up to 7 other players to take on quickfire missions and a horde-mode style defense game.

Trine is a physics-based platformer where three heroes make their way through a fairytale world of great castles and strange machinery. While primarily a puzzle-platformer, the Trine Enhanced Edition features online co-op and mod support.

Offworld Trading Company is a real-time strategy game where the focus is on manipulating the stock market, making money and buying out the other players. We review the final Early Access version of the game, just before the official release.

With the recent announcement of Titanfall 2 for Xbox One, PC, and PS4, we thought we would go back in time and talk about the original Titanfall and what it brought to the multiplayer shooter genre.

Join us as we talk about our co-operative experience working through Torchlight II, an action RPG developed by Runic Games that was originally released at the end of 2012.

Specifically built for co-operative action, FORCED is an arcade RPG which takes you through a number of challenging arenas. Join us and find out more about “The Orb” and “Marking up Enemies”, two strong mechanics that make FORCED a fun little online game.