Pick of the Month · July 2026: Palworld
July belongs to Palworld — Pocketpair's monster-taming survival hit finally sheds the Early Access tag with its 1.0 update, more than two years after launching to a Steam-shattering 2-million-plus concurrent players. The full release brings new islands, a raid-boss roster, and endgame base-defense content substantial enough to anchor a whole weekend of co-op.
The pitch is still the joke that ate the internet: catch adorable creatures, put them to work on the assembly line, arm them with guns, then raid your neighbor's base for the loot they were sitting on. Dedicated servers scale to 32 players, so the friend-slop math is easy — the whole group logs on, splits into hunting, farming, and defense duty, and nobody sits out.
A sprawling factory-survival sandbox built for a Discord call that runs way past midnight.
Gear up your squad
Featured
Read next
2026-09-04
2026-08-28
2026-08-21
2026-08-07
Guides you'll like
When the voice channel has a dozen people in it, most co-op games break. These do not.
Eight is the awkward middle number. Here is how to plan a night where nobody sits out.
New to chaotic voice-chat co-op? Play these five in order and you will understand the whole genre.
Get in, grab the loot, get out alive — the PvPvE and PvE runs built for a tight crew.
Best-of shortlists
Into V Rising's base-building and raiding loop? Here are 10 co-op survival-craft games, from Valheim to Enshrouded, ranked best first.
Real roles, real comms — 10 of the best tactical co-op games on Steam for squads who'd rather plan than panic, ranked best first.
Go in, grab the loot, get out alive — 10 of the best extraction co-op games on Steam for your friend group, ranked best first.
No monsters, no quotas, no yelling — just 10 relaxed co-op games for Steam nights when your group wants to unwind, not survive.
Nobody picked it, so nobody can complain. That's just physics.