All Types

Overwatch                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Like you didn't already know. Like you haven't been playing it compulsively since it released. Like the world of PC gaming hasn't become awash with Tracer fan art and Play of the game. Overwatch is a phenomenon, and the class-based multiplayer shooter's still in its infancy.

Slaying demons, playing dress-up and obsessing over loot are all activities that become much, much more interesting with with friends by your side. Blizzard’s hack-and-slash action-RPG franchise might currently seem bogged down in a creative malaise, but the series’ third instalment still packs hundreds of hours of grinding, and gear-stat fetishism despite being over four years old. Better still: it's still receiving the occasional update, including the new Necromancer Class due out late 2017.

CS:GO                                                                                                                              Counter strike: Global Offensive's is an underwhelming origin story. A refresh of Valve’s previous refresh of a Half life one mood, it was conceived as nothing more ambitious than a console port; an experiment to see if PlayStation and Xbox gamers would engage with the Counter-Strike name.  And if PC players fancied another few rounds of de_dust2 while they were at it, what’s the harm?

If you weren’t there when Team Fortress 2 launched, it’s difficult to convey what a delirious and unexpected pleasure it was back in 2007. In development longer than Pangaea, TF2 blindsided everyone when it finally arrived dolled up in cheery and lustrous Pixarian sheen. Instead of the anticipated amalgamations of biceps and military garb, its cast were a brigade of slapstick comedians whose interplay provoked frequent, spirited, and genuine lols.

We’ve no desire to make assumptions about developer Matt Thorson’s testicular region, but it takes some balls to release your game as an Ouya exclusive (perhaps the incentives for N-Gage or Virtual Boy distribution just weren’t high enough). However once that strange period was over, Towerfall received its Ascension subtitle, as well as a release on platforms people actually play. And now we're crowning it one of the best multiplayer games, so the cycle is complete.

Released in 1999, the same year as id’s Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament also made a huge contribution to the online first-person shooter as we know it today. Running around for power-ups, armour shards and super-weapons may have fallen out of favour since its release, but the pace, game modes and map designs set an indelible blueprint for the genre.

It’s easy to be cynical about Worms, now entering its third decade with an appetite for platform proliferation. Chop a turn-based party game from Team17 in half, myth has it, and two new iterations will spring from its remains. But the core is still inspired: 30 seconds in which you must steer your pink avatar around a pockmarked landscape with the aim of bazooka-ing, batting, Super Sheep-ing or otherwise obliterating an opponent before their turn comes around.

Whatever it is you're looking for in a multiplayer game, the MOBA genre, and these pair of juggernauts in particular, probably covers it. You can go in solo to prove your superiority over others, honing your skills in whatever role you prefer to always try to win. You can play more casually with friends, making it your regular multiplayer home, either in the standard 5v5 modes or playing one of several custom games that are always available. Whether you want to be the best in the world - good luck - or just bash about in well designed systems, there's something there.

The battle royale genre has been knocking about since Brendan Greene, or Playerunknown as he’s best known, released the Battle Royale mod for Arma 2 and 3. He also chipped in with the development of H1Z1: King of the Kill. That makes him the father of this emerging genre, and as you might have guessed, Playerunkown’s Battlegrounds is his baby. It’s the battle royale premise boiled down to the bare essentials: 100 players drop into a giant map with nothing but their underwear, scour the map for guns and gear while duking it out until only one of them is left alive. Oh, and there’s a gigantic electrical field slowly closing in around the map to force players into confrontation.

Probably never destined to become an eSport, this one, although there’s undeniable appeal to be found in watching proceedings unfold. KTANE (which sounds like a bad beat-’em-up character or late-’90s house DJ) is a collaborative multiplayer experience in which one participant has a bomb to dismantle but no idea how to do it, while the other has the diffusal manual but no way to see the device itself.