I love cooperative games. In particular, I'm drawn to games in which planning has to take place extemporaneously, when there simply isn't time to discuss and each player has to try to predict their allies' behavior and execute the most complementary plan on the fly.
Well, I say "has to", but maybe that ought to be "should".
I've spent far more time playing Retribution's Last Stand mode than its single player campaign, which means that I've spent a lot of time getting matched up with two strangers for a rousing game of Smash the Eldar. The game is designed in such a way that no one character can be equipped to fight everything; some waves need strong armor-piercing strikes to penetrate the hulls of tanks and wraithlords, while some need area-affecting sprays to dispatch hordes of termagants and guardsmen. In order to be successful, your team of three has to select complimentary loadouts, each member filling in a weakness of the others.
Unfortunately, nobody actually does that.
You select your character and loadout before joining the matchmaking queue, which may be part of the problem. People decide that they're going to play a Space Marine Captain with a jump pack and a power axe before they even see their teammates, and they'll be damned if they're going to change that over a tiny thing like winning. Once you get matched up and everybody can clearly see that nobody on the team has brought a weapon capable of killing two enemies at the same time, it behooves somebody to make a change, but why do that when you can just stumble awkwardly through the first six waves and then be beaten to death by a hundred banshees? Really, isn't that the true essence of fun?
