Slay The Spire 2 Co-op, Explained
The original Slay The Spire kickstarted the craze of the roguelite deckbuilders, but it preceded the one that took over indies in the post-covid era: co-op.
Now, the sequel is bringing back one of the most addictive games ever and letting you play it with friends. Here is the Slay The Spire 2 Co-op, explained.
The Basics
Slay The Spire 2 allows you to play in single-player, but you can also opt for co-op to a maximum of four players. The challenge scales with the number of players, both how much health enemies have and the damage they deal.
The game mostly remains the same, but there are cards, relics, and potions specific for teamplay. Other than that, most rewards you choose are individual.
All players can act simultaneously, and their debuffs affect everyone else. If you apply vulnerable on an enemy, your friends will deal more damage. On the other hand, all enemy attacks hit everyone, too.
This means that you can’t all in into going full glass cannon hoping one of your friends will be your armored tank— even though they technically can, if they get lucky.
Slay The Spire 2 Co-Op Interactions
There are a few things you can do with your teammates, but most of them you can’t. Every potion that is used by “Throwing”, can be used on a teammate. All the ones that say Drink, though, or special ones like Fairy In A Bottle, can only be used on yourself.
Your relics only affect yourself, and you cannot trade them. There are a lot of possible interactions, though. When entering a resting site, you can heal yourself, or opt to heal an ally.
There is an entire roster of cards that is entirely focused on impacting your teammates. These can be used to give your teammates Block, Strength, Energy, Dexterity, most effects that you can think of.
Additionally, playing in co-op means that your run isn’t over when you die. As long as one player is alive, even in a full party of four, all dead players revive at the end of the combat.
This doesn’t mean that the game is necessarily easier in co-op. Slay The Spire 2’s balancing isn’t up to snuff yet, which is understandable given that it just entered Early Access.
In our experience, some fights do get easier in co-op, but others actually get harder. There are certain enemies that get stronger when you do certain actions, like use Skill cards. Those are considerably harder when you have up to four players using those cards.
Slay The Spire 2 Co-Op Weirdness
While we’ve been enjoying the co-op addition to Slay The Spire 2, it needs some work. It feels weird to not be able to trade cards or potions. We’re confident that the system will change considerably between now and 1.0.
As it stands, though, there seems to be no incentive to play the same character as your teammates. You’re much better off having one person on each character. But that means that it doesn’t feel like a co-op experience, it plays more like three parallel solo-runs being played simultaneously.
Interactions are limited and the order in which you do actions has little impact on their outcome, besides the obvious ones like applying vulnerable before your teammate deals their damage (which you would be doing regardless in solo runs).
That’s everything you need to know about Slay The Spire 2’s co-op mode, which while already good, definitely is a work in progress.
