Cooperative alien-blaster Earthfall lands with a launch trailer

You wait ten years for a Left4Dead successor to come along, and then four swarm you from all sides within the space of a few months. We’ve already had the much-improved Vermintide II earlier this year, while Deep Rock Galactic’s Early Access adds a shade of space dwarf shenanigans to the structure defined by Valve’s co-op classic. There’s even GTFO lurking in the shadows of Q4, quietly hoping to be the Aliens game that Colonial Marines certainly wasn’t.

Right now though, there’s Earthfall, a high-intensity co-op shooter which switches out shambling zombies for scuttling aliens. The game is set in the verdant forests of the Pacific Northwest, and sees players working together across ten missions of extraterrestrial-splattering action.

There’s a little more to Earthfall than a straightforward run-and-gun, however. Players can deploy barricades and gun-turrets to establish defensive positions on the fly, while new weapons can be created via the use of 3D printers. The latter smacks of being a little gimmicky, but the idea of custom fortifications seems like a smart way to get players to work together.

There’s a launch trailer below which, frankly, doesn’t do the best job of selling the game. But if you’re up for some more cooperative gunplay, you can pick up Earthfall right now on Steam for £24. Developers Holospark also have plans to support the game beyond launch, and those future updates won’t cost you nothing more than the time to play them.

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.