Revision 8

Tears of Metal is designed from the ground up as a co-op experience. Players can join together online with up to three additional friends for a full four-player campaign. The game also supports solo play, making co-op an option rather than a requirement.

Online Co-op

Online co-op supports up to four players simultaneously. Each player controls their own playable hero, and different hero combinations can create powerful team synergies when combined with compatible artifact builds. The game uses online multiplayer only; no local split-screen co-op has been announced.

Sessions are hosted rather than server-based, and open games appear in a Public Lobbies list. A launch-day hotfix stopped lobbies for campaigns that had already started from appearing there.

Cross-Platform Play

Cross-play between the Steam build and the Microsoft Store build shipped with Early Access. A hotfix on launch day, July 22, 2026, repaired an issue that was stopping players from using multiplayer cross-play at all, and the Microsoft Store product record lists cross-platform multiplayer and cross-platform co-op among the game's capabilities.

Cross-play compatibility depends on both parties running the same build, and Steam updates are approved faster than the Microsoft Store and Game Pass versions. Every patch from July 24, 2026 onward has therefore shipped with cross-play temporarily disabled on the default Steam branch while the matching Microsoft Store build catches up, the August 14, 2026 build included. Paper Cult publishes a Steam beta branch named crossplay that stays matched to the Game Pass version, so players who mainly play cross-platform can sit on that branch and receive updates slightly later rather than losing cross-play. The studio has noted that staying on the older branch means missing newer save-safety work.

Separately, the game supports Xbox Play Anywhere, so a single Microsoft Store purchase covers both Xbox Series X|S and Xbox on PC, and progress carries between them. Play Anywhere is a purchase and save-sync feature rather than a cross-play feature; the two are independent.

Challenge Shop Co-op

The Challenge Shop mode, unlocked after defeating the boss Gilles the Hog, supports the full co-op party of up to four players. This high-difficulty mode is designed to be tackled solo or with friends for greater rewards.

Progression in Co-op

In co-op sessions, players share the same campaign run and must coordinate artifact selection, soldier management, and combat strategy. Permanent soldier losses apply across the shared campaign, so the whole party must work together to protect experienced troops and advance through increasingly difficult environments.

Reviving Downed Players

A player who goes down in co-op can be brought back by a teammate within a time limit. What that costs changed on August 13, 2026, when Paper Cult replaced the coin price with a health price.

The reviving player gives up 50% of their current health. The revived player returns with health proportional to the share of maximum health that was actually surrendered, so a revive performed from a fuller bar returns more. A player needs more than 10% of their own maximum health remaining before they can revive anyone at all. Each revive that happens during a run shortens the window for the next one by five seconds.

Paper Cult described the reasoning at length. The game originally shipped with no revive mechanic; the coin-based version was added to make co-op more forgiving across different skill levels. The studio then judged the coin cost wrong on two counts: it competed directly with buying Charms, pushing players to hoard coins instead, and because the price rose with every revive it could snowball into an amount a party could not reach. Under the health-based system a revive can be taken immediately and the health recovered later at a healing fountain, whose price now rises only between Acts rather than with each death. The studio presented the change as an Early Access experiment and asked for feedback on it.

Early Access Caveats

Paper Cult describes online multiplayer as fully supported in the Early Access build while noting that it is still being balanced and stabilised, and multiplayer stability was the explicit focus of the second open beta in 2025.

Desync is the most-reported multiplayer problem since launch. The studio traced it largely to players connecting through distant relay servers, or to hosts on less stable connections, and named networking optimisation one of its two top priorities alongside mid-run saving. That work shipped on August 13, 2026, after which the studio described networking as drastically improved and desync as far less common, while noting that players on poor connections may still see short, infrequent stutters. A follow-up build the next day stopped Elite and boss health, Threat levels and the campaign map from drifting apart between clients. A number of multiplayer crashes and freezes are attributed to the same networking layer rather than to the game logic.

Co-op sessions include in-game chat, and both storefront listings flag in-game chat and online interactivity as elements that no age rating covers.