5 Great Online Games to Play with Friends

After weeks of rearranging and aligning each of your friend’s busy schedules like an intense game of Tetris, you’ve finally set a date for a night of online gaming. The group chat is abuzz with excited chatter, your partner has relinquished the telly, and you’ve even got EE Full Fibre – a lightning fast, performance-enhancing broadband designed especially for gamers. Nothing is going to come between you and the top of the leaderboards, my friend.

Then it happens – everyone ambles into the party chat like hapless toddlers, and the choice paralysis begins. No one can agree on a title, and you’re all stuck staring at your “installed games” with the overwhelming feeling that you’ll be spending more time bickering about what to play, than playing anything at all.

Let us make this easy for you, whether you’re looking to compete or collaborate, here are 5 of the best online games to play with friends…

And if you’re still unsure about the stability of your broadband and don’t want to end up (literally) lagging behind your squad, here’s some more info on why EE Full Fibre is the UK’s most reliable broadband, boasting 1.6Gbps speeds to take online gaming to the next level.

Let’s get stuck into our top picks!

Sea of Thieves

Avast ye, scurvy sea dogs – for our first entry takes us to the high seas for some cooperative nautical tomfoolery. Sea of Thieves is the quintessential pirate experience, letting you set sail with a crew of up to three friends to explore a perilous expanse of aquatic kingdoms and uncharted islands. Draw maps for your buried treasure, take quests to hunt for loot, dabble in a spot of fishing, battle other pirate vessels, and even square off against gnarly beasts like the mighty Kraken and the (supposedly extinct!) Megalodon.

There’s so much freedom to charter your own course in Sea of Thieves, making it perfect for a bunch of friends looking to forge their own co-op adventure with few restrictions on how they play. Customize your crew with the likes of scars and tattoos, sea shanties and weaponry, and deck out (pun fully intended) your ship with furnishings and upgrades.

And if you’re not looking to pick a fight with other pirates, just pop Safer Seas mode on to explore the ocean at your leisure. Now, bring me that horizon…

Among Us

Our next title also contains a crew, but it’s less “matey” and more “murdery.” Among Us sees you and your fellow crewmates hanging out on a spaceship, doing maintenance tasks to keep everything on course, with one very important twist…one of you is an imposter out to murder the rest of the team. Yikes.

Each match can have one or more imposters (depending on your pre-chosen settings) who must pretend to blend in with the other crewmates until they’re able to pick one off to kill. When a body is found, a crewmate can then sound the alarm and call a meeting, where everyone (including those treacherous imposters) have to debate who they think the killer is, in a battle of deception drawing parallels to the infamous Round Table in BBC’s The Traitors. It’s a ton of fun, designed for between 4 and 15 players (though we recommend pulling in as many mates as possible to make the best of the experience), and super easy to pick up for friends who are more casual gamers.

Overwatch 2

If you’ve got four friends and an itchy trigger finger, Blizzard’s critically acclaimed 5v5 hero shooter, Overwatch 2, is a great shout for your squad. It’s free-to-play (so maximum accessibility for the whole gang) and features 40 plus heroes to choose from, each with unique playstyles. The objective of each match varies depending on the mode, but it’s a great blend of competitive action and collaboration, as you and your mates must work together, utilizing the key gameplay roles of Damage, Support, and Tank, to seize victory and topple the opposing team. If you play regularly, you and your team will undoubtedly experience the satisfaction of feeling like a well-oiled machine, something that makes Overwatch 2 so compelling.

And take our word for it, if there’s one game in this list that requires a high-speed, unshakeable broadband connection, it’s Overwatch 2. The fast, frenetic gameplay requires the ultimate precision in kill-or-be-killed moments, something EE Full Fibre helps players achieve with 1.6Gbps speeds, super low ping and WiFi 7, the latest generation of WiFi technology that delivers a faster connection and low latency to keep lag from impacting your matches.

Plus, as a live service game, Overwatch 2 is always expanding, rolling out seasonal content roughly every nine weeks to keep the experience fresh.

Fall Guys Ultimate Knockout

Fall Guys has all the whimsical charm and humour of oddball game shows like Takeshi’s Castle and It’s a Knockout, combined with a seriously addictive party royale format and easy to pick up platforming mechanics – ideal for more casual players who aren’t as keen on hardcore twitch shooters. The premise is simple: compete in several rounds of absurd obstacle courses and hilarious mini-games, with the aim to be the last bean standing, or (depending on the randomised finale) the first to snatch a crown.

Much like Overwatch, the content is constantly evolving, and the cosmetics are an absolute joy – you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a hot dog costume running full pelt into a spinning fan and being yeeted off the course. The only thing better than winning a match is looking utterly ridiculous winning a match.

Plus, it’s free to play and has cross-play enabled, meaning you can party up with three friends on any platform…so what’ve you bean waiting for?

Halo Infinite

Our final entry on this list is, quite simply, a legacy title when it comes to multiplayer gaming. Halo Infinite, the most recent entry in the series, features a myriad of competitive and collaborative gameplay experiences, from wave-based survival mode Firefight: King of the Hill to the beloved Oddball, where players must take possession of a skull for longer than the other players to win. As with most Halo games, there’s also a co-op campaign too, so you and a friend can step into Master Chief’s massive boots and play out chapters in the epic story together.

And if you’re feeling imaginative, Halo’s content creation tool, Forge Mode, has advanced tech features and a powerful AI Toolkit to let fans create their own playable Halo experiences, such as custom maps and bespoke modes for your mates to dive into.

All of these games guarantee an absolute blast online, and you can now bag a massive 24 month subscription of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which includes many of the titles above and 100s more, when you purchase EE Full Fibre. Being the only broadband made exclusively for gamers, EE’s Full Fibre also includes Game Mode, to turbocharge your WiFi by minimizing latency, connect you on to the best server for the title you’re playing, and even let you prioritize bandwidth to keep your gaming sessions uninterrupted. Can’t promise your partner won’t want the TV back at some point though…