REVIEW
8.0· Great
It Takes Two Review 2026: Still the Co-Op Benchmark Five Years On
Our It Takes Two review 2026 asks whether Hazelight's GOTY winner still holds up. Five years on, the answer is a confident yes. Worth it in 2026?
Opening
The most considered co-op game released in the last decade cost £19.99 and came out in 2021. It Takes Two still holds that position in 2026. Josef Fares and Hazelight Studios built a mandatory two-player adventure where every one of seven chapters discards its mechanics entirely and replaces them with something new: hammer-and-nail traversal gives way to magnet puzzles, time manipulation, and a four-hour miniaturised Rose’s Room sequence that functions as a game inside a game. Split Fiction arrived in early 2025 and pushed Hazelight’s scope further, yet It Takes Two’s combination of mechanical invention and emotional grounding has not aged out of relevance. With a free Friend’s Pass included in every copy, over 20 million copies sold, and a Game of the Year win at The Game Awards 2021, this is the co-op game that five years of competition has not displaced. The kind of design that asks two players to commit to the same evening and earns the ask.
Game Snapshot
| Developer | Hazelight Studios |
| Publisher | Electronic Arts (EA Originals) |
| Release Date | 26 March 2021 (PC, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series X/S); 4 November 2022 (Nintendo Switch) |
| Platforms | PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Windows PC, Nintendo Switch |
| Price | ~£19.99 / $29.99 |
| Rating | PEGI 12 / ESRB T (Teen) |
| Genre | Co-op action-adventure (mandatory two-player only) |
| Length | ~11,14 hours (main story co-op); ~14,16 hours (completionist) |
| Install Size | ~43 GB (PS5); ~9.5 GB (Switch) |
Presentation and World Design
The first thing this game asks of the two people sharing a sofa is to commit to the same Tuesday evening for ten hours running, which is a harder ask than it sounds and the game earns it.
It Takes Two is not one world: it is seven consecutive ones, each built around a single emotional beat in Cody and May’s fractured marriage. The family property, which spans a garden, a tree house, a clock tower, a snow globe, and eventually the attic where the story resolves, does not function as an open space to explore. Each chapter is a contained environment built entirely to serve its mechanical premise. The garden shed, scaled to the size of insects, becomes a space of asymmetric tools and vertiginous drops. Rose’s Room expands into a dense playground of toy kingdoms, book worlds, and a space sequence that would not feel out of place in a different game entirely.
Character models are expressive without being photorealistic, and the animation work on Cody and May as dolls gives them a personality the motion-captured human versions cannot quite match.
Navigation is largely linear, though each chapter hides small minigames and collectible moments off the critical path. The pacing between set-pieces is tight. The visual identity shifts dramatically chapter to chapter, which prevents any single aesthetic from outstaying its welcome. A reader looking for a different kind of environmental variety across short chapters will find comparable section-by-section reinvention in Resident Evil Requiem.
Gameplay and Combat
No mechanical system introduced in one chapter carries over to the next. Cody and May receive a unique asymmetric ability set for each chapter, spend a few hours exploring and extending those abilities, then discard them entirely when the scene changes. The Shed gives Cody a throwable nail and May a hammer with a rope swing. The Cuckoo Clock gives Cody time rewind over objects and May a clone she can teleport back to. The Snow Globe rests on magnet polarity. Rose’s Room rotates through six or seven distinct mechanics across its four-hour runtime.
No mechanic functions solo. The rope swing only works when one player anchors and the other swings. The magnet chapter asks players to swap polarities in real time to solve traversal puzzles that neither could navigate alone. Communication and coordination are built into the fabric of the game rather than bolted on.
The difficulty sits at a considered middle register. Platforming sequences ask for precision, boss fights ask for pattern recognition and timed coordination, and failure sends players back a manageable distance rather than a long one.
Mechanical variety at this scale carries one genuine risk: some systems are thinner than others. The time manipulation chapter’s puzzles resolve quickly, and one or two minigame sequences overstay their point before the game moves on. For a reader who wants to extend the co-op session into something longer and more systems-heavy, the best co-op games on PS5 in 2026 provide the context needed to place It Takes Two within the wider catalogue.
Story and Characters
Cody and May are a couple in the process of divorce. Their daughter Rose, trying to repair things with a homemade spell and two cloth dolls, inadvertently traps her parents' consciousnesses inside those dolls. What follows is a journey back through their shared history, guided by Dr Hakim, a sentient self-help book with an aggressively optimistic manner and an unearned confidence in his own methods.
The emotional premise is earnest and effective in places, particularly in the early chapters where the miniaturised scale makes the domestic setting feel genuinely strange. Cody and May's dynamic shifts from resentful to collaborative as the mechanics ask for it, and the game earns several of its quieter moments through environmental storytelling rather than dialogue. The attic chapter, which closes the game, lands its emotional beats with more restraint than the chapters that precede it.
Dr Hakim functions as comedy relief and exposition delivery. His presence is more polarising than anything else in the game. The jokes land unevenly. The character's persistence in scenes that earn their gravity undercuts what the writing is trying to do. The game's treatment of the divorce narrative draws complaint from some quarters for its resolution, which sidesteps the harder questions Rose's setup raises.
The story never achieves the weight it occasionally reaches for, but it does not need to. The emotional throughline is functional and specific enough to give the chapters meaning without asking that a player invest deeply in Cody and May as characters. It is a workable frame for the mechanics, and mostly it works. A reader drawn to the family-and-relationships premise who also wants a solo experience will find a similar emotional register in God of War: Sons of Sparta.
Value and Longevity
At £19.99 / $29.99, It Takes Two is the most accessible entry point in Hazelight's catalogue. The Friend's Pass, included free with every purchase, lets a second player download and join the game at no cost. That changes the effective cost calculation considerably: splitting the purchase price between two players brings this below £10 / $15 per person.
There is no post-game content. No New Game Plus. Replayability comes from replaying with different co-op partners rather than from mechanical depth that accumulates across runs.
EA Play and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can access It Takes Two at no additional purchase cost. The game remains on EA Play's library and is accessible through Game Pass Ultimate's EA Play benefit, which makes it available to a substantial proportion of console players at no extra outlay.
Hazelight's follow-up, Split Fiction, arrived in early 2025 and represents the studio's most technically ambitious co-op work. For anyone who finishes It Takes Two and wants more, Split Fiction is the natural next step. It Takes Two's particular combination of emotional grounding, mechanical invention, and accessible price has made it the co-op recommendation that runs across every platform for five consecutive years.
Technical Notes
It Takes Two runs cleanly in 2026 across its supported platforms. On PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, the game targets 60 frames per second with no notable performance issues. The PS5 version carries an install size of approximately 43 GB, which is generous relative to the visuals but consistent with the breadth of distinct environments.
The Switch version asks for approximately 9.5 GB of storage and runs at a reduced resolution and frame rate compared to home consoles. The physical Switch release requires an additional download. For handheld-only players, the Switch version is functional and complete; for anyone with access to a PS5 or Xbox Series console, the higher-performance versions provide a noticeably sharper and steadier experience, particularly during split-screen play where both cameras need to run simultaneously.
The build is stable. No persistent bugs or stability issues are reported at current firmware. The game has received no major post-launch patches that alter the core experience, and the version available in 2026 is effectively identical to the launch build. Split-screen implementation offers both horizontal and vertical options, selectable in the menu at any point. For a broader view of which console platform handles co-op and family titles best in 2026, the best PS5 games guide covers the full range of options currently available.
Final Word
No chapter asks one player to wait whilst the other solves a puzzle. The magnet snowglobe sequence, where Cody and May must coordinate polarity flips in real time across a shared traversal puzzle, is the kind of moment the game produces consistently and that comparably-priced alternatives cannot reliably match. Skip it only if you have no one to play with: the Friend's Pass solves the cost barrier, but there is no solo mode and no workaround for the requirement that two people sit down together. For a reader with a co-op partner, this belongs on the list of best cosy games of 2026 and holds its place among the best Switch 2 games available. Five years without a true rival is not an accident.
FAQ
Is It Takes Two worth playing in 2026? It Takes Two is worth playing in 2026 for a reader who has a co-op partner. At £19.99 the eleven-to-fourteen-hour main story still has no genuine rival in mandatory two-player design, and the Friend’s Pass lets a second player join free. A solo player cannot play it: there is no single-player mode and no workaround for the two-person requirement. The reader who wants a solo session is not this game’s audience, and the game knows it.
How long does It Takes Two take to finish? It Takes Two runs approximately eleven to fourteen hours for the main co-op story, and fourteen to sixteen hours for completionists pursuing every minigame and hidden chapter detail. The pacing is tight: each of the seven chapters lasts one to two hours and introduces a new mechanical premise, so the runtime never feels stretched.
Do both players need to buy It Takes Two? Only one player needs to purchase It Takes Two. The Friend’s Pass, included free with every copy, lets a second player download the game and join the host’s session at no cost. The pass works across PlayStation, Xbox, PC, and Nintendo Switch, making the effective cost per player half the listed price.
Can you play It Takes Two solo? It Takes Two has no single-player mode and cannot be played solo. Every mechanic in the game is built around two players coordinating in real time, from polarity-flip puzzles in the magnet chapter to rope-swing traversal in the shed. The Friend’s Pass removes the cost barrier but the two-person requirement is absolute.
Useful Links
Summary
It Takes Two is Hazelight Studios’ mandatory two-player co-op action-adventure, released in March 2021 and ported to Nintendo Switch in November 2022. Across seven chapters built around the fractured marriage of Cody and May, the game introduces, develops, and discards a new asymmetric mechanical system every few hours. The eleven-to-fourteen-hour main story carries no genuine rival in 2026, and the Friend’s Pass lets a second player join free across PlayStation, Xbox, PC, and Switch. The PS5 install size is approximately 43 GB; the Switch version compresses to 9.5 GB. At £19.99 it is the most accessible entry point in Hazelight’s catalogue. A player without a co-op partner cannot play it. A player with one will find the design intelligence has not aged in five years.
8.0
Great
SpawningPoint Verdict
Review summary
It Takes Two is a co-op action-adventure from Hazelight Studios, developed under the direction of Josef Fares and published by Electronic Arts. Two players control Cody and May, a divorcing couple transformed into dolls, across seven chapters that each discard their mechanics entirely and introduce new asymmetric systems. The game requires two players throughout, with no solo option, and a free Friend's Pass means only one copy is needed. Visual and performance quality holds across PS5 and PC; the Switch version is functional but reduced. Dr Hakim's comic presence undercuts some emotional scenes, and the narrative avoids its harder questions. The game won Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2021 and has sold over 20 million copies. At £19.99 / $29.99, it remains the clearest co-op recommendation available in 2026.
