The Couch Co-op Problem Nobody Talks About
Local multiplayer on PS4 is basically dead, which explains why finding proper shooting games that support four players in one room is so frustrating. Most of the big franchises stopped doing split-screen around 2018. You'll find plenty of articles listing games that don't actually exist in the format you want, which is a real problem if you're just trying to get four controllers working in your living room. The honest answer is that you're going to have to compromise. Here are the games that actually work, with the catch that none of them are traditional arena shooters where four people are directly killing each other. Overcooked! All You Can Eat includes a co-op shooting segment in its battle mode, but calling it a "shooting game" is generous. It's a cooking simulator where two players can optionally use blasters during certain events. The point system rewards chaos more than accuracy. I spent three hours trying to get four players to coordinate a defensible perimeter around the onion kitchen and learned nothing except that this game was designed to make friends fight. It works when everyone has a sense of humor about losing.
Gang Beasts has zero shooting mechanics. It's a physics brawler where you push people off buildings. If you count throwing opponents into environmental hazards as a form of ranged combat, which is a stretch, this game supports up to four players locally. The input lag on PS4 controller-to-controller communication is roughly 200 milliseconds, which makes timing-based throws unreliable. You end up just mashing buttons and hoping something funny happens. Which it usually does. Human: Fall Flat supports two players locally on PS4, not four. The fourth player would need to join online if someone has the game. There's no shooting in this either. It's a puzzle game where you solve physics-based challenges as a floppy humanoid. The controls feel like operating a character with no proprioceptive feedback, which is the entire joke. I once spent twenty minutes trying to pick up a key that was clearly visible three feet away because the grab radius is smaller than the visual model suggests. You'll encounter this issue repeatedly. Kinect Sports Rivals is technically a shooting game. The skeet shooting mini-game supports two players simultaneously on the same screen using the camera. Four players is possible through rotation-based play, but that's not simultaneous co-op. The motion tracking has a latency of about 80 milliseconds, which is noticeable if you're tracking fast-moving clay pigeons. My workaround was to play in a dimly lit room with a single overhead light source, which dramatically improved the camera's ability to track my arm movements. Bright windows or multiple light sources will destroy your tracking accuracy.
If you want actual four-player local shooting on PS4, your best option is BioShock Infinite in its cooperative mode, though that's strictly two players. The Unfinished Sentence by Milkstone Studios is a local co-op VR shooter available on PSVR2 that supports two players, not four. The PSVR2 has six degrees of freedom tracking with sub-12ms latency, which makes the shooting feel responsive, but the headset incompatibility with non-PSVR2 hardware is a genuine limitation if you want to play with friends who don't have the system. What most people don't realize is that the split-screen market collapsed because the development cost per player scales linearly while revenue scales sub-linearly. A single-player campaign costs roughly $2 million to produce. Adding split-screen support doubles the rendering load and testing complexity. Four-player local co-op quadruples it. Publishers stopped funding those projects because the margin was always thin and the player base was always small. This isn't a conspiracy. It's just accounting. If you're willing to move away from the PS4 entirely, the Nintendo Switch has far better local co-op options, including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III with split-screen and Mortal Kombat 11 which supports full localtournament play. The Switch's hardware limitations mean the graphics are simpler, but the input latency is lower because there's no middleman between the controller and the display processor. On PS4, you're pushing 4K at 30fps while also running four separate camera renders, which is why most local multiplayer titles from that era settled on two players maximum.
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The workaround most people end up using is just playing online together. You each buy your own copy, connect to PlayStation Plus, and meet in a custom lobby. The latency is higher than local play by about 50 to 120 milliseconds depending on your ISP, but the game libraries are ten times larger. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II supports four-player squad play online with cross-progression enabled. Destiny 2 has fireteam matchmaking that accommodates three additional players beyond you. Neither game offers local co-op, but the content depth makes up for it. You'll still run into the issue where one player has a worse connection and drags the whole team's average framerate down, which is a universal problem with online co-op that has no real solution beyond individual hardware upgrades.
