Void Crew, Deep Rock Galactic, and Helldivers 2: three co-op games, three “shooters” (kind of, more on that later), and three games that build on their own self-contained fiction. I’ve played all three. I’ve enjoyed all three. So why do I only admire two of them?

I enjoy co-op or team-based games. The genre can vary—the important part for me is the co-op focus—but usually these games are shooters. That’s just what our overall game market looks like these days.

Deep Rock Galactic puts you in the dirty boots of a dwarf sent to mine resources from the caves of a hostile planet. You and your fellow dwarves (up to four of you in total) must work together to accomplish your mission, facing ever-escalating hordes of angry bugs and other foes. There’s an extremely powerful emphasis on teamwork. While no one ever tells you that Management is your enemy, the game makes clear that the company you work for doesn’t really care that much about you.

Helldivers 2 casts you as the faceless heroic soldier of a fascist expansionist humanity—until you die, at which point you are yet another faceless heroic soldier, and then another, and then another. Yet again, you must operate as a team with your fellow players to carry out your missions, but instead of mining rocks you’re heroically bringing “Freedom” and “Democracy“ to benighted planets. If you accept literally everything the game tells you as truth, you’ll believe a huge number of contradictory things. If you pay even a modicum of attention you’ll realize that: you’re being lied to; you’re the baddies; and, last but not least, you’ll die horribly for people who don’t actually care about you.

Void Crew downloads an instance of your cloud-based consciousness into a freshly generated meat suit so that you can crew a spaceship and carry out the directives of your weird space cult. While a player can solo a mission with enough skill, luck, and determination, ships need a whole crew of meat suits to really shine. Also, most missions will wreck you if you don’t have help. Like DRG and Helldivers 2, Void Crew’s lore leans dystopian. Your weird space cult may actually be ordering you to exterminate a very large number of intelligent lifeforms while dismissing them as non-entities unworthy of recognition.

All three games are co-op. All three have their own lore baked into the game. All three have communities of helpful randos who will join your missions and work with you (though DRG and Void Crew are more reliably positive in that regard). All three are fun!

So far, so comparable.

But Void Crew is the odd one out here for several reasons. First, it’s still in Early Access. Second, it’s the least “shooter” of the bunch; you are first and foremost crewing a ship, which includes piloting it and fixing it and upgrading it. Shooting generally happens while crewing your big shipboard weapons rather than while running around. Third, Void Crew is the least engaging of this trio’s fictional settings, and that’s what I really want to focus on.

Oddly, it’s not the setting’s concepts that hurt Void Crew—it’s Void Crew’s delivery that drags it down. It focuses on exposition rather than integration, and—when setting elements are integrated—its incorporation of those concepts into the game itself is lackluster. While Void Crew has an opening cinematic and plenty of text to convey its larger world, it relies on clumsy exposition. Once that exposition has passed, it is possible to exist in the game with very little to remind you of the game’s setting or lore. Important systems and elements of play are included without any connection to the larger story the game is telling. Worse, I honestly couldn’t tell you whether that larger story has been incorporated into the game’s environment. Practically speaking, that means it hasn’t been. Compare this with DRG, and you begin to understand why Void Crew sticks out so painfully.

DRG says very relatively little about its world in overt exposition. Instead of a wall of text about the setting, you are told that it’s time to start mining for the company. The in-game setup area includes a bar, but you have to pay the company for your drinks. There are motivational posters on the walls, and displays showing what you and your fellow miners in the several different unions have achieved recently. An administrator will occasionally scold you for misbehaving, especially if you, say, drop something into your mining rocket’s launch bay. Everything about the game, from the aesthetics of the spaces to the voice lines of the dwarves to the implications of weapon upgrades’ brief descriptions, all of it says the same thing loud and clear: you are working for a massive company that does not care about you, and your only hope for survival and success is to find solidarity and good teamwork with your fellow miners.

There aren’t any essays required, you pick up all that you need to know just by listening and looking around in the game.

Helldivers 2 is similarly evocative and effective, though it takes a necessarily different approach. Helldivers 2 is satirizing fascism, with all of its frequent bombastic self-aggrandizement, and so you’re treated to propaganda videos that are labelled as “required viewing.” You’re sent through a training program where you may die (your death will barely be acknowledged) while you’re bombarded with celebratory lies about how awesome Super Earth is, and how incredible Super Earth’s soldiers are, and thus how amazing you must be too. You’re treated as a cartoonishly capable and heroic figure, but you will often be ineffectual and will die screaming. If you pay attention to the newsfeeds playing in the background you’ll hear pompous celebrations of how even children are now joining Super Earth’s armed forces, when the recruitment of children and the elderly is usually the last stage of desperate and losing polities.

Again, no essays are required. If you pay attention while you play the game, you’ll understand: Helldivers 2 puts you in the position of a citizen of a desperate fascist government that is lying to its people. It is immersive.

And that’s the difference, really. DRG and Helldivers 2 are both immersive. All three of these games are good co-op fun, but only two of them have well-crafted immersive worlds. Perhaps that is why people playing Void Crew will sometimes shout “Sweet Liberty!” or “Rock and Stone!” but will never celebrate the glories of Metem, their space cult.

For what it’s worth, Void Crew is still in Early Access. Void Crew is also fun to play. But it doesn’t offer the same kind of all-encompassing world-building that these other, comparable co-op games have embraced. I hope it manages to deliver that some day. It would be a better game for it.