What Steel Rain is
Steel Rain is a shoot-'em-up with strategy and RPG layers built around it. You command two combat wings at once, and you can switch between three formations and six customizable firemodes whenever the fight changes shape. The shooting is fast and dense, with big enemy fleets, missiles to dodge, and boss fights to survive across seven planets. Outside the battles you have a whole base layer: build and defend colonies, run research to unlock buildings, skills, drones and combat tech, craft items in your factories and citadels, and equip upgrades on ten different wings across six upgrade categories. Missions hand out the experience points and cash you need for the more exotic upgrades, and you have to remember to actually install what you earn.
Playing together
Steel Rain has a 2 player local co-op mode where both players fight together and command drones. The Steam listing also carries Remote Play Together, so a friend can join your session over the internet even though the co-op itself is local. Beyond co-op, there is PvP, and the game supports leaderboard positions and classic rankings if you want to measure runs against other players.
Before you start
There is a lot of surface area here, so expect a learning curve rather than a quick arcade blast. You get three game modes — Survival, Campaign and Arcade — each with its own upgrade system, plus randomly generated orbital patrol missions and a built-in stage editor for making, sharing and downloading your own stages. Difficulty comes in 10 levels with a hardcore mode on top, so you can tune how demanding a run feels. Full gamepad and joystick support is included, which matters for a game this twitchy. There are over 80 achievements to work through, and the tag list marks it as a singleplayer game as well as a co-op one, so you can play the whole thing alone if nobody is around.