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Alright, so I have seen loads of people canning the multiplayer aspect of the game, and yes I know it is very much buggy and unfinished. Some argue that it ruins the games atmosphere as the true peril of the game is being alone in a space station where everything is trying to kill you.

However, I disagree. Over the recent years I have developed a huge fondness for co-operative multiplayer, pretty much kickstarted by Minecraft back in the ol' Alpha days where you could work together to accomplish something awesome. I am also a huge fan of character building thanks to Deus Ex which despite being my favourite PC game of all time I'd love even more if you could play the game with a friend with different specialties. Having a situation where your friend lures a hybrid round the corner only for you to sneak behind and bash em with a wrench feels such a joy, and having two people play separate specialties allows for better strategies to progress, such as one person who can use telekinesis to grab that gun that happens to be dangling from a ledge out of reach from their marine partner. I ALWAYS play Navy no matter what, just being a hacker is so gratifying to be able to find cool stuff hidden within containers locked out that nobody can normally get into. Because I love the multiplayer concept so much, it depresses me how barely functional the actual co-op mode is, with no modder programmers taking the initiative to at least improve the connection mechanic, or even make an external client. It worked with Thief 2, why can't it work here?
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tl;dr: I love co-op games that are "meant to be singleplayer" as cast by majority vote. Thief 2 being another example. Does anyone else share my same opinion?

I haven't played this game's co-op mode yet, but I generally love co-op games that don't change much of the singleplayer aspects or make concessions for co-op (like adding an AI partner so the co-op fits the story). Unreal is my favorite example of this; its co-op mode doesn't have any fancy features, but it's still fun.

See, I feel the same way. By making it just the same as the singleplayer but having a partner to screw around the game world with is just fantastic. It made me really disappointed that Far Cry 3's co-op unfortunately wasn't just "play the single player, but screw around in this open sandbox with your friends" and so I haven't touched the multiplayer aspect of that game. I am really looking forward to the JC2 standalone client multiplayer since it would be totally awesome to play in a modded game world with your friend and screw around attaching people to aeroplanes and cars.

I typically hate multiplayer games but a friend of mine convinced me to get this game waaaay back when the multiplayer patch was first released and was completely blown away by it. I played through the single player once or twice after our first coop game but found that I never enjoyed it quite as much. I think we ended up going through it 4 or 5 times together. In single player I felt that I had to generalize far too much; there were too many important things to invest points in if I wanted to have hacking, research, and decent weapon skills. Coop let me actually specialize the way I wanted to and work together with a friend to face the horrors. Specializing didn't make it a bad thing, it meant that while you were great at one thing, you were terrible at everything else and really needed to depend on your partner to make up for what you lacked. All of my memorable moments with this game are from multiplayer sessions.

One of my favourite games was with him as the weapons man and me as the wimpy hacker. He invested all of his points in the weapons skills and strength to carry everything, I went full hacking and research. I only carried the starting wrench and a pistol with a small handful of ammo. I couldn't kill anything to save my life, but I could hack anything. He'd cover me while I was hacking or going through chemical manifests, I'd fix his weapons as they jammed, upgrade them, and salvage anything I could for nanites.

None of this ruined any of the tension; in fact, I'd argue that it actually increased it. I lost count of the number of times I'd turn around and he was simply gone, completely unaware that he had wandered off. There were also times where we'd split up to tackle two problems at the same time, only so that he'd scramble back to save my butt from a horde of the many, or I'd need to rush back to a console to hack the security system that was about to come back online and land him in a bunch of trouble. Despite having another person there with me, the game was still scary and intense. The horror came from the environment, situations, monsters, and music, not just from the feeling of being alone.

I want to play co-op, but no one else does :(

I like it a lot. There is something about being truly alone in that game, but given how big the game environments are, there's something kinda cool about splitting up to get an objective beat more quickly and you THINK you're alone and safe while you're searching for elements to do some research with....

And then your buddy suddenly yells over chat that he's being attacked and you have to leg it back to save him.

I'm not saying it's smart :D but it was fun to act like complete horror movie doofuses, plus as one person pointed out above, you get to specialise and be a level 5 psi / level 6 marine or whatever without worrying about not having the other abilities available.

"One of my favourite games was with him as the weapons man and me as the wimpy hacker. He invested all of his points in the weapons skills and strength to carry everything, I went full hacking and research. I only carried the starting wrench and a pistol with a small handful of ammo. "

^ This is how I played my last game. I always play as the hacker, because I feel my wrench has enough firepower, but it would have been nice to get access to an assault rifle as well as be a top elite computer breaker.

I will confirm that I also love the multiplayer. I just started a game with my sister where she is a marine (Standard Weapons, Repair, Maintain) and I am the Navy Hacker (Energy weapons, hacking, modify, research) (we pass our weapons around to maintain and modify them)

We just got to the Hydroponics deck before we had to stop because her laptop was overheating and she couldn't wait to play some more.

While the multiplayer is definitely not good enough for playing online its great for playing in the same room where you can easily diagnose bugs, like why my inventory would keep opening (my sister had dropped her armor and it became a crate that would open my inventory when she tried to pick it up)

I am hoping that we someday have a New Dark 2.5 patch that adds and fixes multiplayer for the Dark Engine games. There is just all kinds of potential here... :)

I love playing SS2 with my friends! Though it really ruins the horror mood and atmosphere, it's just so much fun blasting though enemies, hogging all the loot and playing pranks on each other. I tend to become a walking chemical storage in out playthroughs because otherwise one of my friends steals all of them and throws them in front of turrets or what not :D

Though it requires some patience to deal with the crashes and whatnot, it's totally worth it. And I too hope that someday the MP would get fixed. That would be the best thing ever.