Abstract: In recent years, the coordination of multiple unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) has attracted increasing attention in fields of marine unmanned systems due to its advantages in autonomous operation, intelligent coordination, and flexible deployment. By leveraging networked communications and cooperative control strategies, multiple USVs can collaboratively execute complex maritime missions, demonstrating significant strategic value in marine resource exploration, ocean environmental monitoring, maritime security, and emergency response. Although substantial progress has been made in recent years, many challenges remain in key technologies, including networking and communication mechanisms, swarm coordination strategies, and distributed control methods. To address these issues, this paper systematically reviews the system architecture, functional composition, and typical application scenarios of multiple USV systems. In particular, the development trends, representative approaches, and critical bottlenecks in key areas, including swarm communications and networking, swarm control, cooperative optimization, and game-theoretic decision-making, are comprehensively summarized. First, the research progress in communication and networking technologies for multiple USVs is reviewed from the perspectives of topology optimization and inter-vehicle communication mechanisms. Subsequently, the research progress and inherent limitations of conventional cooperative control approaches for multiple USVs are reviewed from the perspectives of path coordination, formation control, dynamic interception, target encirclement missions, and motion control. Furthermore, in response to the growing demands of complex maritime environments, emerging research paradigms based on optimization theory and non-cooperative game frameworks are summarized, highlighting their potential for balancing individual objectives with collective performance. Finally, the current state of research is synthesized, and future development trends, together with key technical challenges in USV cooperative techniques, are discussed.