Alien Swarm Best Swarm
Alright, boys and...well, it's an internet video game site, so boys pretty much covers it. It's time for a history lesson. Alien Swarm was originally a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004. Released in, well, 2004, it provided a top-down perspective of you and up to 7 other buddies slaughtered your way through a bunch of aliens all while leveling up the four classes in an RPG like manner. As time wore on, and the game started to show its age, there were reports that a new product was heading to Steam. Then the makers of the mod were hired by Valve to work on L4D, and, three years later, the steam version of Alien Swarm was thought to be vaporware. That is until Valve announced that not only would Alien Swarm be coming out, but that it'd be a sequel and be free. Does this free sequel live up to the original's co-opey goodness, or will you be swarmed with distilled bad the moment you start up the game? Read on!
Alien Swarm (The 2010 sequel, that is) is a four player co-op top-down shooter in which you, a marine working for the ISA, land on an unnamed mining world to shoot you some aliens and finish you some objectives. As with all Valve games, that's pretty much the extent of the story that the game bothers to drop in your lap, but If you want to delve deeper into the world of Alien Swarm you can via ingame PDAs. It's all optional, and, as with most games these days, it's mostly there to give you an excuse to run around playing the game.
And what a game it is. There are four classes: The Officer buffs his group and wields a pretty smarmy shotgun, the Tech welds things and hacks things, the Medic heals up the group, and the Special Weapons runs around with a lock on mini gun (No, really). There are two characters per class, with each character specializing in something different, such as a damage based officer and a buff-the-team based officer. The weapons in game range from your basic assault rifle to the Tesla Coil - which is just as awesome as you're imagining it to be - to a rail gun. Each class has a few weapons restricted to it, such as an actual minigun (a la heavy from TF2) instead of the lock on version, but for the most part the 40ish or so weapons/equipables in game are usable by every class. Want to run around as a medic with a sentry gun? Go right ahead! Want to shotgun it up as a Special Weapons? Be our guest!
The actual gameplay has somewhat of a L4D feel to it. You and your buddies/random strangers/goddamn awful pubbie scum go from point to point on the map, completing objectives as you fight your way past an endless swarm of xenos. Unlike L4D, however, where most people you fought were generic zombies and the focus was on a few rare specials, Alien Swarm has a generally even mix of a number of types of things for you to shoot, from the humble generic alien to the cuthulu dog that launches green orbs of bad at you to the parasites that jump on you and will kill you in no time flat should you not get healed. Now, that's not to say that there aren't special aliens; in fact, there are several types of 'big' aliens with special abilities, such as only being able to be hurt from behind or spawning in an endless wave of suicide crabs. Perhaps the bigger features it shares in common L4D is its difficulty levels. There are four difficulty levels - easy, normal, hard, and insane - and, like L4D, the last one gives the game a completely new feel. For the most part, nay, for almost the entirety of the game, the actual act of experiencing Alien Swarm is a blast. You'll laugh with joy when you and your squad barely scrape through a mission with barely enough bullets to fill a clip and barely enough health to even stand. You'll scream on the mic and jump with horror as a parasite latches onto your face. You'll feel the joy that comes with a hard won victory when you manage to eek out a victory on insane mode. The only part where the shooting, and thus the game, breaks down is when things come from 'below' you (ie: into the screen) or 'above' you (ie: out of the screen). Even with your crosshairs directly on an enemy your marine may still fire on the same 2D plane he/she is on, even if his gun is pointing towards an enemy a few z-levels above him/her.
Along with this exceptional (and exceptionally free) gameplay comes a whole host of other awesome things. The sound, while minimal, is exceptional. The graphics are shocking crisp, rivaling several 20+ dollar purchases on XBLA. Hosting (and joining) games is as easy as it was in L4D2. It's also free, in case I have mentioned that yet. The map tools are, yes, free as well, and are pretty easy to use. Finally, and perhaps best of all, it's free. FREE.
To finish this up, there's not a whole lot more I can say. Alien Swarm is an exceptional game on all levels, from getting into a game to actually shooting some xenos to the joy that you get when you finish a tough mission. It is, in a word, exemplary.
It's also free. I haven't mentioned that yet, have I?
