Alien Swarm! Free on Steam!

[MrWally]

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Alien Swarm! What was once an extremely popular UT2k4 mod has not been revamped with the Source engine and is not being released today, July 19th, for FREE on Steam!

 

I'm downloading it right now. I see a bunch of you already have, but I thought I'd still spread the word.

 

Feel free to post your impressions! I'll be coming back here in an hour or two saying what I think of it

 

 

 

EDIT: Played with some friends for a few hours. Feels very much like a top-down L4D, which is a good thing. There are loads of weapon and load out, options. You choose from one of four classes, essentially Tank, DPS, Tech, and Healer. You then choose your main weapon and your secondary weapon, along with some sort of utility (damage amp, armor, freeze grenades, etc). The game is also quite pretty. The lighting is very atmospheric and the monsters are all detailed (to the point where you can easily tell which type you're fighting).

 

I'm headed to the gym so I'll give a more detailed review later, but my only main criticism right now is that the servers are being absolutely assaulted. The lag is pretty bad.

[DarthSlinky]

Its a fun game, I have had a few crashes, but overall it great fun to shoot those critters.

 

The main point of this is not the game itself though, it is a gift to the mod community.

 

Source SDK users have been stuck with the Orange Box version of the engine, with the release of this free game, indie developers and modders may have access to a post L4D2 version of the engine, without requiring them to own L4D2. (and more Steam users doesn't hurt either )

 

This seems to be a growing trend for game companies, respecting independent developers, and realizing that users in many cases are as good as or better then the original developers.

[Liverandbacon]

Woah! That came as a surprise... I thought that Black Cat games had stopped work on the Source version of Alien Swarm (iirc, once called Alien Swarm: Infested) due to lack of interest, RL concerns, and all the other stuff that breaks up mod teams. Nice to see that they were actually working at Valve during the past few years. Downloading.

[leXX]

I used the play the original UT mod with cjais back in the day. Nice of Valve to give it away for free.

[Jeff]

How to play in first person (haven't tried this yet):

 

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Game is fun though, played a bit with Hermie today.

[Inyri]

Just tried it in first person and it's a completely different feel. Those bugs seem a lot bigger in first person.... Would be afraid of what the shield bug would look like.

[Pho3nix]

It's pretty awesome, though I'm having occasional drops in FPS during some areas in specific maps

 

hopin' for a patch >_>

[jrrtoken]

I hate the slo-mo segments, like on the elevator; I thought that it was initially lag. :|

 

Other than that, it's fun fun fun. Someone found a console command that enables the Director a la L4D, and instead of just scripted enemy spawns, the game will literally spawn a mob of 10+ aliens at a given time. Naturally, you'd better keep a sentry ready, or something, because even on Normal the difficulty raises to Insane-esque levels. For anyone interested:

 

asw_horde_override "1"