So apparently this new "mod" is coming out called Alien Swarm being featured on Steam.

From what I understand, it's a mod development team that works under Valve, so you know the quality is going to be amazing. Not to mention they integrated 4-player co-op into it. Oh, and I haven't reached the best part yet.

It's free.

Just thought I'd give everyone a heads up that might be interested! Look for it this upcoming Monday.

Yeah I'm getting it, why the hell not after all?

Just hope my useless shitty graphics card can handle it...

Yeah, I'm wondering how graphically intensive it is. TF2 is already killing me on particle effects and whatever else that I can barely pull over 10fps in these days.

Sigh....My response is sadly resounding disappointment. I hadn't slept for a while when I played it, and my friends decided to play it without me (So I'm now a way lower level, which means playing it on my own to catch up. YAY BORDERLANDS) because of my download speed, which made it impossible to enjoy anyway, but there are many faults in its current form...

-Friendly fire, it happens. A lot. You either shoot at an alien behind your friend and kill both of them, or let your friend die.
-Everything looks the same. Everything. It's probably free because they spent all of their colour budget and could only afford grey with a bit of red for the aiming laser.
-The aiming laser for some reason sometimes stops working and makes shooting really hard. Or maybe I did something wrong. I dunno.
-The screen shakes when you get hit. Hard. It's impossible to see when this happens
-Levels are short and samey, I sort of get the same feeling with borderlands, that everything I'm doing is pointless because I don't know what's going on.
-HURRAH A SUPPORT CHARACTER I HATE WHO SHOWS UP EVERY STAGE.
-And you'll see him a lot - When you die you restart the mission. Not as bad because they're tiny, but they're also samey, so they get boring.
-If you say, have 3 bullets left in your gun, and you reload, you lose those 3 bullets. Not that annoying there, but if you shoot once, then press reload instinctively, you lose all those bullets.
-The characters have about 1 phrase for each situation. Whenever I purp--Accidentally shot our medic, she seemed to yell "CRAP SHIT" sarcastically at me. Or maybe that was the name of the hipster character I was using. Hipsters have weird names.
-When characters die, it pauses and zooms in on them dying. But because every character looks the same, it seems pointless.
-There are aliens that grab on to you, and the only (Or the way it told me to do it) way to get them off is to heal yourself or have a medic heal you. Don't get why you can't just brush them off, and why healing them would get them off you in the first place. Are they allergic to human medicine?

I think there were more. Oh well.
Maybe it will get better after a while, but usually when I'm new to a game, I think "Oh no, I guess once I get better this'll be fun!" but with this I just thought "Good I'm bad at this, it means I can die and not have to put myself through this."
Oh well, it's free, I just had high hopes, seeing as though it was a Valve game. They'd have been better assigning a budget higher than twenty pound, and charging people for it. I wouldn't have minded. Honestly.

crocty
-Friendly fire, it happens. A lot.

I said I was sorry D8



No but seriously, crocty makes some good points. The game is very dark and you can't tell the characters apart. I kept losing track of where my position on screen was.

But besides that, it actually is pretty fun to play with friends. I wouldn't have paid for the game, but for a free one it's nice enough. Also you get a TF2 hat for completing 2 alien swarm missions. :D_b

pastel
I said I was sorry D8

No but seriously, crocty makes some good points. The game is very dark and you can't tell the characters apart. I kept losing track of where my position on screen was.

But besides that, it actually is pretty fun to play with friends. I wouldn't have paid for the game, but for a free one it's nice enough. Also you get a TF2 hat for completing 2 alien swarm missions. :D_b

Oh no, I was just saying I couldn't really cover anyone because I'd accidentally shoot them. So really it feels to me like playing the game solo would make it easier....
But yeah the hat. The hat! The hat.....

crocty
I just had high hopes, seeing as though it was a Valve game. They'd have been better assigning a budget higher than twenty pound, and charging people for it. I wouldn't have minded. Honestly.

I just wished they'd get around making Episode 3 :(

I mean, hey. Portal 2. Sounds great. I like puzzle games but GIVE ME EPISODE 3, GOD DAMMIT!

I don't know what crocty's complaining about.
I for one enjoyed the game.

- Friendly fire doesn't happen at all if you know how to control your mouse, even during 4 player-co-op, though occasionally you may get someone who runs into your bullets.
-Aiming laser always works fine for me.
-The screen shakes a lot if you're hit hard...but it's not too bad if your computer isn't laggy.
-The support character is pretty annoying. I agree...
-The reloading and losing bullets is annoying but you can just unbind reload if it gets too bad. They auto-reload soon as the bullets run out, anyways.
-Crocty got bored and shot me on purpose. I was the medic.
-Each character has a different colored suit so it's not too hard to tell the difference.
-Slow motion death is pretty awesome looking. So what if it zooms in on a different character, I've yet to be hurt during this. Sometimes slow motion is triggered at random and I for one think it's pretty awesome. It makes killing things a bit easier and I've always liked bullet-time sequences in games. There's an item in the game that lets you start bullet-time sequences whenever you want...and I liked triggering it during explosions >____________>

Anyways, the game is free and I'm pretty happy.

Yeah yeah yeah, we got guy in a grey metallic suit, grey in a white metallic suit, guy in a yellow metallic suit, and I think another guy in a grey metallic suit.
Still, I would often just see another player and shoot it because it looked like an alien.
I didn't purposely shoot you, gosh, I'm not a troll.

But yeah I really can't get over it...I wasn't expecting it to be the best game ever, but holy shit no wonder it was free.

I downloaded this and it didn't run. I got to the menu screen, tried starting up an offline practice section and then after it got done loading the game just shut off. I really need a new computer.

Crocty

I just don't think the friendly fire is something to complain about, it's just something you learn how to avoid over time. We used to be pretty bad at it on l4d anyways. We'd accidentally shoot each other because we look like zombies during night campaigns.

kitty17

Crocty

I just don't think the friendly fire is something to complain about, it's just something you learn how to avoid over time. We used to be pretty bad at it on l4d anyways. We'd accidentally shoot each other because we look like zombies during night campaigns.

Yeah but there's just no sure fire way to know where your pellets are gonna go. A problem which would be solved with a cross hair.

Still, even if the friendly fire does get better, that's still only taking away a gram of dogshit from a ton of dogshit.

There is a cross hair you doy. It's that circular thingy that you can move along your aiming laser.

kitty17
There is a cross hair you doy. It's that circular thingy that you can move along your aiming laser.

Yeah but it doesn't have any size change with gun changes. It's just a cursor to be there when your laser stops working.

It's top down. I'd see the cursor as something to complain about if it were first person.
And the laser never stopped working for me.

Just to address a few people's concerns:

Certain parts of the levels are meant to be dark on purpose. I guess that's why they want you to incorporate the flare special weapon. You're in a factory being invaded by aliens - of course the electricity might be failing in some areas.

As far as gameplay goes, this was designed for four player coop. I can see why some people might be disinterested in that style as you're forced to play as a cooperative team rather than the lone hero that saves the day. If you enjoyed Left 4 Dead 1&2, then you'll find that Alien Swarm is a nearly identical coop experience. Friendly fire is a good way to make sure the coop aspect of the game stays coop.

I agree with some people's complaints that the infestors are way too powerful. You're either forced to have someone equip the electrical armor, or waste two to three health packs just to shake them off.

The reloading in the game is simply a copy of Gears of War's active reload mechanism. It just takes some getting used to.

I also don't share the same sentiment with the whole environment blending together. Then again, I've decided to run the game at maximum settings, which might have something to do with it. If you don't have a machine that is capable of it and everything does look the same, then that is truly unfortunate.

As you can problem tell, I'm definitely in favor of trying out this game. It's well polished, especially for something that came out of Valve's mod team (note mod, these guys are not linked with their main titles like Half-Life and Portal). Great fun especially if you have three friends to throw together to just blast away at aliens. I also noticed that if the game seems rather bland/boring, it might do you well to ramp up the difficulty to Hard. We tried Normal for a while, and it wasn't quite the spastic, "Oh Sh**" moments you'd want from this game. Hard definitely came through there.

And lastly, the fact that it's free just seals the deal. There's no excuse to not at least give it a try (pending you can run it). Even the randoms in this game are rather nice, but expect to always get stuck with medic, even if you don't like the class at all.

Here's a few screenshots for the some of you who haven't had a chance to play the game yet.

Right click and view/open image for full resolution, kthx

This is what it looks like with all the graphics setting turned down to "low"


This is what it looks like on medium:



In both these pictures, all of the playable characters look nearly identical and that's definitely an issue.

Also I love my sentry gun. That thing covers your back when a swarm rushes in from a single direction. It's fantastic.