Alien Swarm available July 19th on Steam (for free)

http://www.alienswarm.com

I remember hearing that this UT2004 mod was being redeveloped on Source as a commercial game. I wonder why Valve decided to release it for free. Maybe they want more people on Steam like when Portal was released for free for a short time?

interesting ... think I'll try it when it comes out.

Ah, great, now I gotta get Steam. Wait... no I won't.

Might as well if its free, I have steam anyways.

Steam can be a bit misleading when it comes to coop and that's one of the main things I'm really interested about with this game. There were two other top down shooters on Steam I was interested in on Steam that claimed to have coop, but the first one, alien breed only offered it for a separate and considerably shorter campaign. The second game, Shadowgrounds Survivor, only offered splitscreen coop, which needless to say was retarded considering it was a PC exclusive game.

Steam's listing of co-op games is not very reliable in finding the co-op that we want in a game, and even in some cases, developers forget to include co-op in their list of features, as with Titan's Quest, an RPG featuring 6-player campaign co-op.

And speaking of campaign co-op, it's the most desirable form of co-op. Campaign co-op classics like Contra, Diablo, and Doom gives you the ability to play with friends in the single player campaign.

I'm certainly going to check it out - just to see how it'll hold against Shadowgrounds on single player (I love the first one, but Survivors was certainly a letdown). On one hand the trailer looks visually better, but the gameplay itself doesn't look as great, at least not so far.


As for Shadowgrounds' coop, it was the first game of a tiny company made as a single player game, and the coop was thrown later as an afterthought. Sure they could have added networking at that point, at the expense of rewriting the whole engine and risk going bankrupt while doing so. And Survivor recycled the same engine, so no networking there either.

The original Alien Swarm mod was amazing. It featured tactical, challenging and exceptionally intense campaign co-op action, and overall it's definitely one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time. So naturally I'm looking forward to playing this sequel quite a lot.

The AS mod was in essence designed solely for co-op play and there isn't much doubt that this stand-alone AS game will be the same. In fact the mod featured relatively complicated combat situations and such a primitive AI that it was hardly playable in single player. So I wouldn't set very high expectations for the AS game's SP mode either.

Maybe we should have a special hidden area of the forums set aside for free advertising for Steam junk.

Don't know if anyone cares, but its coming out today.

Unlocks in 5 hours.

Wee

OK, trying to get through the servers to download this is a major pain in the ass.

Not for me, but it's really slow.

HWGuy said:

http://www.alienswarm.com

I remember hearing that this UT2004 mod was being redeveloped on Source as a commercial game. I wonder why Valve decided to release it for free. Maybe they want more people on Steam like when Portal was released for free for a short time?

I'm guessing Valve wants to see what kind of community will emerge around a freely distributed open source game. I could see a dedicated team making a hack 'n slash type Diablo/Gauntlet mod out of it.

Just played it, its brillant and free. The gameplay is smooth (I played with 3 of my irl friends) and we had a blast. Teamwork actually works well, you need a skilled player in each class to do well (best combo usually is 2 medis, 1 tech and 1 soldier), and the leveling system is great. 4/5

Agreed, good game. Campaign's short, but I've only played it through on easy to get a feel for the combat and levels. got to lvl9, favorite loadout - officer, with the burst shotty, tesla gun, and hornet missiles. I think the missions are short enough you'll rarely need 2 medics unless you're on the harder difficulties, which I'll probably try later. Steamid is Blood_Titan so say hi if you see me ;)

I think the most interesting thing is going to be seeing all the custom campaigns people make with the SDK.

I got a chance to try it out. Like most coop games, it's a lot more fun when you're playing with friends. A lot of times when I'm playing with strangers I can't help but feel like I'm baby sitting them. One time my entire team got slaughtered just a few feet from the start. The idiots managed to get themselves completely surrounded within a fraction of a minute and killed in even less.

Damn, I am so hating my internet connection right now. It's even worse than what I posted on the internet speed thread. It's gonna take all freaking night to download. Why the hell didn't Valve let people preload the game over the weekend so that their content servers wouldn't get all backed up today?

Played a bit with avery on normal, then decided to try my hand at insane. Needless to say, it's insane. And fun. But mostly insane. Over 3 hours and with players that rolled in and out like the group was a saloon door, we managed to get to the level with snow outside and where you get to blow up some piping. There we got so bogged down that for the last hour or so we'd been attempting it. I think I've got a strategy to get us past, and in fact we almost made it 2-3 times, but there's a certain part where you have to go as fast as the support ship or you get overwhelmed, instantly. Not to mention there's a grenadier gauntlet we basically rush through and a part where you basically have to weld the doors shut and place quite a few turrets to even have a chance of surviving.

I will never have more respect for any gun besides the tesla gun. The thing has the most ammo capacity of any gun, kills decently fast, and stuns enemies, and that can transfer to multiple targets if they're clumped. Which holds off the hyperagressives quite well.

I've only played a few maps on Easy so far, but I like what I see. I want to get a hang of the classes and get a sense of when exactly I should deploy ammo and so on.

Would work great as a base for a Crusader clone.

I like it

Downloaded it, haven't tried it yet. Hope it works. It should if it's on the Source engine, though.

Got through the entire campaign on normal. Only level 15 and still have tonnes of crap to unlock. Which I assume make the higher difficulties more playable. That was within an hour and a half of playing.

I know people poo-poo Steam, but unless you've a dial-up modem there isn't really much you can actually complain about in respect to this game.

It's great. Short, but I'm not going to complain for it being free. And a pretty solid amount of replay value. They're probably just hoping to see a lot of custom campaigns get released for it, which I'm fine with. It seems like the sort of game that could easily have a campaign added with very minimal need for voice acting or the like. The gameplay is pretty refined and quite balanced, and teamwork is absolutely essential.

Was a fun way to kill a few hours with friends*, especially since we made all these L4D jokes the whole way through. Worth a download and a playthrough, even if just for the TF2 hat.

[*Friends being my Left 4 Dead competitive team]

Played a few levels yesterday. It was pretty fun, and I at least got my TF2 hat. :P

Quite fun indeed. Not overly difficult on Normal with a team of three and more, The only real threat are those parasite things (if there's no medic on the team). The different weapons/items and classes seem to allow for some variation and different approaches to the levels, though I'm a little disappointed it's only a single campaign. Hopefully there will be some proper custom ones soon - shouldn't be too hard considering it's "just" Source engine and the SDK is available, too.

looks like you can play it in FPS mode too
http://www.gametrailers.com/user-movie/alien-swarm-in-first-person/347646?playlist=featured