The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

A few days ago, I finally played through all of Alien Swarm, the free co-op game that Valve put out that involved shooting a bunch of aliens.

BUT WAS IT WORTH THE COST?

Oh yes. Completely.
I would have easily paid 10 bucks for this game, although in that case, perhaps a few more missions would have been nice. But seriously, Alien Swarm is very polished and a lot of fun. If you haven’t gotten some people together to play it, you really should.

The game is a top-down shooter in the twin-stick style. Of course, you don’t control it with a gamepad, even though I’d like to. You use the cursor you move around the outside of your dude and walk around with the WASD. That’s completely functional and works perfectly fine, of course. It’s just something I don’t prefer. Doesn’t affect the game in a negative way, though, even for me. You run around and shoot these people. There are a variety of different weapons and a variety of different classes you can be, each of which has slightly different loadouts and skills. The most important of these classes are the tech, which can hack open doors, and the Medic, which, oddly enough, has access to healing equipment. The other two classes, Officer and Special Weapons, don’t really seem all that different, from what I’ve seen. They just shoot some stuff, with Officer being a bit more well-rounded stat-wise and Special Weapons having access to a few bigger guns.

The way this game switches it up from other games of its type, I feel, is that you really have to manage your ammo and fire. Most shooters from a top-down perspective like this are “fire like crazy and kill everything.” In this, you have fairly limited ammo for most guns, so you have to make sure every shot counts. You also have friendly fire on, so much like Left 4 Dead, you have to actually pay attention and make sure not to catch a friend in the sweep of your flamethrower, for instance. This gives it a more different feel, and makes it feel much more like a squad-based FPS. That’s fun times. Of course, the new perspective makes me even worse at the game. At least in a FPS I feel like I know when I’m going to friendly fire. I feel like I have much more control over it. In this game, I either get so ancy about friendly fire that I barely shoot at all, or I force myself to shoot, and have many friendly fire incidents. I’m sure if I practiced a bit more, that would go away. But it is just the sort of game where I’m not used to be cautious and calculating, and it does affect my play. Doesn’t make it any less fun, though.

Seriously, the game is pretty amazing. It has Steam Achievements and persistent leveling to unlock new guns, which is nice enough that you can unlock everything in a few run-throughs of the game: hitting max level isn’t impossible. It uses the same PC lobby system that Left 4 Dead uses, so you get to bypass a lot of PC bullshit to get into co-op games, which I always appreciate. It’s just a really, really polished product, and totally worth your time. They could have easily charged some money for this, but instead they gave it away for free, with the complete source code out there on the web for full mod-ability. It’s great. Glad I’ve played it and enjoyed it.