Alien Swarm Review : Alien vs Predator needs to watch out

Many of you should have heard about Valve by now, the guys behind all these epic features like “Counter Strike”, “Team Fortress”, “Left 4 Dead Series”, just to name a few. These games, as you might well agree with me, are the titles PC gamers all over the world always crave to lay their hands on, and explore every possible facet of the terrain untouched in them. Well, along came “Alien Swarm”…. this game was created by a group of talented designers at Valve who were hired from the Mod community, yeah you heard it right fellow gamers “modders” made one of the best co-op game to ever grace the world of FREE co-op gaming.

The Mission

“Alien Swarm” is not just any other alien game, in fact, you could’ve easily misjudged it for a zombie based game, because the enemies just keep coming out of anywhere imaginable, just like hordes of the undead. The game offers us co-op addicts a true team-work oriented experience with this one. In Alien Swarm, you are one of 4 Marines sent out to complete some series of tasks, you team up with 3 other Marines online in order to complete your Tasks in an unique blend of co-op play and squad-level tactics.

Here comes the tricky part; at the beginning of each mission, each of the 4 Players are allowed to select their respective classes which includes the following: a Tech,a Medic, a Special Weapon Marine and an Officer. If by any chance your squad did not decide on a good balance of the 4 classes the game offers before the match begins, you’re in big trouble. In order to avoid such situations, either have a tactical plan before the game starts or if your team-mates are nuisance, like I had many times today while playing the game, make sure you have a backup plan in your kits!

So here’s a breakdown of the Classes in the Game: We have the Officer, a normal Marine with leadership quality and vindicator Damage, then there’s the Medic as usual with ability to save your life with a healing setup and  infestation curing, the other guy is the Special Weapon Officer, he’s got high amount of Autogun Damage and a piercing Bullet add-on, and the Tech, he’s the Engineer and has the ability to scan ahead of the squad,knowing possibly where the Aliens are about to spring a surprise, he’s also the computer and door hacker.

The other thing you don’t want to do in this game is to play Rambo or lose your squad, do either of those and you are in for some battle in your hands. The Team needs to work together, advancing through each level depending on each order for survival.

Gameplay And Level Tactics

As the game advances, each member of the squad level up, thereby having the chance to acquire new weapons and gadget, some of the levels are so specific to some weapons that if none of the squad members doesn’t have the weapon, then you can just call “gameover”, since you wont easily have any alternative way of advancing through that specific level. Another thing to take into consideration is  Teamwork, sometimes you have to hold a position ( like a moving elevators for a long period), here you will need to use your team ability to scrape through, and watch out for friendly fire, you do not want to kill or weaken your team-mates before the ever coming alien minions finally do it.

The graphics of the game have no “wow” effect,well its not meant to have, it’s a 3rd person visual game and its FREE, but surprisingly enough the game details are good and clear, the level design is a well thought task by the developers with ever changing multiple pathways and corridors to explore, bridges and elevators to hold and escape (alternate) routes, especially if you are low on health status in order to achieve your goals. A lot about Alien Swarm is fairly standard, the deal is: its very well done. After a few levels into the game you’ll begin to see what each squad member brings to the group and importantly, appreciate the wonderful teamwork this inspires.

This is Alien Swarm’s basic and strongest Tactic: Work together everybody wins, in another scenario get co-players who just want to do it by themselves (Remember Rambo?), you’ll always lose. The feeling you get when your squad runs smoothly and works as a well-oiled machine of bug killing awesomeness is truly satisfying….

The Mini but Nice features

Alien Swarm adds 3rd person camera, depth of field, improved dynamic shadows and a wide variety of gameplay additions to the Source engine.

• Tactical, 4 player co-op action game with a top-down perspective
• Complete game code and mod tools
• Unlock persistent items by gaining levels
• Over 40 weapons and equipment with countless loadout configurations
• 4 unique classes and 8 unique characters
• Matchmaking, Steam Cloud, Steam Stats
• 64 achievements
• Tile-based map generation tool
• Powered by Source and Steam

Get the game here for FREE