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Alien Swarm: Free, fun, and full of violence

To those involved in the first person shooter “modding” scene, Alien Swarm should sound familiar. Black Cat Games released the first Alien Swarm game, an Unreal Tournament 2004 mod, to a warm reception. Their success translated into jobs at Valve and an opportunity to create a full, “real” game, now on the Source Engine.  Enter Alien Swarm, again.

Alien Swarm plays like a top down Left 4 Dead with aliens instead of zombies.  In a similar construct to L4D, four people team up and complete mission requirements before completing a level.  Breaking from the L4D mold, Alien Swarm adds the Modern Warfare-like abilities of character leveling, varied classes, and unlockable items. The development team was keen on making new equipment easy to obtain, and it’s a pleasure to see an appreciation for the difference between “leveling” and “grinding”. The formula is pretty simple: beat a mission, gain a level (usually), and get an item.

Leveling up and progressing in the game is fun, but hampered by the scant amount of content. At the current time there is only one “campaign,” consisting of 7 levels. The levels tie together with a thin story: there are aliens, they are bad, kill them. It’s a Michael Bay story, not Christopher Nolan.