Unexpectedly for all on the official Steam website appears a new game page from Valve under the sonorous name - Alien Swarm . And the best part is that the game is completely free! That is, to start playing, you just need to get Steam, find Alien Swarm in the game list and just download it. Isn't it great?

Full game review. Under the cut, especially for Habr!
')

Seasoned stories

The game is a classic top-view shooter. And as usual, contrary to all the laws of logic, various evil spirits begin to creep out from everywhere, and our main task is to destroy these alien creatures.



As it turned out, Alien Swarm developed over two years. A talented group of developers, which consisted of ordinary fashion designers, worked tirelessly.

Let's take a look at a few facts that developers themselves advertise:

• Tactical command shooter with a top view, designed for 4 people
• Open source game and full SDK , for quickly creating maps and modifications
• New items inside the game, after upgrading
• More than forty types of weapons, with their own unique characteristics and features.
• 4 classes and 8 unique characters
• In-game statistics
• Tile based map generator
• And all this beauty is running the Source Engine.

Valve is a cake!

Beg a slight lyrical digression. Many players cannot understand how it is, not some enthusiasts there, but Valve itself, a large company with a huge staff, creates a free game and does not ask for anything in return. As so, because we all know the old popular wisdom: free cheese is only in a mousetrap. This is by any means true, but in this case everything is a little different. Friends, Valve did just a great move! Having released a free game distributed through their computer distribution system Steam , they thereby advertised it. Millions of players from all over the world downloaded Steam just to enjoy another game from Valve.

Thus, the company has attracted many new players to its service. And, of course, in the eyes of others, Valve , climbed another step higher. We are only better from this, because now we have a great team shooter, represented by Alien Swarm . And now let's go back to the game itself.

Light, camera, motor!

Alien Swarm will take on your hard drive is not much is not enough - 2 GB of free space. The first night, immediately after the release of Alien Swarm , when the game just appeared in free access for download, download it was problematic. There were many who wanted to try the game to taste, the servers were loaded, and in some countries the speed practically dropped to zero. Now, everything can be downloaded at maximum speed, the download time will depend only on the speed of your Internet.



After launch, we will see the following menu:



In general, the menu is standard, and there is nothing new here. You can join existing games, create your new game on the server, join friends already playing, or start a single mission to train and test your new weapons and ammunition. By the way, in single missions there is nothing interesting. Maps are the same as in multiplayer, but to run through the dark nooks will have not with real partners, but with computer dummies. The whole point of this mode is only to check the new gun, or to try the game for those who have no Internet in their edges, or it does not work well. The rest is a boring and dead mode.

In the case of creating a new game, we will be offered to choose a map on which the whole battle will take place, not for life, but for death. In this case, your nickname, marked with an asterisk, so that other players know who is the boss here. Accordingly, you are given all the privileges, for example, you can change the card if you want.
In addition to the above possibilities, Alien Swarm can be used to make polls between players, whether it is the appointment of a new leader (the person who first created the card by starting a new game), or the offer to "throw out" any player for indecent behavior or fire on allies.

As soon as you select the map and set it up properly, the game will load all the necessary resources and a new window will appear in front of you, the character selection window. Here you can observe the choice of each of the players. The game chat is activated by pressing the "Y" key, the voice chat, of course, is also present and is assigned to the "C" key by default.



Alien Swarm includes 8 characters, each of which has its own specialty. All characters have unique characteristics, be it health or firepower. Each specialization gives unique abilities that are not relevant to another kind of specialty. For example, a doctor cannot break locks, and a technician can treat his associates accordingly.

A choice of 3 cells for weapons and ammunition. There are types of weapons intended only for one particular specialty.

A huge emphasis in the game is placed on the team game, and if your team does not have a doctor, then at difficulty levels above Normal , it will not be easy to complete the mission. Some missions require the participation of at least one character, with some specialty, usually a technician. Without it, it will not be possible to crack the lock required for further passage or to launch the turret.

We would play army

And now a little about the game process. As you may have guessed, the whole process is reduced to the endless logging of aliens from all sorts of guns, turrets and other murder weapons. Weapons here, it is worth noting, very diverse. As you gain experience for the passed missions, your level will increase, and with it the number of available weapons will increase. It has everything that a real maniac could wish for: guns, shotguns, grenades, pistols, minigun, chainsaw and much, much more. To my surprise, there is even the weapon of Nikola Tesla himself , which, by the way, is very effective!

The game has a map and a list of tasks in order to inadvertently not get lost in dark rooms. And yet, you can draw on the map:



I apologize for the quality of the picture, for reasons unknown to me, the just-drawn letter disappears very quickly, so I had to hurry in order to have time to draw all this.

As for the game levels themselves, they are made on a level. Card design will not make you bored, only tasks have seriously pumped up. They are not interesting and monotonous: press that button, break the door, blast, kill. But there are some more interesting things, consisting not only of one, but several movements, for example, on one of the cards you need to open the door, but to do this, you must turn on the electricity. And here we are already rushing at full speed in the opposite direction of the card in order to turn on the inactive generator of electric current.

I will bring to your attention a few screenshots showing the gameplay Alien Swarm .











Let's dilute all this with several videos:

The official game trailer:

Demonstration of gameplay:

However, default cards are likely to be the subject of familiarization. After all, the game flaunts an excellent SDK , designed to create new maps and modifications.

What we should build a house

As I already mentioned, Alien Swarm has a full-featured SDK for creating new and editing old maps.
Alien Swarm SDK consists of several tools, some of which are very familiar to modmakers and mappers of games such as Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike . As you may have guessed, Hammer World Editor and Model Viewer is such a tool.

You can see the rest of the tools in the following screenshot:

Hammer World Editor (in the screenshot a loaded map of Alien Swarm:

This concludes my story about Alien Swarm . It turned out quite a good game, and most importantly, that it is completely free. Below, I posted links to resources about the game, perhaps you will find there something interesting.

Links

Official game site
Game page on steampowered.com
Official project forum
Wikipedia page

Minimum system requirements

• OS: Windows® 7 / Vista / Vista64 / XP
• Processor: Pentium 4 3.0GHz
• Memory: 1 GB for XP / 2GB for Vista
• Graphics: DirectX 9 128 MB Shader model 2.0. ATI X800, NVidia 6600 or better
• Hard Drive: At least 2.5 GB of free space
• Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card

I wish you all a pleasant game!