If you’ve been on Steam recently, you may have noticed the huge hype of a Valve’s brand new, free game called Alien Swarm bundled with the Source SDK. Developed by former Black Cat Games employees, this 3rd-person shooter brings you in an “icy planet’s surface, to a subterranean lava-flooded mining facility” over run by aliens.

After the large amount of traffic on the Steam servers, I was successfully able to download and install Alien Swarm on my Macbook Pro’s bootcamp partition. Since the game is around a co-op campaign, I decided to go right into the online mode. Based on the loading times, you could tell that the servers were very packed. I was greeted by three other players. We all chose our classes (tech, medic, etc.) and started the game.

First thing I noticed was the weirdly-layed out HUD. Being more of a health at the top, weapons and players at the bottom-guy, it was difficult to adjust to this layout.

The gameplay is really unique compared to many other games and it FEELS like a console game for a variety of reasons. And the weapons make it all the better. Players get new, stronger weapons when they level up.

As for the campaign, the story line isn’t the best, and easily becomes confusing due to the plot.

In terms of the engine, the graphics look very nice but in terms of performance, it’s not living up to the Source engine name as far as expected. Example: at 1080p, David’s Mac Mini (bootcamp) gets about 15-25fps.

Overall this game deserves 4/5, especially for being free. If you have time to spare, check it out here.

Lev – Lead Writer