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

Google Voice is a great service that I really enjoy. It offers free texting, calling, and voicemail transcripts. As much as I love it, the only way that I know of to use the service is through a web browser, which for me is very inconvenient. So, I tried searching for an application that would allow me to log into Google Voice without having to use my web browser and, what I came up with was… nothing. Apparently, not many people are actually interested in a Google Voice application, so of course, I had to make one myself.

Armed with only a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, I made the program within about 20 minutes. The program itself is written on Visual Basic .NET and was pretty simple to make. I won’t give you the source code but, I’ll give you a basic idea of how it’s done. I made a web browser in Visual Basic that does not navigate to any pages besides the Google Voice Mobile site (I used the mobile site to make it fit into a small window.) I then made the buttons link to pages on the site. I’m planning on implementing some more services into the program such as Gizmo5.

Well, this is the first build of my application and I hope you enjoy it. Download the file HERE. If you have any comments or suggestions please feel free to email me at: fruitpunch36@techreevu.com

David – Senior Editor, TechReevu.com