Interesting, but not quite there for now.

User Rating: 8 | Alien Swarm PC
By Kikron | Review Date:
Alien Swarm is a nice little free steam game that could 1 day become a big production. Its sort of a 3rd person strategy shooter game that you can play with youre friends without having to spend a lot of money to buy a 4 person co-op game. The bigger pluses of the game are that it is free, fast steam download and you can start playing, the controls are not that hard to handle and you can learn to play very well within a few minutes. The missions are interesting with 2 or 3 objectives per mission, and a total of 8 missions in the original download. There are also custom missions you can download via web. There are 4 classes you can pick to play(Officer, Heavy Weapons, Tech and Medic) and a wide weapon span. There are special weapons for each class but a lot of weapons are usable by all classes, and some of the class only weapons have a auto-aim perk witch can make it easier for you to kill the massive enemy swarm. The missions are not to long and do have at least 1 event in witch you need to protect the teams tech while he opens doors or hacks terminals witch is the time that the swarm comes to kick youre ass. Every mission is special and there is no event that is the same in any mission(non custom missions) witch is a big plus since it is a free game. The whole game can be done without the medic or the officer class but only on lower difficulty witch is also good becose it will make you try out every class. On the minus side the classes are not balanced, for ex. the officer class does not give a big bonus and has only 1 special weapon(shotgun) that is not very useful at medium and longer ranges, so you would be better of with 2 techs or 2 H.Weapons than a Officer. The weapons are almost all balanced but there are some weapons that are over powered, for ex. the flamer is the best weapon in the game becose it flames the enemy basic swarm unit in 1 blow killing them seconds after. This way you can kill large amounts of enemys without using any ammo. Some of the weapons are under powered, for ex. the medic gun that can heal allys has only 80 rounds and no reserve clip. There is no ammo for it in the game so when you use the 80 rounds its over for the gun. Enemy AI is very good and balanced by difficulty. There are about 6 types of swarm enemy and 1 alien pod that can spawn little aliens. One minus is the lack of new types of enemy swarm creatures as the level difficulty gets higher and there are no new spawn spots on the levels(the aliens do more damage and need more bullets to get killed)., witch can lead to players easily learning where the aliens spawn and killing them right away. In that way you can pass the higher difficultys without the proper skill. On the plus side you cannot pass the game solo even on easy difficulty becose the swarm will kill you when you attempt to hack a computer. The game takes an hover at max. to pass first time around on medium difficulty, so if you want to pass it on Insane or higher you will need about 2-3 hovers of game time witch is very good. There are no bugs or glitches in the game but considering it is short and not to complicated there really should not be any. All in all the game has some minuses but its still a game that you should play if you are looking for something to pass the time with youre friends. It has potencial to become a big game like in the case of Portal-Portal 2 and I hope we havent seen the last of it. In total - Graph:7(Nice but can do better, needs a real engine), Sound:9(Nice tons, small but good voice acting), Playtime:8.5 (You could play the game for ever is youre friends want to but if you are playing with random people 10 hovers is the max. limit before you get bored) and Gameplay:9(Easy to get the hang of it right away). In total I would give it a 8-8.5 but not higher since it still has some way to go before getting into the must-play games.

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