Alien Swarm is a short and simple third person shooter offered for free via steam.
Very similarly to Left 4 Dead, the game is a 4 player coop. You could play by yourself, but the bots are too good and you'd be missing 90% of the point of the game. There are 4 classes and each class has two characters which offer slightly different stats for that class. There is only 1 campaign with about 7-8 levels and each level take maybe 5 minutes or less.
I beat the game today with four friends on hard. There's more to do: we could go back and try insane, we could get to max level, we could score some achievements, but there really isn't much replay value. Still it was lots of fun playing through together the first time.
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And like L4D, the game is more entertaining when you have more people to yell into the microphone when bad things happen. Good times.
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I wasn't terribly impressed by it. I did an offline practice mode, and there's nothing resembling a tutorial, which is fine for running and shooting, but doing something time-sensitive like hacking, it's nice to know what you're doing instead of just leaping into it. It also seemed to be that by reloading, I permanently lost the ammo in my previous clip, which is just a horrible system. (And the reload system is lifted wholesale from Gears of War.) I'm sure it's better with friends, but I can't see it becoming good enough to actually want to play with friends.
Majivo wrote:
I wasn't terribly impressed by it. I did an offline practice mode, and there's nothing resembling a tutorial, which is fine for running and shooting, but doing something time-sensitive like hacking, it's nice to know what you're doing instead of just leaping into it. It also seemed to be that by reloading, I permanently lost the ammo in my previous clip, which is just a horrible system. (And the reload system is lifted wholesale from Gears of War.) I'm sure it's better with friends, but I can't see it becoming good enough to actually want to play with friends.
Solution, stop reloading after every shot.
Yeah, an obvious solution once you know. But the game doesn't tell you at any point, and I wanted to keep my clip full, so I ended up losing half a goddamn clip. That's not a very user friendly system.
Well, at least it was free. :P
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"Excellent value for money, would buy again."
Majivo wrote:
Yeah, an obvious solution once you know. But the game doesn't tell you at any point, and I wanted to keep my clip full, so I ended up losing half a goddamn clip. That's not a very user friendly system.
Welcome to no longer having magical self-emptying and self-filling clips. It's not hard to get used to reloading only when you're low or out.
Dear people I don't like: 凸(â—´―｀â—)凸
Welcome to the point. I never said it was hard to get used to. I said it was a stupid system if you weren't going to bother telling the player that it was in place, since nearly every other shooter does not operate on that system.
Played this again last night with a friend. It went a lot better, but it doesn't seem to scale down the number of enemies to how many marines you have, so the two of us were fighting twice as many swarm as we ought to and had to resort to meleeing to avoid running out of ammo. We did the first three missions on normal, then had to switch to easy to make it any further. So far it seems like it has potential, but the execution is just somewhat clumsy. It also has the problem all Valve games have - they have no problem with being a complete ******* to the player. In this case, three Shieldbugs rolling down a narrow tunnel towards us.
Majivo wrote:
Played this again last night with a friend. It went a lot better, but it doesn't seem to scale down the number of enemies to how many marines you have, so the two of us were fighting twice as many swarm as we ought to and had to resort to meleeing to avoid running out of ammo. We did the first three missions on normal, then had to switch to easy to make it any further. So far it seems like it has potential, but the execution is just somewhat clumsy. It also has the problem all Valve games have - they have no problem with being a complete @#%^ to the player. In this case, three Shieldbugs rolling down a narrow tunnel towards us.
The giant hand looking things? Yea, those are ********
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Yeah, I'm assuming you're supposed to shoot them from behind, but I can't actually tell if that makes a difference. So far I just hit them with a stun grenade, lay down a sentry and fire like mad.
ETA: And I only know they're called Shieldbugs because I got an achievement for killing one. I have no idea what the rest of the Swarm are called, which makes communication.. interesting.
Edited, Jul 23rd 2010 6:17pm by Majivo
ETA: And I only know they're called Shieldbugs because I got an achievement for killing one. I have no idea what the rest of the Swarm are called, which makes communication.. interesting.
Edited, Jul 23rd 2010 6:17pm by Majivo
Majivo wrote:
Yeah, I'm assuming you're supposed to shoot them from behind, but I can't actually tell if that makes a difference. So far I just hit them with a stun grenade, lay down a sentry and fire like mad.
ETA: And I only know they're called Shieldbugs because I got an achievement for killing one. I have no idea what the rest of the Swarm are called, which makes communication.. interesting.
Edited, Jul 23rd 2010 6:17pm by Majivo
ETA: And I only know they're called Shieldbugs because I got an achievement for killing one. I have no idea what the rest of the Swarm are called, which makes communication.. interesting.
Edited, Jul 23rd 2010 6:17pm by Majivo
Yes, you have to hit the fleshy white part on their backs. It's not always easy to get around them in a hallway though...
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http://thumb-culture.com/2010/07/22/alien-swarm-in-first-person-is-terrifying/
Professor shintasama wrote:
http://thumb-culture.com/2010/07/22/alien-swarm-in-first-person-is-terrifying/
That's pretty sweet.
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Vataro wrote:
Majivo wrote:
Yeah, I'm assuming you're supposed to shoot them from behind, but I can't actually tell if that makes a difference. So far I just hit them with a stun grenade, lay down a sentry and fire like mad.
ETA: And I only know they're called Shieldbugs because I got an achievement for killing one. I have no idea what the rest of the Swarm are called, which makes communication.. interesting.
Edited, Jul 23rd 2010 6:17pm by Majivo
ETA: And I only know they're called Shieldbugs because I got an achievement for killing one. I have no idea what the rest of the Swarm are called, which makes communication.. interesting.
Edited, Jul 23rd 2010 6:17pm by Majivo
Yes, you have to hit the fleshy white part on their backs. It's not always easy to get around them in a hallway though...
Thats when stuns really come into play. I usually play medic with telsa and am purely support, (i'll throw on double melee power for everything aside from insane just for fun) and as long as you have a stun shield bugs are pretty easy. I have for the fun of it, stunned and punched one to death using the double melee 3rd item option on hard before xD. Insane on the other hand is when the game just hands you your *** with no questions asked, ESPECIALLY the ******* elevator part.
I played it for about 2.5 minutes. I was highly unimpressed and didn't really care to start another game that doesn't bring anything new to the table.
Also,
That is pretty cool.
Edited, Aug 5th 2010 11:08pm by jboons
Also,
Professor shintasama wrote:
http://thumb-culture.com/2010/07/22/alien-swarm-in-first-person-is-terrifying/
That is pretty cool.
Edited, Aug 5th 2010 11:08pm by jboons
jboons wrote:
I played it for about 2.5 minutes. I was highly unimpressed and didn't really care to start another game that doesn't bring anything new to the table.
Also,
That is pretty cool.
Edited, Aug 5th 2010 11:08pm by jboons
Also,
Professor shintasama wrote:
http://thumb-culture.com/2010/07/22/alien-swarm-in-first-person-is-terrifying/
That is pretty cool.
Edited, Aug 5th 2010 11:08pm by jboons
Would have figured you would enjoy it since it mimics your posting style.
Lady Bardalicious wrote:
jboons wrote:
I played it for about 2.5 minutes. I was highly unimpressed and didn't really care to start another game that doesn't bring anything new to the table.
Would have figured you would enjoy it since it mimics your posting style.
jboons wrote:
I played it for about 2.5 minutes. I was highly unimpressed and didn't really care to start another game that doesn't bring anything new to the table.
You must have one sad and pathetic gaming career then.
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