Alien Swarm

[Zyx]

Nothing we can host, because it's only available on Steam, but anyway.

A free top down remake of Alien Swarm (which was a mod for Unreal Tournament), with 4 player co-op and a shipload of weapons. Made by Valve, known for Half-Life, Portal and Left 4 Dead among others, so the quality should be top-notch. Available on the 19th.

Not only the game is free, but the code behing the game will be released as well.

See http://www.alienswarm.com/ and http://store.steampowered.com/news/4081/

[jayenkai]

Cool!
Thanks for the pointer

[Zyx]

After playing through the offline practice mode, this game looks pretty good! Of course, a manual or even a short readme should've been nice. Haven't played multiplayer (aka the real game) at all, I'm just afraid to play this with strangers, my previous experience with L4D isn't exactly positive.

There are apparently a bunch of mods in works already, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone made a Space Hulk/Warhammer 40k kind of mod... of course, it just need to be done really really carefully as not to upset the lawyer demons at games workshop - like what happened with Alien Assault.

[Zyx]

I did play this online, and I was positively surprised. Sure, because the game has four roles for the four players, it does kinda stress the point that this is about co-operation but the game is still quite playable with total strangers.

However, you do get a nice increase in difficulty once the medic and heavy weapons guy decide to be total n00bs and die in the first minute. (Don't let them be techs, because those guys are vital for completing the level and it's an instant failure if all die. And they need to solve some puzzles so no-one wants voluntarily be them, anyway).

The levels are not too long, so it's not such a bad thing if there are some bad apples in your party. Unlike in certain zombie-shooting games from the same developer.

The game can be modded quite heavily, and if I did have the time and skill, I'd make a Special Forces remake out of this.