Valve Quietly Drops Another Free Alien Swarm Game; Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop
Back in 2010, Valve released a free to play top-down shooter on Steam called Alien Swarm. Alien Swarm was originally a total conversion mod for Unreal Tournament 2004, but like many of Valve’s games, they acquired the rights and brought on the developers to work on it for their own game engine. The Steam version of Alien Swarm was a fun 4-player co-op shooter that had a leveling system, character classes, and lots of aliens and parasites to shoot. Despite the initially large player base and requests for more content and features, there were only a few minor updates and the game was abandoned. Fans resorted to player created content which had to be manually acquired and installed.
I didn’t see the original announcement that they were working on a sequel, so when I was told a new Alien Swarm dropped today, I dropped Rocket League and started the download. Though the original title never got the features that users asked for, such as Steam Workshop, controller support, and first person mode, this version adds all but the last option. First person mode will likely come out with mods, but for now we’ll just have to enjoy the game for what it is.
Reactive Drop contains the original game’s basic menu layout, but it doesn’t stop there. It contains the original game campaign, Jacob’s Rest. In addition to Jacob’s rest, they added at least 10 more campaigns to play through, including Deathmatch. There’s so much more content to view, so look forward to some content over the next few days.
