Alien Swarm

This article is about the 2010 Source engine game. For the Unreal Tournament 2004 mod, see Alien Swarm (mod). For the Ben 10 movie, see Ben 10: Alien Swarm.

Alien Swarm
Developer(s)	Valve Corporation
Publisher(s)	Valve Corporation
Engine	Source
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows
Release	July 19, 2010
Genre(s)	Shoot-em-up
Mode(s)	Four player co-op

Alien Swarm is a free top-down shoot-em-up by Valve Corporation. It is a remake of the Alien Swarm mod for Unreal Tournament 2004, and it was developed by the original team after they were hired by Valve.

Gameplay

Alien Swarm is a top-down shoot-em-up set at a 60 degree angle. Four players can join a single co-operative game, the aim of which is to progress through science-fiction themed levels killing waves of aliens with a selection from a 40-strong arsenal of weapons. The game includes persistent statistics, unlockables and achievements.

Classes

The game is class-based, with players choosing from the roles of Officer, Special Weapons, Medic, and Tech. Each class has two selectable characters with a difference in abilities.

The Officer grants a passive bonus to damage and damage resistance to nearby allies. He has access to a class-restricted shotgun and has general all-around abilities. The Officer tends to carry the most grenades, though this depends on the player's desired weapons load out as they are mapped as the 'alternate fire' of a weapon. The Officer may also find class-restricted ammo caches on the field for his Vindicator shotgun.

The Special Weapons brings raw damage to the table and starts out with a customized assault rifle with superior parameters, high magazine capacity, and auto aiming ability. The Special Weapons gains access to many different class-restricted weapons and can pick up class-restricted ammo caches on the field.

The Medic is able to deploy temporary healing beacons (with the proper load out). At level 9, they are able to heal allies with a healing gun.

The Tech carries a motion sensor, can share his sentry deployment speed bonus by being near other players, and can hack into consoles to gain access to new parts of the level. On some maps, a Tech is mandatory and losing the Tech will result in a failed mission. The Tech starts out with a customized assault rifle with auto aiming and stun grenades.

Development

Alien Swarm was announced in 2005 under the title of Alien Swarm: Infested as a Source engine based follow up to the original Unreal Tournament 2004 mod. However by late 2007 the development blog had stopped updating, leaving the future of the mod uncertain. In July 2010 with the announcement of Alien Swarm it was publicly revealed that Valve had hired the team behind Alien Swarm, who had finished the mod between working on other Valve products such as Left 4 Dead and Portal 2.

SDK

An Alien Swarm software development kit including buildable source code was released alongside the game. It is free to all users of Steam, rather than only to owners of existing Source games (as is the case with the 'mainline' Source SDK). This allows total conversion mods, which do not rely on content from other Valve games, to be free to all as well - a significant business decision that echoes the strategy of the Unreal Development Kit.

The SDK includes a tile-based level designing tool called TileGen, which allows level designers to prefabricate rooms and hallways that can be either arranged in a certain way or randomly arranged based on generation rules. The tool does not replace the Valve Hammer Editor, the use of which is still required before a map can be distributed.

External links

• Homepage
• Steam Store page
• Steam User Forums
• Alien Swarm Wiki, an external wiki