Muffin Swarm

Yet again I'm without money so I'll dip back into a game I got for free. Yes free. No not illegally free. I got this game 100% no-strings-attached, beat you to death with a corgi if you don't believe me free. ironically enough, despite it being so free, it was still pretty awesome, though it is hard to experience with a bad internet connection.

This game is called Alien Swarm. It is a break from normal shooters as it takes the appearance of an RTS game with it's top-down style of viewing. It takes more things from other games, as it uses the L4D style of the four player gameplay. During the offline practice mode, you have three AI computer partners that help you by performing tasks you cannot along the way to your destination. I do have to say that having intelligent AI for once in something that isn't L4D is somewhat mood-lifting to me, as generally they are dumber than a Saint Bernard after it had been used to club baby seals. Other than the fact that you have smart AI, the game actually lives up to it's name. As you go into it, there are actually large swarms of aliens that come to lay eggs in your lower intestine or something.

The gameplay is pretty straight forward. You have a gun and aliens have blood and guts that are still intact. Remedy this situation promptly. I'm not really sure if there is a story hidden in the game, but I'm sure there is because there -always- is. Game developers don't know what to do with a game if there's no story save for Valve (Yay for TF2) and speaking of Valve GUESS WHO MADE THE GAME? But at any rate, you've got four different classes of person that you can use to kill things with, all with a different combination of skills and weapons. I'm not going to list them all for you because I really don't feel like trying to find the list because, like you, I'm lazy. If you weren't lazy, you'd have just gotten the game for yourself instead of reading what someone else thinks of the game. Congratulations. On top of the different classes you can play as two sets of characters, each set having the same classes, just different people. Awesome.

The enemies are not terribly smart if you start off in easy mode, and I didn't get to progress much higher because I was promptly kicked out of the group I was in because of my laggy interwebs. This being said, I did get to find that there are a multitude of maps with a multitude of missions and you can mix and match character sets with your teammates to best suit the situation. You -have- to work together or else you will die. No ifs about it, you -will- die. Killing enemies, unlocking doors, waiting on really slow elevators... it's not innovative in the way of obstacles and objectives, but you have to give them credit for trying something new with all the old stuff attached. The enemies aren't terribly smart in the first few levels either... You might be able to get away with less than four people if you're good. Which if you're reading this review, I doubt you are.

In conclusion, I enjoyed this game thoroughly with the two hours that I put into researching it simply so that I had another game to review. It can stand as a game on it's own, all though it would have been really nice to see them put in a little more that you can do single player and offline. You gotta work on that next time! Either way though, it was worth the nothing that I paid and I'd do it again simply because of that fact. Hooray for being broke!

>Ryft