Free Game Alert: Valve Announces ‘Alien Swarm’

Valve have today announced that they will be releasing a totally free game on Monday via Steam, entitled Alien Swarm. The game, originally a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004, will be released for free with the Source SDK and “complete code base” for the game- great news for budding modders everywhere.

Fans of free shit should be rejoicing at this moment; not only are we getting a free game, it’s a free Valve game. “Two years ago Valve hired the talented team behind the popular top down co-op mod Alien Swarm,” say Valve. “Since then they have been busy working on the Left 4 Dead Series, and now Portal 2. However, we never forgot about Alien Swarm and the team has spent a lot of time bringing the game to Source in between their contributions to the other Valve projects.”

So these guys have been spending time developing on some of my favourite games of all time, as well as one of the most hotly anticipated games in recent memory- and now they’re putting out a free game? This can only be another example of Valve’s brilliant service. It’s not often that a big company can have this great public image, and it’s stuff like this that cement that. I’ll certainly be playing it come Monday, and if you’d like to as well, you’ll be able to get hold of it here.

About the Game

Alien Swarm is a game and Source SDK release from a group of talented designers at Valve who were hired from the Mod community.

Available free of charge, the game thrusts players into an epic bug hunt featuring a unique blend of co-op play and squad-level tactics. With your friends, form a squad of four distinct IAF Marine classes. Plan your attack using an unlockable arsenal of weapons with countless loadout configurations against a wide variety of aliens. Blaze your way through an overrun, off-world colony, eradicating the alien infestation in environments ranging from the icy planet’s surface, to a subterranean lava-flooded mining facility.

Along with the game get the complete code base for Alien Swarm that features updates to the Source engine as well as the SDK. Alien Swarm adds 3rd person camera, depth of field, improved dynamic shadows and a wide variety of gameplay additions to the Source engine.

• Tactical, 4 player co-op action game with a top-down perspective
• Complete game code and mod tools
• Unlock persistent items by gaining levels
• Over 40 weapons and equipment with countless loadout configurations
• 4 unique classes and 8 unique characters
• Matchmaking, Steam Cloud, Steam Stats
• 64 achievements
• Tile-based map generation tool
• Powered by Source and Steam

System Requirements

• • OS: Windows® 7 / Vista / Vista64 / XP
  • Processor: Pentium 4 3.0GHz
  • Memory: 1 GB for XP / 2GB for Vista
  • Graphics: DirectX 9 compatible video card with 128 MB, Shader model 2.0. ATI X800, NVidia 6600 or better
  • Hard Drive: At least 2.5 GB of free space
  • Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card