INTRO:
Seven long years – or rather eight, at this time of writing – were enough to brood over how much one’s expectations had been let down. To me, Alien Swarm represented so much promise, not only for itself but for the Steam platforms. Of course, things did not turn out the way I wanted, and Alien Swarm appeared to have been abandoned from 2013 onwards, when its last update was just mere bug-fixing.
That is, until 2017. Reactive Drop is a rebuild and repackaging of the game, fixing many of its problems and implementing quite a lot of content that fans had came up with through the years. Considering that Alien Swarm is a ‘free’ game that is not intended to generate revenue directly, this was perhaps a surprise.
People who had turned cynical like me might try to think of some less-than-kind reason for why Valve would invest more resources – little as these are – into this game. There is the convenient fact that modders made this rebuild, not Valve employees, but then, the original build was made by modders anyway, prior to their employment by Valve. Yet, Reactive Drop raises more tantalizing expectations out of me, again, despite my scepticism.
PREMISE & PDA MESSAGES:
The backstory and setting of Alien Swarm have remained the same: humanity’s expansion into space is threatened by the seemingly pervasive presence of alien infestations, specifically of the kind with too many claws and teeth.
However, some maps in the original Jacob’s Rest campaign have been reworked to include huge PDAs that are lying about. Each PDA contains messages between certain individuals; the back-and-forth between them is more than likely a tribute to the Alien movies and other sources of inspiration for Alien Swarm’s setting.
However, they also strongly suggest that not all of humanity are aware of the threat posed by the alien bugs. Rather, the only humans who do know the true extent of the threat are the IAF and its soldiers, who are of course the player characters.
STILL MUST HAVE STEAM, OF COURSE:
Having been the poster-boy/girl for how “awesome” the Steam platform is/was, Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop still requires connection to Steam in order to work – at least by default. There are repackaged “independent” versions out there, but it is hard to consider playing these likely unreliable builds when the proprietary version is just free.
INCOMPATIBILITY WITH ORIGINAL GAME PACKAGE:
Since Reactive Drop is a rebuild of Alien Swarm, the progression system that is used in Reactive Drop is not the same as the one in the original build. This means that whatever progression the player has accrued in the original is not transferred over in any way to the rebuild. This can be unpleasant to learn, but on the bright side, it is an excuse to play the game all over again and see what has changed.
SINGLE-PLAYER SUPPORT:
To recite a statement in my review article for the original package of Alien Swarm, CPU control for team-mates that are not within the control of a human were previously only available for the first two missions in the Jacob’s Rest campaign. This was a problem, because players could only experience the other missions alone on their lonesome if they could not find other players to play with. This problem only got worse over time.
Reactive Drop addresses this through modification and implementation of behaviour scripting for CPU-controlled soldiers. The scripting appears to be based on the one that was used for the “Offline Practice” mode of the original build. The modified version is more than a little reminiscent of the scripting for CPU-controlled characters in the Left 4 Dead series – for better or worse.
“GOOD SHOOTING!”:
The CPU-controlled soldiers are all perfect shots, especially with the standard-issue rapid-fire weapons. Indeed, it might be wise to have each of them carrying the default assault rifle all the time, whereas the fire support specialist should be using only autoguns. They are not always great at making each round count, but since they are so good shots, one or two rounds of overkill should not be too much of a problem.
THEY ARE NOT VERY GOOD AT USING SPECIAL WEAPONS:
Unfortunately, the CPU-controlled soldiers are just bad at any other weapon because they lack scripts to utilize them efficiently.
In an example, CPU-controlled soldiers with shotguns rarely if not never consider the spread of their shots. They will just shoot a lone enemy at range anyway, rather than getting up close first before firing. In another example, CPU-controlled soldiers with flamethrowers will just burn their fuel away as long as enemies are within range. Wiser human players would know that they are better off simply setting the bugs on fire and bypassing them while they are writhing. Most of them will eventually burn to death anyway while they chase the soldiers.
CPU-CONTROLLED SOLDIERS UNAWARE OF HAZARDS:
CPU-controlled soldiers are unaware of dangers that are not falling hazards. They will sometimes waltz into toxic vapours, large moving machines and sometimes fires. They will not stay long in them of course, but they might still get themselves onto/into these hazards again.
MISSED OPPORTUNITY FOR ACTIVE TEAMWORK:
Unfortunately, the rebuild of Alien Swarm did not include features to have team-mates help each other. The other soldiers still cannot help the support specialists reload their guns, they cannot give magazines of the same guns to others and techs cannot help each other hack computer systems, to name some limitations.
ADDITIONAL CAMPAIGNS – OVERVIEW:
The once-fans of the original build of Alien Swarm had clamoured for more campaigns, but ultimately the most that they got were campaigns that were designed by other fans. As good as these were, their fan-made origins are all too obvious, such as bad writing even in the little text there is for the mods, and sometimes inane level designs that do not reflect the industrial nature of the human installations.
Quite a lot of these fan-made campaigns had been retouched, and made official. Some new ones were also added, apparently to showcase some new gameplay elements and bugs – for better or worse.
AREA 9800:
This is a campaign with dense maps. These maps have many winding passages and circuits. The player should learn to use these to funnel bugs or run around them, because there are many, many more bugs that spawn in this campaign than there are in others. The player will also be spending a lot of ammo, but conveniently, there are locations with opportunities to resupply. (Fortunately, these places look like armories or other locales that could understandably be used as a source of supplies.)
Unfortunately, the prevalence of staircases and winding passages meant that CPU-controlled soldiers often lag far behind. This is because their proximity scripting is based on straight-line distances, not actual movement distances. Every mission in Area 9800 also needs a tech, which limits choices in the team’s composition.
LANA’S ESCAPE:
Lana’s Escape was touted as the showcase for the advances in mission complexity that Alien Swarm’s campaign has achieved. It is one of the campaigns that make use of the “AI Director” feature, an innovation that has been proven and popularized by the Left 4 Dead series.
This means that some maps in Lana’s Escape do not play out the same way twice. For example, the Lana’s Vents map has the team working their way through claustrophobic HVAC (heating, ventilation and air-conditioning) tunnels, which are blocked off here and there by pipes that conveniently let the bug through anyway. There are also traps, such as mines and falling platforms in the first map.
The complexity of these maps is even greater than those of Area 9800. Unfortunately, this also means that CPU-controlled soldiers are even more unreliable in these maps. The player will see them falling prey to environmental hazards that would be obvious to experienced game consumers, and they also actually get lost in the maze-like Lana’s Vents.
Lana’s Escape also has the first archetypal “boss fight”. There is a pair of special and particularly tough Shield Bugs that are supported by Shaman bugs that can heal them quickly. In this scenario, the players are supposed to keep the Shamans away, while luring the Shield Bugs into hazards. This is impossible to do with the dim-witted CPU-controlled soldiers.
Lana’s Escape is mainly there for multiplayer gameplay. Playing it with CPU-controlled soldiers makes for a very bad experience.
OPERATION CLEANSWEEP:
After how different Area 9800 and Lana’s Escape are, Operation Cleansweep seems to be a rather simple campaign – simple enough for even the CPU-controlled soldiers to work it without much of a problem. The highlights in this one are its long elevator rides, and that is not saying much; everything seems done before. As uneventful as they are, the elevator rides do showcases how much verticality that a level can have, and how easy it is for that verticality to work against a team if they are not all getting aboard an elevator.
PARANOIA:
Paranoia is perhaps not exactly well-named, though its main gimmick is certainly one that causes some anxiety. Many of its missions require the team to go to some end of the map to get something, and then go all the way around to get some more things, all the while being hounded by the bugs. Completing each objective also enables scripts that trigger the appearance of nasty hordes of bugs; the campaign also has more than a few instances of shield bugs crashing through walls.
Static assets like sentry turrets are next to useless in this campaign, because there are so many places from which bugs can spawn. Buzzers are plenty in this one too, and they often come from above. Sometimes, they even glitch, staying well above the level and obscuring the camera.
Fortunately, this is a campaign that is perfectly doable by CPU-controlled soldiers. Perhaps the best moment regarding them is how they automatically huddle into small lifts.
One of the maps has the team escorting a mine cart filled with explosives to a target area. This is perhaps one of very few, if there are any others, escort objectives. As with almost all escort missions in video game history, it is typically tedious. Thankfully, the cart is indestructible, so the player does not have to worry about it being destroyed.
RESEARCH 7:
At first glance, Research 7 appears to be composed of laughably easy and short missions. Some parts of the text seen in the PDAs and mission objectives still have problems in their writing, which makes a bad first impression. The penultimate and final missions have some entertaining twists, however.
In the penultimate mission, a crucial machine is vulnerable to bug attacks, and the team has to defend it. This mission also showcases some machines that have not been seen in prior campaigns.
The final mission has the team going into a mine, of all places, to lure out and kill a Queen bug with a huge mining laser; the huge mining laser is another machine that is unique to this campaign. Afterwards, the team needs to escape while the mines inexplicably floods with lava, thus making this mission the most obvious “obligatory lava level” in Alien Swarm, to cite a video game cliché. Amusingly, players that had not been observant might go the wrong way instead and drown their characters in magma.
One notable pleasantness about the maps in this campaign is that they are fast to load, because of their small size.
TILARUS-5:
This campaign is actually composed of missions with very little connection to each other, other than a flimsy excuse that they are all set on the same planet. Narratively, the team is being shuttled from one colony to the next to carry out missions.
The main gimmick of this campaign is that the mission objectives are not revealed to the player right from the start, unlike certain other campaigns that sometimes give away what is going to happen. This gimmick is used in some other campaigns, but much more so in Tilarus-5.
Of course, these objectives remain the same, no matter how many times the player replay them.
TEARS FOR TARNOR:
At this time of writing, Tears for Tarnor is the only uncompleted campaign. It takes place on a planet that resembles Mars, e.g. iron-rich rocks and red dunes. This campaign has better writing and narrative than most of the other campaigns, which is perhaps why it is not completed yet at this time of writing. Whatever maps there are that had been finalized are dense and polished, not unlike those in Jacob’s Rest.
“BONUS” MISSIONS:
The “Bonus” missions are yet more individual maps with challenging layouts and scripting and no significant connection with each other. The developers did not bother to work them into a campaign, likely because they do not want another Tilarus-5 , assuming that these maps were intended to be part of a campaign to begin with. If the player has played the aforementioned campaigns, the maps would be quite familiar, and would seem to be more of the same.
Indeed, if the player had been grinding through whatever official missions there had been before these, the gameplay experience might have become stale by this time.
DEATHMATCH:
After having killed so many bugs with other people (or the CPU in single-player), the player might want to do something different – like kill the other soldiers instead. The “Deathmatch” ‘campaign’ offers this palette-cleanser. Besides, with an angled top-down view and a rather generous zoom level, Alien Swarm does seem ripe for a player-versus-player gameplay mode.
This campaign is composed of maps that have been specifically made free-for-all matches. There is plenty of verticality to gain height advantage against opponents. Supplies and gear are strewn all over the maps, constantly respawning to accommodate their need for implements of violence. Some of these maps happen to be maps that had been adapted from other campaigns, such as the outdoors map with a snowstorm in the Jacob’s Rest campaign.
Every participant starts with the standard-issue assault rifle, and may have to find other guns to complement that. Interestingly, the class-specific guns are in the maps too. Only soldiers of the correct type can use them, which gives them an advantage against the others when having to search for spare weapons. For example, the medic’s healing gun appears in the maps too, giving him/her the ability to heal himself/herself on the move.
However, quite a number of the soldiers’ capabilities are rendered useless in this gameplay mode. For example, the Officers’ Leadership skills are pointless in the free-for-all gameplay.
Amusingly, if a map has Sentry Guns, any deployed Sentry Gun is hostile to all soldiers, including the one that planted them. However, considering that Sentry Guns respawn, having to deal with a player that incessantly deploys Sentry Guns at the expense of everyone can get frustrating and annoying quickly.
Up to four human-controlled soldiers can participate in Deathmatch. The keyword here is “human-controlled”; there are simply no bots for this campaign, at least officially.
Amusingly, the combat roll of the player characters is replaced with jumping, as in the jumping that has been seen in Source-built Valve games. It is effortlessly goofy, but still as useful as ever to get from one platform to another.
ADDITIONAL GUNS & GEAR:
Additional pieces of gear have been included in Reactive Drop. Many of these have to be unlocked by achieving progression levels that are higher than those in the original build.
Perhaps placing them behind a grindwall is good, because they do require some finesse to be used. For example, the combat rifle is a combination of an assault rifle with a shotgun; to use this, the player needs to have experience with both archetypes of guns, and know when to shoot either. For another example, the last unlockable gun at this time of writing is a medic-only gun, which fire regular rounds with its primary fire and emit a healing beam with its alternate fire. Obviously, the player needs to be already a seasoned shooter and healer in this game to avoid screwing up his/her control inputs.
ADDITIONAL BUG TYPES:
Reactive Drop introduces a few types of bugs, and also implemented some unused content in the original build. The most notable – and annoying – of these are the Shamans, which are very fast-moving and can rapidly heal other bugs. One of the bugs also happens to be a monster that had been imported from Half-Life 2; it does not seem out of place in this game.
The Queen was intended to be a boss bug, but was cut out of the original build because of problems in implementing a bug of its size. Indeed, any missions that include the Queen have level designs that feel contrived, like conspicuously large and wide areas that are devoid of hard cover.
VISUALS:
Reactive Drop was rebuilt from Alien Swarm, so understandably it still uses the Source engine. Its graphics had not changed much since the original package. However, it is still serviceable in these days and more importantly, adequate enough for the gameplay.
Some of the campaigns showcase some sophisticated design decisions that are intended to improve the ambience of their maps. For example, in Lana’s Escape, some maps have levels below the one that the player characters are on. These levels show aliens overrunning the human installation.
The additional guns and gear were originally conceived by fans as mods of existing ones; some of them have since been implemented as official content. Therefore, both of their models and their schematic icons look quite similar to those of the weapons that had been around. Fortunately, due to the aforementioned limitation on sharing magazines, these similarities are not much of an issue.
One notable addition to the visuals of Reactive Drop since the original Alien Swarm is the inclusion of visual assets not seen in the Jacob’s Rest campaign. Some campaigns feature maps with forests, rust dunes, lava-filled mines and such others. They are nothing to a jaded set of eyes, but at least there are more visual diversity in the official campaigns now.
SOUNDS:
Most of the sound effects in the game have been recycled from the original build, which is perhaps expected and understandable, especially in the cases of gunfire and bug noises. Unfortunately, there have been little in the way of new sounds to be heard. In particular, the voice clips for the commander of the Hellhound gunship have been reused for some of the additional campaigns, albeit snipped here and there to prevent him from saying things that are not related to the current mission.
SUMMARY:
One could say that Reactive Drop is more of the same. However, this statement takes on a more benign tone if one considers that the rebuild ultimately has a price tag of zero. Sure, having to deal with Steam is the actual cost. However, “buyer’s remorse” is limited to having to deal with the Steam updates and product-promoting features that just could not be turned off. These are not likely to be more than just bearable annoyances for people who have not stepped onto the Steam platform before, or people who have dropped off it a long time ago.
More importantly, Reactive Drop shows that there is still official infrastructural support coming from Valve, even after so many moribund years. Of course, most of the work concerning game design and content had practically been outsourced, as is often the case with Valve products these days – but then, perhaps this has always been Valve’s magic all along: let others call the shots and do all the work in return.