nine.

Fuck Alien Swarm.

There I said it. If you're not sure what I'm going on about, then go the the VALVe website, download Steam, and then download Alien Swarm.

If you say to me 'I Like It', then I will kill you.

Premise: Alien Swarm is a free, top-down design, alien shoot-'em-up. To break it down, you are a space voyager who's job it is to investigate a deep space facility that has been over-run with aliens that want to kill you. Your job is to discover what happened to the scientists on the facility, and to kill the aliens.

This is made difficult by several things, and I'm going to go very nice and slow for you.

ONE. Top-down design. This is where, in games like Pokemon, you view your character from a 'skyview', and follow them around. It was originally used in games such as Lufia II, Pokemon, sprite games that didn't have the processing technology we have now. It was also coined by blizzard on games such as StarCraft (Also a game i detest) because it allowed easier camera flight to your various units, allowing players to micromanage their armies.

I can almost see why they would do that in SC, and god knows it wasn't the worst design flaw in that game by any means, but in a shooter, it is not a good idea. The last game that was designed in this way was called Infantry, and it was terrible. not just for that, but the controls (see below for more) were ridiculously complex. It simply didn't work for a shooter game, and I am simply baffled as to why any self-respecting game company would choose to design their game in this view.

The only saving grace of that is that they did put in a first-person toggle-switch in the options menu, but because everything was designed to be looked down on, the graphics are simply terrible in this mode. Not a good design idea, and should never have been implemented.

TWO. The controls are simply awful. The first 'mission' you can do in solo-mode is a very long tutorial where my fingers wandered most of the way over the keyboard trying to find buttons that stopped me dying. The controls are meant to be easy to use, not difficult to find, and they simply weren't. Okay, 'E' was still the use key, and 'Mouse 1' was still shoot, but nothing else stuck into my memory, and some wasn't even explained to me, hence why I died when the first alien ran at me from the shadows.

'F' provides a fairly unusable flashlight, as in this game, your aim is dictated by your mouse movements (as with most games). But in a top-down design this simply idea goes out the window, and as a pretty seasoned first person player, it was very difficult, nigh-on-impossible to get used to this new mechanic. It's not worth my time to work out how to use something so basic from scratch, and I think this should have at least been thought about.

THREE. This is the ONLY part of the game I liked. Ammunition does not last forever and does not grow on trees. It is a good thing that a game designer has finally decided to make ammunition finite. It isn't dotted around all over the fucking place, it's very much you're on your own. I like this idea.

But not in this game.

With the game already made difficult enough with a dodgy control system, the LAST thing I should have to worry about it firing at the next wave of aliens and not being able to do a THING about it. I simply don't think this idea works in this game. Any other game, and it would have been wonderful, but this just takes this from 'badly designed but okay game' to 'piece-of-shitsville'. And I had such high hopes too, which leads me to my final point:

FOUR. Everyone is playing this game. Everyone. Why? "Because it's free!"

That is NOT a reason to play a game. Games are played for fun, not because they don't cost anything. This game simply has no fun parts to it, and if I don't have fun on my own, I don't even want to TRY it with friends.

This game is not accessible to someone wanting to crack into these types of games. I've been trying for YEARS to get into the top-down view hardcore strategy games, and every single game that has come out has entirely failed me.

My problem is that since all my friends are playing it, I'm left out in the cold.

See you all when your bored of your free game.