INCOMPATIBILITY WITH ORIGINAL GAME PACKAGE: 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. 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. 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. However, they also strongly suggest that not all of humanity are aware of the threat posed by the alien bugs. 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, some maps in the original Jacob’s Rest campaign have been reworked to include huge PDAs that are lying about.

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. Reactive Drop has the Swarmopedia, which lists the bugs that the player can expect to encounter. Yet, Reactive Drop raises more tantalizing expectations out of me, again, despite my scepticism. 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. 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. Considering that Alien Swarm is a ‘free’ game that is not intended to generate revenue directly, this was perhaps a surprise. 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. 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. To me, Alien Swarm represented so much promise, not only for itself but for the Steam platforms.

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. By Gelugon_baat | Review Date: November 29, 2018

Alien swarm reactive drop review