Wow, here's a Friday surprise. Valve just announced that it's releasing a full version of Alien Swarm, a co-operative shooter based on an old Unreal Tournament 2004 mod, next week. And it's free.
The cooperative, third-person alien shooting game will be available next Monday. According to the Steam product page, Valve hired a from the modding community (not unlike what it did with Portal) and set them to work on making the game in the Source engine. The mod was as hard as a drill-sergeant's hug, so expect a nasty, life-draining bug hunt through a ravaged colony, leveling your grunt with your friends. Alien Swarm will also most of Valve's middleware: Steam Cloud, matchmaking, statistics-tracking and 64 Steam achievements.
It's encouraging to see Valve leaping into a genre other than first-person. Alien Swarm grows Valve's reputation for being an aggressive talent scout within the industry. We learned in October that Valve is probably working on a Defense of the Ancients-style game after Icefrog, one of the primary minds behind the mod, was snatched up by Valve and later reported that he was " leading a team " for the studio.
All the details are here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/630/ . If you can't wait until Monday, there's a heap of cheap, similarly-genred games already on Steam: Alien Breed: Impact , Alien Shooter , Zombie Shooter .
