Recent reviews by Mithrand

The sequel of Alien Swarm, an top-down cooperative shooter released by Valve back in the days.

Alien Swarm originates from an unreal tournament mod back in the days and was acquired and re-released by Valve in 2010. This game combined elements from survival games like shadowgrounds and left for dead. For a free game, it had a good presentation, nice gameplay and good graphics. It only lacked two things: content and community.

Like Alien Swarm, Reactive Drop is a cooperative top down shooter. The player plays with other marines against hordes of aliens, in order to complete different objectives. In the game, there are 4 different classes to play, each one consisting of two characters with different statistics including some class restricted weapons.

During gameplay, the player will earn experience, that is used to unlock new weapons and items to use in combat. For who played the original Alien Swarm, the gameplay of Reactive Drop is untouched, which is a good thing.

Now, Reactive Drop, after many years, tries to fill the lack of content, by adding workshop support, and promising us some other new things:

- coorperative 8 player support;
- (team) deathmatch up to 32 players;
- new high quality built-in campaigns and missions;
- new aliens;
- new weapons;
- achievements;
- leaderboards;
- and most important: workshop support.

The big question is, does the game keep its promise?

Reactive Drop has inherited the same mechanisms as Alien Swarm, which is a good thing. The game plays fast and controls and mechanics might require a certain learning period, but they should feel familiar and pretty good worked out once you master them.

About the graphics. For a game, originally released back in 2010, the graphics simply still can keep up with modern games. Don't expect Battlefront 2 or Assassin's Creed Origins level quality, however for a free to play game of this age, the graphics still look pretty good.

The workshop support is an absolute winner. The biggest thing of the original game was the lack of content. Workshop support fills in this gap. As a result, some active community members have already published and polished some great campaigns out there, like Adanaxis and some new game modes, called challenges.

The over 100 achievements make the game a challenge of itself. Even experienced players will spend quite some time to unlock them. The new weapons are a nice addition for variation.

Increasing the cooperative player limit from 4 to 8 players, means, you can now invite 7 other friends to play with for even more cooperative swarm killing. Who could possibly not like that!

After playing the original over 1500h, and RD going in that direction, the game still manages to surprise me from time to time.

Increasing the player limit is a good thing, but also can be a bad thing. Games might get a bit too chaotic with so much going on. In 8 player games, good communication is a must.

(Team) death match is a fun addition, however the quality and game mechanics of this mode, is not even near the quality of the cooperative mode. The game was clearly designed to play against aliens, this is noticeable in the death match game modes.

The leaderboards are an absolute joke and full of cheaters and missing entries. Although the idea is very nice to compete against your friends, the game does not have anti-cheat mechanisms built-in, which means there are a lot of people, cheating their way into these leaderboards, rendering them useless. The developers seem to struggle to combat this.

Compared to other games, this game has no matchmaking. Every beginner can join every game, even on highest difficulty, which can be frustrating from time to time. As a result, new players are asked to leave or getting kicked out of hardcore games. On the experienced player side, games are sometimes ruined because new players join and open friendly fire on team. Since the game has promotions and xp leveling, it would be nice if the developers would have implemented some kind of filter for game difficulties, however no such thing does exist. My advice would be to play in friends-only games, to counter this issue.

Most of the time, the game is very stable, however from time to time, crashes to desktop or fps issues occur. This was also an issue in the original Alien Swarm, so probably it is engine related. Luckily, in comparison with the fps drops, the crashes are quite rare.

Although the game does get regular updates, there is no clear public roadmap or communication between developers and the community. A shame, because the game could really benefit from this.

Although the game is not perfect, and has its issues like leaderboards and lack of matchmaking. For a free game, it is one of the best games out there.

Initially released by Valve in 2010, it survived until today and still has a community that actively plays and supports it. The graphics are descent, the gameplay is fun and when bringing some friends, you are ensured of an evening full of fun. If you like top-down gameplay, just download it and give it a try!

I would rate Reactive Drop 7/10.

If the developers would work with the community in a more professional way and fix the outstanding issues, this game has the potential to reach 10/10.