Best way to waste your day: Valve releases Alien Swarm and Source SDK free

The other day Valve had so nonchalantly announced that it would be releasing a remake of the Unreal Tournament: 2004 mod “Alien Swarm”  running on the Source engine for free via Steam. Alien Swarm will be a four player co-operative, top-down shooter created by the original team who has been busy in the meantime working on future Valve blockbuster titles such as the Left 4 Dead games and the upcoming Portal 2.

That’s not all you have to be excited about though, Valve has also announced that along with Alien Swarm, they will be releasing the Source SDK for free, so for those of you who don’t already own a Source based game such as Half-Life 2 or Team Fortress 2, you can create your own game mods or design maps, along with a plethora of other things to create.

Valve lists the following content as such:

Alien Swarm is a game and Source SDK release from a group of talented designers at Valve who were hired from the Mod community. Available free of charge, the game thrusts players into an epic bug hunt featuring a unique blend of co-op play and squad-level tactics. With your friends, form a squad of four distinct IAF Marine classes. Plan your attack using an unlockable arsenal of weapons with countless loadout configurations against a wide variety of aliens. Blaze your way through an overrun, off-world colony, eradicating the alien infestation in environments ranging from the icy planet’s surface, to a subterranean lava-flooded mining facility.

- Tactical, 4 player co-op action game with a top-down perspective
- Complete game code and mod tools
- Unlock persistent items by gaining levels
- Over 40 weapons and equipment with countless loadout configurations
- 4 unique classes and 8 unique characters
- Matchmaking, Steam Cloud, Steam Stats
- 64 achievements
- Tile-based map generation tool
- Powered by Source and Steam

You can expect to see these up on Steam for free download later today. You can also check out www.alienswarm.com to watch the trailer right now.