There are not many games that actively encourage you to take joy out of killing the characters you control. Swarm does just this. It is a game where you play as charming little blue creatures (no, not Smurfs) called Swarmites, and control them through various levels solving tasks and collecting as many points as possible. As you travel through the game, you expose the 50 Swarmites you control to horrific deaths since pretty much everything in the environment will kill them.
It’s hard to gather whether there is actually any story in Swarm. There are objectives, but not so much of an end goal. Basically, you have to collect as many points as you can over ten levels to please the “Mamma”. You collect points as you travel though each area, gathering gems, solving puzzles and destroying objects. The key to the game is the multiplier, which builds up by either scoring more points, or sacrificing your Swarmites. If you do not concentrate on increasing it, you will get low scores guaranteed.
Thrown into the mix are a couple of bosses which come in the middle and end of the game. You unlock these by collecting various amounts of hidden “DNA” items scattered across the levels. These are not hard to find, but do sometimes require a bit of skill to obtain. You also gain ‘Death Medals’ throughout the game. These are earned by performing unique Swarmite deaths, and are added together to enable you to unlock Bronze, Silver and Gold awards.
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Swarm is by no means an easy game. Never mind getting to the top of the leaderboards, even just progressing through the campaign takes a lot of practice, and lots of repetitive level runs. It really isn’t helped by the difficult game controls. Though there are tutorials at various intervals in the game, some of the actions are really difficult and complicated to pick up. For example, the rush attack requires you to build up power with RT, release it, then immediately press LT. Doesn’t sound too hard, but when you take into account that you have to jump and target your enemy at the same time, it all becomes very complex. Most of the time I found myself just hammering the buttons hoping to get lucky.
A lot of other actions are fairly simple, yet effective. You can group your Swarmites together in a pack by holding RT. This is especially useful when traversing across narrow ledges, or to get more power when attacking enemies. By holding LT, you can spread your Swarmites out, allowing you to cover a great area in less time. This is useful when collecting many gems in an open space.
An annoying problem in the game is that there is little or no guidance. Whenever you get to new obstacles, it rarely gives you a clue of how to overcome them. It expects you to know, which is aggravating as most of the solutions are not obvious either. There are useful checkpoints throughout the levels which save your score and position in case all your Swarmites die, as well as eggs which reinforce your current party.
Though at first I have to admit I found Swarm very dull and boring, once I got used to the mechanics of the game I found myself having more fun. The problem is that once you hit an annoying patch on a level (and you will find several of them), I found myself getting easily tired and giving up. Even when you get past the levels, there is no sense of reward in any way. Yes your score goes on the leaderboard, but then what? There are no unlockables or additional content available, and the entire time really feels like you are getting further into nothing. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of a storyline.
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The graphics in Swarm are good, though the colours and textures become very repetitive throughout the various levels, and the environment doesn’t change much. On one of the rare occasions that it does change (level 5), the designers decided to make the entire level dark, forcing you to pick up little lights throughout, and making it incredibly fiddly and annoying. There are some neat animations though, and some of the deaths are amusing (as sadistic as it sounds). As for the sound effects, at first they are great. Then they slowly become old as you realise that every death animation has the same noise.
The game does have some replay value. Though there isn’t any multiplayer, there are online and friend leaderboards. Also, once a level is complete, a time multiplier is added offering gamers the opportunity to further increase their score. That said, I can’t imagine many people playing through the linear levels too many times just to increase their score.
At the end of the day, Swarm is no more than an average arcade game. Is it worth 1200 :MSPoints:? I don’t think so. It’s a good platform game with amusing little characters, but it offers little level variation or replay value, and can get quite boring quickly. It’s a shame because when you play Swarm you can see there is a lot of potential in the title, but the poor controls have caused it to be implemented badly.
| Rating | Description |
| 7 | Gameplay Tricky controls, but fun when you get the hang of them. |
| 6 | Graphics Good effects and animations, but repetitive environments. |
| 5 | Sound Little variety and dull music. |
| 6 | Final Score |
Swarm can be purchased from the Xbox Live Marketplace for 1200 Microsoft Points.
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