"Hey, have you seen Swarm? It's this game about these cute blue blobs. Could be my sort of game" That's how Swarm was first introduced to me, via our very own Sarah, who'd developed an interest in the game for the vainest of reasons. Sadly, as it's often been said, you can't judge a book by its cover - and in the case of Swarm, that couldn't be more true.
You see, Swarm is indeed a game about cute blue blobby people, but it isn't the sort of game Sarah was expecting. After a weird alien tendril appears and, er, passes around 50 of them into the level, it's up to you to get those little blue squishy things from one end of the level to the other. So far, so straight forward, but it wouldn't be much of a challenge if you were just walking a straight road. Instead, in between you and your goal lies a range of evil destructive implements, designed to slice, fry, zap, and splat your poor blue squishy friends, making each level something of an obstacle course from hell. And far from being encouraged to help your friends to survive, you're practically encouraged to kill them.
The little blue guys look a lot like Berk from The Trap Door - if anyone remembers that? And if you can make them out.
In Swarm, you don't get rewarded for successfully navigating the courses - and, surprisingly, there's no achievement for finishing the level without losing a Swarmite. The reason behind this is that a) it'd almost be impossible not to, and b) that you need to sacrifice swarmites to keep your multiplier going. As you make your way through the level, you'll come across various DNA fragments your blue friends can collect in order to build up your score, and, when you've collected enough, earn a multiplier. No sooner have you earnt your multiplier, however, than the timer gauge around it starts decreasing. When the gauge empties, your multiplier's over, and your score gets increased by the measly multiplier, times however many points you've amassed since it began. The whole trick of Swarm is to manage to keep your multiplier going, helping you build up higher multipliers, gaining more points, and a higher bonus along the way.
There are two ways you can achieve this. The first, and most humane, is to simply keep collecting the little DNA fragments - every one you collect will boost your multiplier straight back up to the top. The second, and crueller way, involves killing your swarm. Every time you send one of your blue minions to his death, your multiplier gauge gets replenished, buying you a precious few extra seconds. Of course, you can only exploit this trick a limited number of times - but with your Swarm being restocked at various points through the level, it becomes an essential part of the gameplay.
Signs throughout the level do at least try to help you figure out what to do, but the controls are so poor, there's little point trying to do anything.
In essence, the game seems to have been designed so you can gleefully murder as many of the blue beings as possible, all under the pretence of keeping your multiplier going. It's frustrating, because practically everything you do in the level will involve one of your creatures dying - whether you're getting your Swarm to ram a crate (which seems to randomly use either one or up to around 12 of your Swarm of 50) in an attempt to get some extra DNA shards, or simply navigating the hellish obstacle courses, you can't actually keep the blue things safe. Killing them is meant to be the fun thing here.
We could possibly turn a blind eye to this too, if the game were actually any fun. But it isn't. Any fun that could have been squeezed out of the game is forcibly removed like a decaying wisdom tooth thanks to the abysmal control scheme, that requires you to have around 400 fingers to use it properly. To give you an example, you have to hold the right trigger to get your swarm to cluster together, then hold, and release the left trigger to get them to charge into something. If you hold, and then release the A button at the same time as releasing the left trigger, you can do a boost jump. Holding the right trigger, while not touching the analogue stick, and pressing A will cause your swarm to pile up into a tower. Hammering A more will make them make a taller tower - but as soon as you try to move anywhere, your tower collapses. Which kind of begs the question - what's the point of making a tower if you can't actually do anything with it? Practically as soon as you push the trigger, it collapses, which makes reaching things that are high up in the level rather hard indeed.
And that's if you can actually see your swarm to begin with. When traps start firing, flamethrowers start burning, fans start... fanning, and your swarm start getting killed, it's often nigh on impossible to tell where you're meant to be looking, and which of your swarm are still alive or dead. All of which simply leads to you watching the wrong blue blob, and wondering why it isn't moving as you accidentally drive your remaining herd straight off a cliff.
Spot the live ones. We can't.
But Swarm isn't done there. Further frustration comes from the point score required to finish each level. Yes, reaching the end isn't quite enough for the developers here - you actually have to achieve a certain score in order to progress to the next level. It may not be so bad if these were cumulative, but instead, you have to get the relevant score in one run through the level - which is much, much, much easier said than done. It took us several attempts, and several hours to get enough points to unlock the fourth level. Of course, all this means is, if you're simply not good enough at the game, it's actually impossible for you to get any further and play the game you've paid for, meaning you've just spent 1200 points on a little slice of hell.
Disappointing, crude, and frustrating, with a control scheme that seems designed to irritate almost as much as the primary game mechanic, Swarm is a game all but the most masochistic can safely steer clear of.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
