The Cruel and the Kind- Swarm Review

Almost more interesting than the game’s story is the story of how Swarm came to be: In 2006, Mike Hayward was developing his PhD thesis on how individual AI instances would react to one another when given a discreet task. With the help of some friends, that concept was refined into a pitch for an indie game and entered into “The Great Canadian Video Game Competition.” They beat out 3 other games to nab $300,000 for development, and 5 years later, Ignition Entertainment has brought it to your digital doorstep.

At it’s core, Swarm is a simple side-scrolling point-grab. You try your best to avoid traps, you break open boxes, and you try to collect glowing purple things for points. The twist is that rather than controlling one character, your controlling a mob of fifty, and you almost never have direct control of any of them. Each Swarmite is essentially its own intelligent entity that responds to your command in whatever way is appropriate, given his unique situation. That sounds pretty frustrating, but in reality it controls quite well. The swarm stays together in a pretty tight group, which you can expand and contract to best a variety of different traps, but the group can also boost, stack, jump and ram – all of which make traversing levels much more varied and challenging.

The levels are filled with a respectable variety of traps and pitfalls, which are used in interesting enough configurations to keep the challenge feeling fresh throughout. The adventure is punctuated by an occasional boss fight to break up the otherwise consistent momentum. To complete each level, you must collect a set number of points, but most of the time, there are not enough points littered throughout the level to meet that goal. Managing score mulitpliers becomes the most critical part of the game. In general, this is done by collecting points quickly, before the timer runs out, but if you find yourself about to lose a clutch 30x multiplier, and no points are to be found, you can just as easily sacrifice members of your swarm to raise your mulitplier. It’s that sort of real-time strategic decision-making that gives the game so much more depth than your average platformer. 

Swarm’s one major misstep is it’s camera. As simple as a fixed camera for a sidescroller may seem, keeping track of 50 independent objects at once, in real time, is apparently not as easy as it sounds. There are a great many instances where the camera will zoom out, or tilt ever-so-slightly to cover up a devious trap or to force your Swarm into taking leaps of faith. On one occasion early on, you are tasked to lead your swarm through a funneling, jagged hallway, which is covered with lava. The tricky part is that you can’t actually see the last 10% of the tunnel, so nine times out of ten, I just wound up losing my entire swarm. Luckily, burning my entire swarm at once helped me to unlock a medal, so I wasn’t too upset.