First Look at Hothead’s “Swarm”

Less than a year after the success of “Deathspank” and “Thongs of Virtue”, Hothead games is back with another title, “Swarm”,  I had a chance to sit down with Director of Game Technology Joel DeYoung and play through a few levels, and I must say: This game is going to be addictive as hell. 

As opposed to one character, like a traditional platformer, the player controls a nebulous swarm of little blue "swarmites", which look like something of a cross between a frog, a bat, and a Smurf. The swarmites are brought to a desolate and apparently sadistic planet by their mother, who drops them at the beginning of each level from an intestinal-looking blue tube, and retrieves them at the end.  

The swarm only technically needs one swarmite in order to continue the game, and part of the challenge within the various puzzles is to discern whether it is more advantageous to have a smaller or larger swarm. Some of the puzzles offer bonuses for meeting a specific quota of swarmites, and some are more difficult to navigate with a larger crowd. 

The game's AI is purposefully imperfect with regard to swarm behavior, and you see this quite a bit if you forget to actually pause the game when you put down the controller. Swarmites will wander away from the herd and run into the various traps within each level, and there are an awful lot of traps. Buzzsaws, bombs, towers, pretty much any type of gruesome torture device that can be imagined exists somewhere within this game. 

Boss combat is a combination of timed survival and striking specific targets, and the boss that I observed was both hideous and difficult, with mechanical spider eyes and a mouth like the Sarlacc from "Return of the Jedi".  

On the whole, anyone who is a fan of platformers in general is probably going to enjoy this one, but it might also be a good choice for those who don't have experience or don't usually go for this genre. The gameplay itself is fairly intuitive, and the look of the game is colorful and manages to strike an artful balance between cute and ugly: Not so adorable that you feel bad when the swarmites die (and this is a "when", not an "if"), but so so awful that you want to kill them off on purpose!

Swarm will be available on Xbox LIVE Arcade and PlayStation Network. Check out a few screenshots below and the rest of the batch in the gallery.