As I booted up Swarm, there were two options laid out to me on the right hand portion of the screen: “Press A to select” and “Do not press Y.” Naturally, I chose the latter and watched the death of my first Swarmite. Up close on the welcome screen, the slaughtering of the Swarmites is actually kind of disturbing. Normally in the game, you have an isometric view that makes the Swarmites look more like ants and their deaths more like you focusing a magnifying glass on them. But here, the Swarmite in full screen, it killed the whimsical detachment I hoped I would achieve while playing the main game.
The setup is pretty basic. “Momma” needs a new hat, and the “Hat Boss” is the one who’s got it. Before you can get to the hat boss, you’re going to have to collect some DNA first. Each level available, excluding boss levels, has 5 pieces of said DNA. That’s about all the explanation I could find. The name of the Hat Boss was descriptive enough, I suppose, but why collecting DNA is what allowed me to face the hat-wielding boss was without explanation.
You start each available level with 50 Swarmites, the maximum possible at any one time. As you make your way through the level from left to right, you’ll encounter traps, enemies, and just about anything else that could possibly reduce that 50 to 0. It’s not all bad: as your Swarmites perish, their deaths boost your score and combo meter, which is fueled by glowing orbs found throughout the level. There’s a timer for how long your combo meter lasts, so either careful planning or well timed Swarmite executions must be used in order to keep up a good score. Luckily, checkpoints are scattered throughout the levels that capture your current score based on your multiplier and also offer a haven if you were to lose all 50 Swarmites, which for me, happened often. The checkpoint does not maintain your combo; however, and if you lose all the members of your little blue army, any score gained after reaching the previous checkpoint is lost.
This made for some mandatory level replays. I would often fail to reach the mandatory score to move on the the next level, usually on account of losing all my Swarmites and my high combo score with them. Not until I had played the entire level and seen what and where all the obstacles were, would I be able to navigate safely and maintain a high enough combo score to reach my goal.
Players are given the chance to enhance their score periodically throughout the levels with pads marked with different numbers, referring to the number of Swarmites required to activate them. This may seem counter intuitive, and it is, as you had probably been sacrificing your poor little lemmings up to that point. Fortunately, there are patches that replenish Swarmites littered throughout levels; however, rarely do they correspond to these score pads. More often than not, they’re found following a particularly difficult area, rewarding those that can navigate while losing the minimal amount of Swarmites.
The majority of the time I hit a score pad, it was after losing all of my Swarmites and starting over from a checkpoint that had a pad nearby. This was fairly frustrating in the later levels where the pads had a requirement of either 40 or 50 Swarmites almost exclusively, though on the plus side it does provide some added replayability. The score pads are easily one of the best ways to give your score a huge boost, and reaching all of them is sure to get your Gamertag near the top on the leaderboards. If you’re not a leaderboard kind of player, chances are that this will be a single-playthrough experience for you.
With 11 levels, and just two bosses, the game was definitely on the short side. With how intricate some of the levels became, I’ll admit that I was surprised to find such an abrubt ending. For what the game was, the gameplay kept me engrossed for every minute I played it. If it gone on a few levels more, the appeal of mass murdering little blue blobs would have begun to fade. It would be a lie to say I didn’t have a fun time playing Swarm. At the same time, not much about it made me feel like it was something that I needed to experience again. Any of the levels I played more than once I did so out of necessity and a slight obsessive complex for getting all the DNA. Chances are you won’t regret your time spent with Swarm, but I can’t say how long you might remember it.
Rating: 
This review is based on the Xbox version of Swarm, which was provided for review by Ignition Entertainment. It is available for $15 on XBLA and PSN.
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