Deep Among the Swarm

This is a bit of a hidden gem. It plays a bit like a rogue-like version of [b]Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal[/b]. For another comparison; Imagine you were struggling in a game of [b]Red Alert[/b] or [b]Age of Empires 2[/b] and were constantly inching your way forward across the map with your army, fighting through a sea of enemies. As you're doing that, you're constantly building little bases and turrets along the way, fighting for every inch of map you can attain. It plays kind of like that. The game revolves around the supply depot buildings, which when placed, allow you to build more buildings in range of it. You end up dotting trails of these across the map, kind of like in [b]Creeper World[/b]. It only takes one enemy to sneak in and abruptly destroy one of these depots, stopping your power supply chain to all of your turrets so they stop working. Because of this vulnerability, every so often you end up building a little fortress along your supply trails, comprised of some walls & turrets. The initial levels are pretty easy, but that quickly changes by the time you've drilled 1000 meters deep. I was banging my head against a wall for a while when I reached that point. ..atleast until I went onto the games Steam discussion page to get a better understanding of one of the games central mechanics: The swarm meter. The longer that you stay in a level, the more the swarm meter rises. This meter affects the strength and number of the enemies and the meter is always rising as you play -it doesn't reset between levels. This means that if you stay in the early levels for too long, you will reach a point where you have basically no chance of making it further. The swarm meter will be too high and enemies will have outraced you in power, making them unmanageable. This makes your runs in the game a race against time, where you need to play fast and efficiently, frequently pausing the game whenever you need to make a decision or manage a minor crisis. You need to be frugal as opposed to greedy when it comes to spending more time in levels searching for loot. As well as having to deal with the swarm meter, after the first 1000 meters, there's a significant difficulty jump in tier 2. The enemies seem to scale up a lot, meanwhile your equipment is still stuck at tier 1. You need to find and craft the tier 2 equipment. It feels necessary to find this equipment in order to keep up with the swarm. This task is easier said than done, especially with the tier 2 units seeming to have twice as much hp requiring you to place twice as many turrets and units to deal with them. Between levels, you can do a decent bit of customization with what kind of troops and buildings you use, and equip them with different items which you will craft. The crafting system is very simple thankfully, I enjoy this aspect of the game. [b]Deep Among the Swarm[/b] can be oppressively difficult even on normal difficulty (there is an easier difficulty option though). I found it necessary to search the games Steam discussion page at least once to work out what I was doing wrong, but I would still consistently hit a wall where it was unclear to me on how to make progress. I imagine a bit of a search on Youtube would possibly teach me more of where I'm going wrong. Despite my struggles with this game (and even if I was to drop it right now) I have had a blast playing this. It's an easy recommendation, I just wish it had a little more variety in the rogue-like aspect, as runs don't feel wildly different from one another. I want more units/turrets/upgrades/maps/enemy types. I also wish that the game was a little clearer on how to improve and make progress.

I really wanted to like this game as I generally like these sort of alien swarm / TD games. I could not get over how bad the controls were, it took all the fun out of the game. Yes I can rebind some things but my biggest complaint is the build layout. I should not need to be memorizing starcraft build macros for something this simple. WHY is the most common building the LAST thing? I'm always going to build miners and expand my build area, put those first! I am microing some units and want to click on the turret next to them and build a copy, why can't I do that? Why do you need to go > back to drill > Back to subtab > click the thing you already had selected. Too frustrating.

My 2 cents on this - I rate a game on how many hours i play on it - 1 hour per £. The game is £7.49 and i've played almost 38 hours on it. I also enjoy how the dev is active and trying his best to improve the game as it goes along. The game is in early access, and people know the risks of early access. All reviews both positive and negative are good as it helps the developer. Negative reviews before a 1.0 release should be constructive, and after the 1.0 release the reviews should be mostly positive because the bad reviews have helped the dev sort problems out. I love that the dev is active with the small community that plays his game in the discord. Ideas flow and the game develops. It gets better slowly over time. My biggest issue is the burrowers. The fact they can show up randomly without much warning really slows down the progression inside the map. My suggestion to fix this is - have burrowers spawn invisible at the spawn points, and walk towards the drill. Then when they attack the drill, their cloak disappears. They ignore everything that can block a normal mob. The only counter is to have the vision tower the only tower that can detect burrowers and will uncloak them. This makes a redundant building useful. :)

It's a combination of different ideas that I think works ok enough and occupies an interesting niche. Many games in this broadly similar or adjacent category (e.g. They Are Billions, Glory to Goo) have this enormous pressure to be fast and efficient and you have to be ready in time for the final wave at pre-defined time. In this game, it's more easygoing, and also not as complicated as, say, Mindustry. You choose when to trigger the final wave (with tradeoffs) and you can take your time, build up proper defenses and enjoy what you've created. There's also an interesting upgrade/crafting system that lasts within a run which makes each run interesting. It's easier to have fun with this game than the other games in this genre, I feel like. I really like it. Unfortunately it does have issues with UI design and the core gameplay loop is quite narrow. The map generation is also a bit limited. But it's also a very low-priced indie game. If you liked any of the other games I mentioned above, do try this one out.

Good game, but too easy once you have plenty of unlocks. Massed defenses can defeat anything. Challenge difficulty increases only slowly, but removing the unlocks and restarting might create challenge, I'm not sure.

Very satisfying gameplay loop of expand, consolidate, push. Great little RTS with quite a bit of depth.

The gameplay itself is enjoyable, but the way the game is set up isn't, which is why I wouldn't recommend it for anyone who doesn't want to invest 50-100 hours+ into a game like this. The game progresses with digging down. Once you lose you'll have to start all the way up from the top again and you'll get to unlock some meta progression that lets you go a little deeper the next time, or make the rounds a bit faster. The individual gameplay levels take way to long to have this be an enjoyable grind, so it just ends up being frustrating.

игра хороша, но не хватает Русского языка

Awesome game..a very fun mix of Tower Defense and Strategy. Can be addicting.

A lot of bad ideas, and even the good ones are implemented poorly. Just to name a few of the bigger issues: [list] [*]A single objective type (collecting fuel and then refueling the drill) for every normal level, and the 3 boss levels play out the same in practice. [*]Only two map types, one is too easy and the other is too hard (to the point the game stops it from being picked for the boss levels), both terribly repetitive in spite of the procedural generation. [*]The only strategy on the offense is to attack move with enough DPS, and the only strategy on the defense is to AFK after building a defensive wall with enough DPS and healing turrets behind it. [*]The refuelling phase at the end of each level is usually 5+ minutes of AFK, unless you couldn't build strong enough defense then it's a game over: there is no inbetween. [*]Little content: for example, infantry has two types of armor (light or heavy) and five types of weapon (rifle, sniper rifle, shotgun, rocket launcher, medic gun). [*]Some of the content isn't well integrated: for example, the lightning tower building cannot use most items for defensive towers, does not benefit from most tower bonuses, and has a handful of dedicated bonuses that can't keep up with the ones the other towers get. [*]The roguelite progression between RTS levels is 90% gambling with parts: there is no guarantee of progress, an absurd gap between an item with bad rolls and one with good rolls, and no stat reference to know what the baseline is. [*]The remaining 10% of roguelite progression includes the max fuel and fuel efficiency upgrades, that will put you in an unwinnable situation if you upgrade them too soon and will put you in an unwinnable situation if you upgrade them too late. [*]The metaprogression systems are tremendously grindy. [*]The biome system is blatant padding, requiring you to gamble again to replace all your equipment with the next tier, re-farm blueprints for the same items only of the next tier, and start every run without access to a lot of items types. [*]Burrowers are somehow still the worst idea in the whole game. [/list] Just don't bother.