Swarmcade

This game is a worthy addition to the ever-growing catalog of bullet-heaven games. The aesthetic is a real treat for the eyes here, with a few options to really lean into to the whole idea of "looking into an arcade cabinet". The each class has different starting stat bonuses and weapons, and there are a few that require unlocking in early access. This title has quite a bright future, and I'm hoping more people give this game a shot.

The game is a close Vampire Survivors clone with a different style. This itself isn't a problem in itself(despite what some other reviewers think). The problem is that, like many other clones, it only offers style. It has no twists and has a shallow understanding of the VS content. The power-ups seem fine enough, but there's no discovery as you gain them. "Vampire Survivors speeds up projectiles - Swarmcade needs a projectile speed up." The upgrades and classes are all on the table immediately and almost nothing seems hidden for me to find. There's none of the feeling of peeling back tiny layers of the game to get more. But it is the levels and swarms where the game falls down the most. The levels are small or very small and have nothing to find. The Pac-man level is cute, but tight halls are a terrible Survivors layout (and then it changes to the Robotron rectangle which is nothing). Games with small levels usually have shorter runs. The most clear level issue is that enemies do not attack in interesting timed patterns. In Vampire Survivors and the good clones, there are scripts of swarms which are obvious. Flocks of bats, pauses and then you are surrounded. Circles of killer plants. With enemies that all feel largely the same, the main reason to move around is to pick up XP. There's also a lack of flair despite the interesting style. Level ups don't have that Slot Machine feel and show little info. Enemies do not react when being damaged unless they die, so you can't tell if you are hitting them. For some reason, levels you can't play yet aren't grayed and you must choose them to be told you can't play. And there aren't any other side rewards/mysteries as far as I can tell. Just to be clear, it's not the amount of content that is the problem here, it is what the content and gameplay is. It either needs to offer something that VS doesn't. The developer could offer up 50 more unique levels like this with 50 powers and it wouldn't change that as it stands the game has no interesting twists. If the developer takes the graphics that exist now and makes larger levels with items to find in the distance, interesting, memorable waves, enemies that attack differently, and maybe different powerup and upgrade mechanics. Until then, I can't recommend this. ***Edit*** Responding to developer. This one frustrates me. I did not have a good experience, but the developer chose to not be polite. My criticism of the game was never going to be fun to hear. "you had 30 mins of play before you made this review and seemingly stopped there. It has taken players who have gone for every unlockable/achievement in the game over 100 hours to see all the game has to offer." I stopped after I reached my frustration point. With Survivors-likes you can sometimes tell a lot quickly. You can see the play style, level style, meta progression options. I wanted to find another layer of depth, but it wasn't there. The rate it takes to unlock the unlockables doesn't tell you how much fun the game is. It tells you how many plays you need to play to get to the unlockables. A secret boss or a secret warp to a different looking level is something I don't really care about. It's like a secret color. "You found 0xFF3344." If the game play isn't interesting, it just changes how things look. In other words, whatever the secrets are, there's little of it showing up in the moment by moment feel of the game. "Levels are smaller than VS. Granted, yes, a deliberate design choice as someone who was not a fan of endlessly repeating stages. It's fine if that's not for you." There's a reason why VS style combat doesn't work well in tight corridors. It reduces player choice further in a system which already has limited action. Larger maps also encourage player movement. The map doesn't need to be endless. Plenty of different games have medium size stages. Smaller stages are usually better on games with short runs. "Enemy patterns: It sounds like you wanted a 1:1 recreation of VS. No twists? There is a whole third difficultly that you didn't unlock that changes things up in a big way, with unique curses and boons. Some enemies use projectiles, leave floor traps and hidden bosses offer unique challenges." No, I want twists and changes. My big criticism is that the game largely "does less". In fact, the single developer games that have the most success choose to not follow the VS formula so closely so they aren't forced to be compared to vs. Because the game plays the action so close, it's easy to see what's not there. Having endless waves of samey enemies instead of interesting scripted patterns compares poorly. Options other games use include random waves of differing enemies, enemies that change obviously when events are met or when different areas are moved into. Shorter maps with different enemies on each map...there are plenty of other options. Having to unlock a third level of difficulty for floor traps and projectiles seems like a long time. Why is it that this game feels the need to hide these on a third level? "In options, you can turn on hit flashes to see when you are hitting enemies, along with damage numbers." I get that games can't be technically perfect, but this kind of reaction is critical in a modern game or a retro game. I think players also expect some kind of push back from an attack. This is another way the game fails to go sub-VS in the mechanics, where the twist is "doing less". The player can only control the enemies with a normal attack by killing them completely *** Ultimately, you keep suggesting the game "not for you". If the feedback to issues is that the game is fine and that the problem is on my side, logically I'm not going to recommend a game which intentionally has mechanics and design which is hostile to me and will not change. It's an easy NO on the recommend.

KERSHPLUNKT! -Giggles Games came in and dropped a big bowl of Gen X candy.

I liked the aesthetics but the animation and hit detection are pretty bad and it feels like you are walking around in molasses.

I want to start by saying if there was a neutral I would click that instead of a negative. But I cant give this game a positive in its current state and I worry I wont be able to in the future. As it stands there are a lot of issues. The developers very active and seems to be working hard at ironing those out, so we will see what happens and ill update this review much later in EA or after 1.0. In the meantime here are the issues I take with the game/developer. 1. The complete lack of skills or build diversity. This is a direct VS clone in the sense that every character has 1 weapon. All characters than pull from a pool of a few general weapons or the weapons of the other characters. This isnt like games in the genre I would arguing are evolving such as Nordic Ashes (BUY THIS IF YOU DONT OWN IT!!!) or Scarlet Tower that give each character multiple weapons/a skill tree and a wider general pool. The limited selection of skills and all the skills being attached to another character makes every game feel pretty similar regardless of what build you attempt or character you play. If no character has unique skills, dodges, evolution or ANYTHING to separate them...every character plays the same. 2. What "builds" there are I find limited in the extreme and unsatisfying. Iv put 8 hours into this game despite the limited content and every game devolves to a huge swarm of enemies overcoming you no matter what you do. As a result players MUST take healing and defensive skills. Every game you will be increasingly swarmed and take damage no matter what you do and must build to survive. 3. Because the previous two issues it means I dont feel my skills as a gamer are being rewarded. If im picking similar builds each time, than my skills at min maxing or build creation are not being challenged. And if im being swarmed and have to play defensive in a bullet hell arena game, it means my twitch skills are not being challenged. I know as someone that tends to make the top 10% of the leaderboards for every single one of these games I have a high degree of skill. If anything though that should have made me more capable of playing alternative builds and not getting so swarmed I feel forced to take defensive skills and play healing builds. I feel if at my skill levels I am having these issues, I cant imagine what gamers like my wife or little brother would go through. 4. The stage balance isnt designed well. By the developers own words stage 2 is harder than stage 3 or 4....yet he plans for future stages that are implemented to be even harder......and I know this because I had requested the ability to skip easy mode and go right to hard. I pointed out that to play stages 3 or 4 on hard I now have to spend 60+ mins of time on easy playing those stages. His response is many players are still struggling with the game. I countered many of us are not and we shouldnt be punished by being forced to play easy stages because some need more hand holding. I also pointed out factually each update that adds new stages will mean players having to all over again play easy for 30+ mins just to get to the actual challenge of hard mode. Further more that each update more players will have invested in upgrades so more players will just want to jump right to hard. His response was that future stages will get progressively harder.....yet stage 2 will still be harder than stage 3-4. This is just flat out a bad design choice and was my moment to check out of this game for a long time. It means you either force skilled players to play through on easy to unlock hard for every new stage. Or you have to design each new stage to be so difficult on easy it is a challenge to players playing hard on previous stages....but that than locks out anyone who was stuck on easy or hard on stage 2/3/4 from having ANY chance at beating stages 5/6/7 as they are added. This is the main point that made me check out of this game and leave this review. I lost a lot of faith in the developer when they couldnt see the basic logic in not forcing players to play easy to unlock hard....or that making stages progressively harder isnt a solution as it locks out those with less skill. 5. A lack of turbo mode makes the 30+ min stages a terribly boring grind. The dev said he plans to add it to be fair, but that its likely one of the last features added. Without it I just lost even the last interest to see how this game develops in EA. No turbo mode, 30+ min stages that are designed to be played over and over again with the exact same weapons and being forced to play each stage on easy just to unlock hard.....that is beyond a punishing grind even for one of these very grindy style games. 6. Finally I have to note I bought about 12 of these types of games during the bullet hell fest. I had surgery this week and binge played hours of each of them. Swarmcade was 1 of only 3 I returned/wish I had returned. Iv played dozens of games in this style and have been playing them since before people ever heard of VS (check out Nation Red!). This is one of the rare games that iv bought, kept and than checked out of for all the reasons above. When games like Nordic Ashes, Scarlet Tower or Project Lazarus all offer you 5x as many skills, stages, build diversity etc for the same price I just cant see playing a game like Swarmcade. Good luck to the developer and I will check the game back out and update the review if things change later. As I said the dev seems to be working hard. But I personally do not understand many of the game play choices he is making and find them incredibly limiting, punishing and grindy even for this genre. I know I said a lot of bad here and called out the developer directly. But I do wish him best with his game and hammering out the balance or at least making this into whatever his vision is.

The game has potential but the level ups and power comes too slow. It becomes tedious and repetitive to play as a result. Please look at other survivor games like Vampire Survivors, Death Must Die, and time the rate of level ups particularly in the first 10 minutes of play. It's way faster and more fun as a result than this, so I suggest adjusting XP and levelling rates accordingly. Also a lot of the weapons need to be looked at. They are very underpowered and the level ups are not very impactful, which is possibly contributing to the slow level ups. *Update* I have tried Hard and Cursed mode. I feel the tuning on levelling speed on Hard is actually closer to the experience I want, but it's tedious to play through because I feel like the entry point to Hard mode is nearly maxing out upgrades (which I've done, and takes significant amount of hours to do), and there are too many weapons in the pool that feel like liabilities rather than fun and powerful, before being able to upgrade to ultimates. I stopping playing after 18 hours, most of the play time was just okay but leaning on the side of not enjoyable, just a grind to see if I was misunderstanding something and on the verge of unlocking a feature / ability that would drastically change my experience. But I didn't end up finding it. I achieved full upgrades except for banishes and shop, unlocked all characters except for the specials. My uninstall point was discovering that unlocking the new characters would require a large amount of gold gambling with no exciting 'feedback' to clicking before seeing my gold get deleted (gacha rolling typically has animations or mechanics that are exciting / stimulating). Also the fact that I couldn't find an interesting reason to grind for the new characters, nothing indicates ingame that these characters are any more powerful than the original ones, and there are no indicators that their weapons have cool ultimate combos to work towards. The pumpkin on the first special character felt so bad, and taking the pumpkin character into cursed mode was like "Oh my god I'm weaker than a non-upgraded account on normal / hard mode!", which made me question why I spent all those hours grinding and achieving this special character in the first place. For the developer, it may be worth categorising my experience and comparing it against other player telemetry that you're seeing, based on hours played / uninstall point. < 20 hrs on a game like this I feel is low for me, I usually am interested and spend a lot more time. E.g. - Twilight Survivors: 40hrs, finished after fully clear and unlocks - Slime 3k 25hrs, " " - Death Must Die, 35hrs " " - Vampire Survivors, 80hrs on Nintendo Switch, " " For me, I think the first step for optimisation is to reduce the number of upgrades per weapon and make each upgrade more impactful. I.e. Max upgrade level reduced from 10 to 5. There doesn't need to be 3 game modes, condense them into 2 game modes (Normal and Swarm mode). Combine aspects of the mob behaviour, levelling rates from Hard into the New Normal mode but make it easier. Reduce game time from 30 minutes to 15-20 minutes because 30 minutes is such a grind, and the reason gamers play survivor games is because we want a distilled experience of levelling, rng, and moment to moment gameplay. Buff movement speed to make the game feel more frenetic and give me more agency to dodge and feel like I have more outplays to my disposal. Mobility is so important in this game, especially when there are no dash mechanics or other movement buttons like in other survivor games. Then, I would take a good look at the power tuning and functionality of the weapons. The weapon unlocks are meant to be the most exciting part of playing through the game, like working to get a present and unwrap it to see what it does. So when finally unlocking those weapons, it feels bad when you realise that the weapon is underpowered or isn't worth using vs others. Finally, I would look at the high-hours (or 'end game') systems such as the lottery, special character unlocks. For me, encountering these systems were my quit moment in the game. But I feel like the issues listed above are higher priority and could cause players to quit much earlier before reaching these high-hours systems.

Another Arcade Arena Shooter that's more akin to Vampire Survivors than some of the other similar games released. Probably one of my favorites out of the new games of this genre. Has a lot to go in terms of content compared to others but what it has is very well done.

This Survivor game bring a good old Arcade vibe to the genre. The gameplay is very fluid and fun. There is alot of skills, characters and enemies already with cool maps in this Early Acces stage. The Dev keep updating and expand the game. It already worth the price asked. Recommended!

Awesome game, if you like these types of games. Got a bit far into the game, still plenty to unlock. So enjoying the experience. Plenty of upgrades and heroes to unlock as well. Overall, would recomend. and the dev is super helpful as well, which is always a plus.

I'm going to say it right now. Better than VS.