Game Profile: Swarm Assault

So, if you like real time strategy games, but aren't great at them (like me) and don't have a lot of money to blow on them, where do you look for them?

Well, you could buy Swarm Assault, which can be had for $13 or thereabouts (according to the website I checked). It's a little hard to find, and it is no longer supported or even acknowledged by the studio that apparently created it, but if you like RTS games, there are worse ways you could blow less than twenty bucks and six or twelve hours.

It's no Total Annihilation, but it is fun.

The game is much simpler than the typical modern high-budget RTS. There are five "species," for lack of a better term, of "insect" that you can control (each produced by its own kind of "colony"), and four "factions" which each get a bonus in production for one type of "insect." There are only four tilesets, which run rampant with "wild" neutral enemies of three varieties who will likely cause you a fair bit of trouble.

The thing I haven't mentioned yet? The "insects" have guns, missile launchers, and bombs.

Each kind of colony has a unique defense gun. (My favorite is the Ant colony's powerful machine guns, which can stop the typical mob rush in its tracks; the worst is definitely the Beetle colony's inaccurate, short-ranged, slow-firing and outright cruddy cannon.) Each also produces three types of unit of its own "species," meaning that the game features fifteen controllable units.

In broad strokes, each type of unit is suited by its weapon and armor for a specific role. Melee units (such as the Bull Ant and the Savage Scorpion) are useless against colonies; if used, they're better suited for defense, killing artillery units that are out of range of the base guns. Artillery units (Cannon Beetles, Missile Spiders, Spear Scorpions) are ideal for killing colonies, as they outrange most colony guns. Then there are units that are a tad more versatile, such as the Sniper Spider and the Ninja Scorpion. (See why I like the game?) The Sniper Spider's considerable range and excellent accuracy make it highly capable at picking off enemy artillery or doing light artillery work, while the Ninja Scorpion's homing ninja stars (!) despite being short-ranged will kill just about anything they can reach because of its high firing rate. (The Ninja Scorpion is kind of expensive, but it's probably the most powerful unit in the game because it can fill nearly any role.)

The oddest "species" are probably the Wasps, as their cheapest unit, the Assault Wasp (which isn't that cheap) is probably their best "artillery" because of its range, while its longest-ranged unit is a base defender instead (it launches "knockout" projectiles that don't affect colonies), and its heaviest unit, the Sonic Wasp is a mixed-role thing whose range is too short to work against many colonies. (The whole species probably has this oddity and disadvantage because they're the only species that can cross water, which is the only advantage flight gives them. Also, weirdly, nothing in the game can shoot while moving, and the Wasps can't stop while over water, which makes beachheads nearly impossible.)

I speak of costs, but the only cost in the game is time. Each unit takes a set amount of time to be built, and if you play as the color/faction that matches the species, they build 25% faster. The true resources of the game are the colonies. Each colony can never be destroyed, only "knocked out" and then captured. (Comically, when a colony "dies," it erupts and releases some slimy stuff I can only refer to as "goop," which the various insects in the area will seek out in preference to fighting. Whoever gathers the most goop wins the colony, which is "reborn" without any health, and if there are mixed forces in the area, it will almost certainly die again and need to be recaptured, since the enemy bugs will immediately start shooting it.) Colonies can regenerate if they aren't building, and there is a certain strategic element to turning production on and off.

The biggest flaw of the game, although it also lends an air of uniqueness, is the fact that, at the end of the day, your bug soldiers are still bugs, and they pretty much are impossible to control except in the most general ways. You can't give them standing orders to stay put or patrol an area; once they aren't actively doing anything, they start just aimlessly wandering around, following whatever catches their eye. (A piece of advice various parties have given concerning the game is to send your Wasps flying over the enemy's colonies; this causes all nearby units on defensive duty to forget what they're doing, if anything, and chase and shoot at the Wasps. This often severely damages the colonies, as the defenders are freaking morons and will shoot at anything. Even worse is when a neutral flyer causes your units to do this.)

The neutral units in the game come in four flavors to match the tilesets; in what I think of as the "normal" tileset, there are dragonfly bombers and flowers that shoot heat-seeking pollen; in the "nighttime" tileset, there are moth bombers (probably the least threatening bombers) and the uber-annoying popcorn plants, which are not tough but exist in huge numbers, and can make capturing colonies nearly impossible; in the desert tileset, spiked plants shoot thorns and flies drop crow's feet bombs which bounce and multiply across the landscape; and then there's the candyland tileset, which is pretty trippy, as it features a "bomber" that resembles a helicopter made from popsicle sticks and piloted by a neutral Grenadier Ant (its gobstopper bombs are similar to those of the desert fly except more musical and colorful). There are also neutral Ants which emerge randomly from burrows in many environments.

The game comes with one hundred "missions," and I have doubts as to whether they were all play-tested, as some of them were freaking impossible and I don't see how any amount of preparation or planning could change that. (For instance, one map modelled after Spain and the Americas features you trying to overwhelm the huge "American continents," crammed full of a single allegiance of colonies, with a single Wasp colony in "Spain." [Talk about cultural insensitivity.] As I mentioned, Wasps can't shoot while hovering over water, and the computer AI seeks out the nearest enemy and sends all of its units on a... well, a bee-line for it, which means that they all crowd over on the eastern shores and start shooting at anything that comes in range. There's no way to get around that, even if you had more colonies than the other guy, which you don't.)

Swarm Assault has no multiplayer that I know of; it's just as well, since two to four people trying to manage a bunch of bugs with guns couldn't end well.

Swarm Assault isn't a "deep" game with numerous facets; it's a hideously simple one. Sometimes that's all you need to have fun.

-Signing off.