Hothead Games, the studio that brought you games like the Penny Arcade Adventures and DeathSpank, was present at PAX East and showed off their upcoming game Swarm. While the game may appear to be a lemmings clone with little blue blobs, it is actually so much more than that. The cute little blue guys are called Swarmites and build a swarm when being in a pack of 50.

Swarm is not just 50 blobs running around and looking adorable, the game is actually a complex and smart action-platformer where players control the 50 swarmites across an ongoing world of suicidal levels filled with destruction and dangerous obstacles. You are probably wondering how does this swarm actually control and is that actually fun? Controlling the swarmites is actually really simple and intuitive. With the push of a button players can huddle, spread, dash, punch and stack the swarm while controlling the direction with the analog stick. Now to address the fun question, playing Swarm was one of the most enjoyable experiences of PAX. I played 3 levels of the full game and applied the controls to the different obstacles and platforming stages.



First of all, the swarmites are hilarious when alive as they have cute animations and make hilarious noises as they cross the different stages. What is funnier though, are all the different ways the swarmites can die. The deaths range from burning, exploding, falling off the level to being impaled – very fun to watch. In order to complete a stage, at least one swarmite will have to make it to each checkpoint and ultimately to the end of the stage. A big gameplay element of Swarm is the multiplier, players can reach super high scores by completing each checkpoint and collecting ‘experience bubbles’ without dying. Sounds easy, but it will take great practice.

Some of the obstacles on the stages include simple tasks like jumping across platforms or punching though a wall. The more complex puzzles can include building a high stack of swarmites and reaching a higher platform or grabbing bombs and enabling a mechanism to drop a bridge. Of course there are more challenges including, ‘running like hell’ from some of the enemies in Swarm.

Swarm is being published by Ignition Entertainment and developed by Hothead Games. It will be available on Xbox LIVE Arcade and the PlayStation Network as soon as March 22nd.