I’ve played a huge number of arena shooters in my time, so encountering a fresh concept I’ve never seen before always gets me intrigued. Swarm Arena sees you taking control of a virtual organism, gathering together a swarm of brightly-glowing cells and firing them off at other organisms. It’s like a neon-fused fight for survival set in space.

There’s some great arena play to be found here, which even gets a little tactical now and again. It’s a little light on content, but for the low asking price there’s more than enough to be getting on with.

GAMEPLAY

Taking control of a glowing organism, your task is to gather up the swarm of your own colour by moving around the arena and collecting them in your circle of influence, or ‘Aura’. You must then collect abilities and use your swarm to destroy any other cells that spawn in the level.

Two different abilities are available to battle with. ‘Shoot’ allows you to fire off your swarm in all directions, hopefully hitting other organisms and ending their rather short lives. ‘Circulate’ sees your swarm circling wildly around you, and acting as a forcefield against opponents’ swarms which try to attack you.

A couple of additional ideas make this a more tactical romp that your usual arena blaster. Special cells can be grabbed which level up your organism, making its circle of influence stronger. Then there’s the score multiplier system – kill enemy organisms quickly and efficiently without getting hit too often, and your multiplier will rise to lovely, score-bragging heights. Tactically dodging and attacking is the key to a stupidly good score.

The swarm concept is really quite an awesome one, and watching them spin around you and fire off in all directions is great fun. The controls are a breeze too, allowing you to be in full control at all times. There’s a fantastic feel to it, as your cells swoop in for another attack or you frantically try to dodge out of the way as another organism decides to end your micro-life.

There are a variety of different modes to playthrough. ‘The Path’ is the campaign mode, introducing each idea one-by-one and providing lots of different goals to accomplish. Score Challenge and Battle Game take missions from the story mode and give you customization options for each. It’s a great variety for some good single-player fun.

Local multiplayer battling is also available, allowing two players to go organism-to-organism and attempt to swarm all over each other. This is easily the most fun option of the lot, although it’s brought down a little due to the missing online multiplayer. Hopefully that will be added in a future update.

Unfortunately, even with all these modes at your disposal, Swarm Arena is really rather short on content. You’ll easily see everything the game has to offer within an hour, with 100% completion taking a maximum of two hours. It’s far too short, and really you have to wonder why, for such a simple game, there aren’t more levels supplied.

STYLE

You’d be forgiven for mistaking Swarm Arena for Geometry Wars at first glance – the game shares a lot graphically, from the space backdrop to the glowing neon colour palette to the simple-shaped enemies to the extravagant colour explosions… OK, so Swarm Arena possibly takes a little too much influence from Geometry Wars.

That being said, you can’t really blame Dedication Games, as it’s a terrific look. Swarm Arena oozes polish and looks stunning, complementing the gameplay perfectly. There’s a real sense of flow to the movement of the swarm and their glowing presence is always one of comfort and power.

The Steam store page describes the soundtrack as ‘adaptive’, although quite what this entails, I have no idea. I didn’t notice the music change or ebb depending on how I played, but rather listened to the kinds of techno beats you’d associate with this genre of gaming. Still, it all sounds fitting enough, so I shouldn’t really complain.

STORY

There are elements of a story at the very beginning. The first level, ‘Birth’, features an unknown voice talking you through your first steps, explaining each concept and collectible. As mentioned previously, you’re an organism, and your drones work as a swarm to protect you and attack other organisms.

After this, there isn’t any story featured. This isn’t a game which needs reasoning, however, so the brief introduction is definitely enough.

OTHER

It’s not often that I use the words ‘unique’ and ‘arena shooter’ in the same sentence, but Swarm Arena is definitely both. I’ve never played another quite like it, and it’s genuinely entertaining to boot.

If only there were more to do content-wise, I’d be fully recommending this to anyone. Of course, game length isn’t everything, and for the low asking price, the one/two hour’s worth of gameplay is still going to appeal to some. Plus there are Steam achievements to collect and leaderboards to top, so gamers who are into bumping up their virtual ego may get an extra hour or two out of the game.

There’s no demo available at present, so if you’re not sure about whether to invest, you may want to wait it out – a demo is bound to be released eventually. For those who are interested, grab Swarm Arena off Steam now.