BattleSwarm Review: 6 marines vs an Angry Mob of Bugs

Battleswarm is a first/third person shooter with real time strategy elements and revolves around the ever lasting cliche of marines vs aliens (have you ever seen a game where marines and aliens were friends?). Well anyways my first impressions of this game were quite good actually. I will start off with saying that I enjoyed playing the game and it was a new experience since I never played anything like this. But as time went on, it just got more and more frustrating, well anyways here is my review.

Story:

There is no story but I can make one up if you like. The army has a budget shortfall so they could only afford 6 marines to fight against an army of bugs, but luckily for them each marine was the secret love child of Rambo and could somehow fight on equal terms with the insect-like invaders.

Server Population:

Very very very very very small. Probably because it was just released from beta, but nevertheless if I have to wait 6-10 mins at night to find people to play a match with, I might just have to rage quit.

Maybe it is just my timezone? (which is PST), so unless everyone else lives in Russia, I can perfectly understand why it is as barren as Age of Armor (Mmo inside joke).

Gameplay:

The gameplay is quite good actually for a mix of FPS and RTS. Humans are in First Person or Third Person Perspective (you can alternate if you like) and Aliens are in a Real Time Strategy Perspective. The thing I like about this is that it doesn't try to mix the two together. You always see RTS and FPS try to get blending into some sort of obmonstrocity which instead of appealing to people who favour those genres. Instead it seperates them and gives those who like the Strategy genre (aka Aliens) an opponent who is completely unpredictable and FPS players a swarm of cunning alien AI's being commanded at will by the Strategist. It is like a classic match of  RTS vs FPS or what I like to call "Brain vs Brawn".

Each human gets 2 weapons and 6 accessories (grenades and mines..etc) and aliens have the same thing except instead of weapons you get eggs. You have 2 types of health bars. One for hp and one for armor. And both regenerate at different rates depending on the armor you wear.

Most of the missions you play either consist of humans trying to destroy alien hives or Aliens trying to destroy human reactors. It is pretty much one side attacks, the other side defends and you have a 10 mins to achieve your objective. It is pretty standard stuff.

Eggs:

Eggs are just another term for alien units. Some examples of them would be the Juggernaut which looks like a molten giant. They have huge amounts of hp and can only be damaged if you shoot it in the side of the ribs. Different bugs are capable of different abilities. Some are siege bugs meaning they can shoot slime or plasma from over long distances (think of the siege tank in starcraft). Others can heal bug units, turn invisible and some have the ability to turn into a wall or shield.

Damn siege buggers

Weapons:

For humans your weapons are a good variety of big bad guns. When it comes to guns, this game doesn't **** around. You don't get a pistol or a knife or any dinky stuff. Instead you get the Minigun, Flamethrower, Pulse Rifle, Grenade Launcher, Assault Shotgun...etc (the rest are different types of rifles and machine guns).

Each weapon has a different purpose in battle. Like machine guns are all around type weapons and are quite versitile. Flamethrower and Grenade Launchers are for close up swarms of bugs and cause splash damage. Rifles do incredible damage and are good for picking off siege bugs and bug leaders.

The minigun can turn anything into fodder

Accessories:

Human accessories are mostly composed of defensive items and explosives. A great defensive item is the air shield which protects against alien projectiles. But accessories really shine for aliens. They can freeze you, slow you down, drop a shower of meteors on your head and cover the entire map in a thick fog so you can't see sh*t. Those accessories where made just to annoy the hell out of every living human.

System Requirements:

The system requirements for this game is amazing. You can play this game on a 11 year old computer and still manage to be okay (lowest settings though). It is completely compatible on direct X7 to direct X10 (lol isn't that surprizing. Direct X 7 was like Diablo II days), and give you a lot of customization like turning off shaders (once you do that, everything looks more oldschool 3d and less realistic). So ya graphically it can look very very good to very very bad. It all depends on how you tweak the settings.

Pet PEAVES:

Okay here are my pet peaves of this game. All of them are directed towards humans though:

Do you know how hard it is to get 6 humans to work together compared to 2 alien players? Most of the time half your team will ignore the objective and go Arnold Schwarzenegger on you by killing every damn thing that moves in sight. It is pretty hard to guard a reactor when everyone runs somewhere else to go beat on some fodder bugs.

Dual Grenade Launcher is not a good choice of weapons ! For god sakes it takes you 2 seconds to reload. You are just asking yourself to become a ham sandwich for a Juggernaut.

Put on some armor. I can't emphasize that if it is your first time playing the game, go through the tutorial or check your pack for armor. No armor = a butterfly can kill you with a single touch.

More maps are needed. The game gets boring within 2 week period.

Conclusion:

Give this game a try. You might like it, you might not, but it is good to try something new from time to time. There aren't that many RTS + FPS type games out there so I am quite peculiar about this. As for gameplay value I would say you would probably play it for 1 or 2 weeks before you start to get bored. At most I would consider this game slightly above average but to be honest what do I know? It is really hard to define how this game stands up against the masses because it is probably the only true RTS + FPS game i know (next to Natural Selection which is a half life mod and totally rocks !!).