Temtem: Swarm Steam Charts & Stats

Recent updates drained the little fun left.

A Pokemon-themed Survivors style game with no real depth in its gameplay. Obnoxious visuals and music. Ugly user interface. You can't really make any unique builds because of the limited number of abilities which makes every run feel the same. This is an easy thumbs down. It's an ultra bland/generic Survivors game with a mostly meaningless Temtem facade.

The positive: Nice visuals. Nice soundtrack. Progression feels impactful. Temtems and their skills have nice designs I guess. Now for the negative Bosses are the worst here with just line aoes to dodge. (one boss' mechanic is literally taking a nap while you fight it to let monsters swarm and just not deal with you. fun design there i gotta say) The level design is too focused on : look how pretty all our assets are. So the map is filled to the brim with obstacles you have to navigate through while dodging the swarm that is running at you and at some point it just melts into one big temtem melting pot and I cant see *** so why am I stuck here? Anyone flagged you during your playtest - Hey those levels might be a bit too noisy? Even worst at that last level where mobs drop a ***ing damage puddle on the ground so guess what? More things to navigate through. The objective system is the worst thing i've seen in a game like this. Why do I need to stand 2 seconds in a very tiny circle when, again, a swarm is running towards me. The worst offender here is the control zone objective. To the designer who thought this was a fun addition: who hurt you and why do you feel you need to hurt others? Game telling i'm spending too much XP on a single temtem - so it's ok for the game to get harder through levels but not ok for me to make the temtem I like stronger? Overall, a 4/10. The level designers need to make meaningful changes to how they see their game. Credit where credit is due, the artists behind temtem are doing a great job.

TL;DR: All of the cuteness of Temtem in a fun, bright, and deceptively challenging survivor game with solid meta progression mechanics. LET ME BE CLEAR: THIS GAME IS NOT EASY There are no difficulty options and starting off can be punishing. This is not a bad thing. Think of your little tem as lvl1 in a big world. As you play, you'll collect pansun coins to 'level up' your tems in different ways. This meta progression includes stat buffs (like health and damage), unlocking new abilities (dash, revive, and additional attacks), and additional synergies (which can combo with abilities to form unique attacks). If you like bullet hells and survivor-type games this is a solid early access pick with a lot of charm.

I... am immensely confused that this game exists. First off, it is a fine game. For the asking price you're going to be reasonably well entertained, even in it's early access stage. It's not a rip-off. Then again, this doesn't really add anything other than a Temtem-skin to a genre that already has plenty of games that are near perfect for what they are. So unless you are like me and really like both the Temtem-IP, I can't really recommend this over the cheaper and arguably better Vampire Survivors. The cool thing about the original Temtem was that, while it was a Pokémon-clone, it brought some very thoughtful and necessary fresh changes to a stale genre that stubbornly refused to learn from it's own past at the time. Which is something I still hold in very high regard. Temtem Swarm however is a clone of a genre that's still fresh and new and then doesn't even try to put a unique spin on it? Which is a shame, because I feel like there would be some legitimate design space for a creature collector + Survivors hybrid game. It's a fine game that smells a whole bit like a cash-grab. Though in an industry where the accepted standard is to sell gambling to children, being a "fine game" that happens to be a bit of a cash-grab seems weirdly... okay? I am not really blaming Crema for releasing this, if this is what keeps the studio afloat and the Temtem-IP alive (and gods, do I want more Temtem stuff...), then this isn't the worst way to do it in my opinion. As I keep saying, it's "fine". I just wish they'd been a bit more creative with the premise.

As a single player game, it's pretty good. I hear about desync issues in multiplayer, but only one notable crash/glitch in my 8 hours so far in single player (though it hard locked and wouldn't give up focus, so it was a BSOD for all intents and purposes.) That said, while it looks good and is mostly fun, I take issue with the progression mechanics and the egg hatching mechanic. The meta progression feels fine and comparable to other games in its genre, but since the upgrades are ALWAYS tem specific, every new tem you unlock just starts at zero again, which really feels bad for progressing through new levels or accomplishing new tasks. I would much prefer an overall basic upgrade tree and then specific trees for each tem, so that your overall progression still applies in some way to a newly hatched tem. Hatching eggs is straightforward, you activate the area and the egg follows you for a few minutes until it hatches, but the problem here is the following. It's a separate entity with separate health and hitbox, and since this is not a super snowball-y type upgrade game (you rarely feel overpowered), you're always kiting... which means the egg is always taking hits for you. It seems overly difficult to hatch tems (at least in singleplayer) just because of the way the egg paths around, and would be much easier if it just relied on your health bar or acted different/had more health/had some ability to make it not take so much damage. Maybe prevent melee enemies from aggroing on it. My other issue with progression is that far, far too much is locked the first time you play a tem. You will lose early runs on every tem, seemingly by design, because your highest tier upgrades and most of the upgrade varieties have to unlock by playing the character first. There's also very little overlap between tems in terms of abilities and upgrades, so you'll have to reunlock most of them for every new tem, meaning the first run or two is just sunk time for little rewards because you're not even allowed to have a full build at that point. Overall, I think the game is good, but I find myself usually frustrated and quitting after a run rather than starting up another and I think it's these arbitrary progression limitations and sort of wonky progression structure/mechanics that make a lot of runs feel like a waste of time even if you're technically progressing.

Its cute and fun even as a veteran player of the "vampire" game. having the little tems evolve is so cute and different. I look forward to the future updates. Makes my ADHD brain go BRRRR

If you wanna play with friends, you can't. For the past 3 months there has been a bug where at random moments the person joining the part will just stop receiving xp. I don't understand the lack of urgency from developers, it's literally a huge game-breaking bug meaning you waste 10-15 minutes of your time on a game which you most likely cant complete. Don't waste your money, at least until it's fixed.

Every single new addition has made the game worse. Frustrating is a great word for the game currently. Carrying an egg around for 5 minutes trying to keep it alive? An event that demands you not get hit in a bullet hell type game. Just wow. Idk how you guys managed to make every new addition terrible but you did it. Bravo. This just screams incompetence and after how you guys did your temtem players I have zero remaining faith in this game and the devs.

The good: [list] [*] Beautiful graphics [*] Fair boss moves [*] Good character selection [*] Full ultrawide support (even 32:9!) [/list] The bad: [list] [*] Having flat power upgrades *per character* as meta progression is an extremely grindy an unrewarding approach that discourages you from trying out other characters [*] Questionable UI design that requires you to manually search through many menus to find basic information such as: What does Luck do, how to unlock a character, hatch eggs or increase your skill variety [*] Power scaling per run is rather dull, skill choices and upgrades do not feel like meaningful options. [*] Normal enemies essentially all have the same behavior of running towards you. there definetely should be more attack pattern variety [*] Bugs: E.g., matchmaking failures or that key-remapping can currently soft-lock you [/list] Overall I will give an upvote because I have seen far worse Vampire Survivors clones with far better ratings. The game still needs a lot of work to meaningfully stand apart in a satured genre, but Early Access is still ongoing - so let's see.