Deep Among the Swarm Reviews

Fun

pretty decent little game.

So addictive. Really love this game.

Addictive game that makes me come back for another run periodicaly. Lot´s of different builds to go with on towers and soldiers every run. Gets regular updates and keeps getting better. Recomended!

Good game, but too easy once you have plenty of unlocks. Massed defenses can defeat anything. Challenge difficulty increases only slowly, but removing the unlocks and restarting might create challenge, I'm not sure.

Really, really fun game - - simple and very engaging; it has undoubtedly improved since early access. Though, it seems the spawn rates are way down. The swarms/spawns could be larger and more frequent (though I have not yet unlocked the hardest difficulty). I wish there were hero units that you can level/etc. and take from mission to mission - - maybe like a mech or android - - to keep with the theme. This, I think, would fit nicely with the game mechanics.

Very satisfying gameplay loop of expand, consolidate, push. Great little RTS with quite a bit of depth.

This is a bit of a hidden gem. It plays a bit like a rogue-like version of [b]Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal[/b]. For another comparison; Imagine you were struggling in a game of [b]Red Alert[/b] or [b]Age of Empires 2[/b] and were constantly inching your way forward across the map with your army, fighting through a sea of enemies. As you're doing that, you're constantly building little bases and turrets along the way, fighting for every inch of map you can attain. It plays kind of like that. The game revolves around the supply depot buildings, which when placed, allow you to build more buildings in range of it. You end up dotting trails of these across the map, kind of like in [b]Creeper World[/b]. It only takes one enemy to sneak in and abruptly destroy one of these depots, stopping your power supply chain to all of your turrets so they stop working. Because of this vulnerability, every so often you end up building a little fortress along your supply trails, comprised of some walls & turrets. The initial levels are pretty easy, but that quickly changes by the time you've drilled 1000 meters deep. I was banging my head against a wall for a while when I reached that point. ..atleast until I went onto the games Steam discussion page to get a better understanding of one of the games central mechanics: The swarm meter. The longer that you stay in a level, the more the swarm meter rises. This meter affects the strength and number of the enemies and the meter is always rising as you play -it doesn't reset between levels. This means that if you stay in the early levels for too long, you will reach a point where you have basically no chance of making it further. The swarm meter will be too high and enemies will have outraced you in power, making them unmanageable. This makes your runs in the game a race against time, where you need to play fast and efficiently, frequently pausing the game whenever you need to make a decision or manage a minor crisis. You need to be frugal as opposed to greedy when it comes to spending more time in levels searching for loot. As well as having to deal with the swarm meter, after the first 1000 meters, there's a significant difficulty jump in tier 2. The enemies seem to scale up a lot, meanwhile your equipment is still stuck at tier 1. You need to find and craft the tier 2 equipment. It feels necessary to find this equipment in order to keep up with the swarm. This task is easier said than done, especially with the tier 2 units seeming to have twice as much hp requiring you to place twice as many turrets and units to deal with them. Between levels, you can do a decent bit of customization with what kind of troops and buildings you use, and equip them with different items which you will craft. The crafting system is very simple thankfully, I enjoy this aspect of the game. [b]Deep Among the Swarm[/b] can be oppressively difficult even on normal difficulty (there is an easier difficulty option though). I found it necessary to search the games Steam discussion page at least once to work out what I was doing wrong, but I would still consistently hit a wall where it was unclear to me on how to make progress. I imagine a bit of a search on Youtube would possibly teach me more of where I'm going wrong. Despite my struggles with this game (and even if I was to drop it right now) I have had a blast playing this. It's an easy recommendation, I just wish it had a little more variety in the rogue-like aspect, as runs don't feel wildly different from one another. I want more units/turrets/upgrades/maps/enemy types. I also wish that the game was a little clearer on how to improve and make progress.