Maroc - 3RD-STRIKE.COM - A La Une - 28/Dec 02:38

Night Swarm – Review

Survivors-like games are a dime a dozen nowadays, and not all of them can emulate, innovate, or reinvent what made Vampire Survivors so popular in the first place. We have played through success stories such as Nordic Ashes and Jotunnslayer, but we’ve also had to suffer through absolute rubbish like Viking Survivors and Primal Survivors. With a few of these titles still visible in the rear-view mirror, we already have the next one lined up for you, namely Night Swarm. With a unique look and a vampire theme, we wondered if this would just be a good-looking clone of Vampire Survivors, but Night Swarm managed to create its own identity, not only with its visuals but also via its gameplay. Story In Night Swarm, you’ll be playing as a reasonably young vampire, Roderic, who is tasked to find his master to restore the derelict castle he currently resides in. Roderic is hesitant at first, but gathers his courage when he realizes what is at stake. The story doesn’t go too much further in many ways than restoring the castle, becoming a powerful vampire, and ultimately vanquishing the evil entity that is the cause of all the bad things that are currently happening. We would perhaps call the story a bit shallow, but it’s still nicely presented with dialogues, voice acting, and the occasional in-game cutscene. Graphics Graphically, Night Swarm looks great. We were mainly drawn to the character designs, which combine cel-shaded outlines with character models that could come straight from a tabletop game. The characters even have a base like actual tabletop figurines, and when moving around, they hobble instead of walking. This by itself already feels refreshing in a genre where titles often look similar. Your castle and the different levels also look decently designed with enough clutter and background material to make sure things never feel too empty. Everything meshes well together, and even with loads of enemies on your screen, there were no performance issues. We perhaps only wished there was a bit more enemy and map variety. Sound The soundtrack is a bit limited at times, and the music can grow somewhat stale during longer sessions, but all in all, the sound design isn’t too bad. The tracks are nice to listen to, and the sound effects provide great audio feedback for the many attack animations that go off at all times. Night Swarm also has quite a bit of voice acting present in the game. While some voice actors clearly have more experience than others, the overall quality was good. Gameplay Night Swarm is a Survivors-like title with a few original components that perhaps reminded us a bit of Rogue Lords in terms of level flow. It’s your goal to pick a world and play through all the short sub-stages in order to defeat a boss at the end. All your attacks trigger automatically, and upgrades, passive abilities, and new attacks are offered randomly when leveling up. It’s a fairly familiar Survivors-like format, albeit chopped up into shorter ‘levels’. The game also introduces the option to fuse different weapons when they reach max level, which frees up one of the available four weapon slots. Sadly, this is often already near the end of a run, making it hard to come up with interesting builds. As you play through the different levels, you’ll complete challenges, which unlock new active skills and passive abilities that may be purchased to be added to the available options that are offered to you when you level up during a run. You’ll also have different gear options, a skill tree to invest in, new followers to unlock, options to restore the castle to its former glory, and even relic upgrades. There are more than enough different currencies to collect for all these upgrades and unlocks, and we dare even say that there were perhaps a few too many currencies. The game also locks certain upgrades behind progress, but also behind difficulty thresholds. You’ll only unlock your second relic slot when you have pretty much reached the final three levels of the game, and the same can be said about the headgear slot of your equipment. We understand that this is done to later try the game on a higher difficulty setting, but there’s not that much to return to here due to the overall limited content, which is also the Night Swarm’s biggest flaw at the time of writing this review. Conclusion Night Swarm is a very capable Survivors-like that has more than enough original components to make a name for itself, rather than rely on copy-pasting successful parts of other titles. While the game itself is perhaps a bit too light on content, which is apparent by locking passive upgrades behind difficulty increases rather than regular progress, it’s still very much worth looking into if you want something ‘new’ in an oversaturated genre. Even though Night Swarm doesn’t reinvent the genre, it’s good old-fashioned fun. We are hoping for a few more content updates in the future, but even without them, this is still a solid game to have a couple of days of fun with.