It is said that King Canute once placed his throne on the shore and commanded the sea not to get his feet wet, thus proving to his flattering courtiers that only God Almighty holds sway over the elements. “But sire!” I would have told him, if I’d been one of the aforesaid lickspittles. “Why not lay down spike strips and park a couple of flamethrowers in the shallows?” I would have said this because I have just been playing Swarmbreaker, a tower defence game that aims to prove there is no fluid body so awe-inspiring that it cannot be machine-gunned into submission.
In Swarmbreaker – which launches on Steam tomorrow, and still has a demo as of writing – you have to defend your rocketship against waves of insect aggressors, who spawn at the map’s far corners. Between waves, you spend earnings from kills on turrets, barricades, troops, and upgrades for all the foregoing. Sounds like bog-standard attrition management, perhaps, but what lifts Swarmbreaker is the “swarm” part. The rapacious scuttlers come in several distinct varieties, but they also “cluster, collide and flow like a fluid”.
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The results are hypnotic: coloured particles burst from each burrow and course through the map’s contours, pushing movable terrain elements and eroding your structures like acid. You can practically hear the oil derricks fizz as they are engulfed and chewed to a lumpy puddle of iridescent digestive enzymes. Speaking of which, the more oil derricks you save during each wave, the more cash you’ll have to spend before the next, but committing to their protection obviously risks leaving your ship exposed. Your fallback option is an inexhaustible mouse-click-fired artillery cannon, but this won’t save you if the bulk of the swarm makes it all the way to your doorstep.
I’m still not convinced this isn’t a run-of-the-mill tower defender, beneath it all, but it’s worth giving the demo a shot just to enjoy the swirling tidal dynamics of homocidal buglife. What would King Canute have made of it all? I think he would have stuck his throne right by the biggest burrow, surrounded by gravity traps and howitzers. “Back in your hole, hungry liquids!” he’d have bellowed, firing dual AK47s simultaneously. “The only god I recognise is efficient chokepoint management! Death to sense-of-flow! Death to trickle-down politics!”
“SIRE,” I’d have told him sternly. “You are getting your metaphors confused. And also that is a total waste of howitzers – those things are best placed on hills.” Read more on Steam.