Swarm, 50 little Swarmites that do your biding, even if that means jump into a laser fence, get blown to pieces or fried in a fire. Yes folks, you have to kill your little dudes in this puzzle 
platform title from Hothead and UTV. The story goes that the mothership crashes on a planet and you have to gather up swarmites to help mother grow so that you can eventually get out of there.
As I said in my preview a game that so openly embraces and even rewards for death is rare. However, given the level design of Swarm, it was almost a necessity to let the gamer know that it’s not always such a bad thing to let a couple of your Swarmites bite the dust. In fact, it’s about the best thing you can do for your score.
Offing some of the little guys helps build up the score multiplier and also keeps the timer ticking allowing you to string together long lines of scoring, multipliers and more scoring. It even allows you to manage some small pieces of things that need to get done from time to time, like getting blockades out of the way and still maintain the score streak.
Killing Swarmites, as I said, gets you rewards in the form of Death Medals, no not grunting, screaming, guitar-heavy rock bands, just cool recognition for killing off the little buggers. There are nine categories of medals; vaporized, dismembered, abyss, trapped, electrocuted, burned, impaled, crushed and asphyxiated, along with Mega medals which you get when you kill your last ten Swarmites at the same time. The Medals have three levels of progress, bronze, silver and gold so you’ve got a lot of Swarmicide to get to.
Swarm is a 2.5D side-scrolling platform game that requires you to navigate the hazards of the planet, collect DNA and some form of molecules, we’ll call it Swarmium for lack of any other word. You’re given 50 Swarmites and the goal is to not let them all die. Along the way, because you will lose some, you’ll find spawn points that allow you to gather more Swarmites to you (no more than 50 at a time though). Run through the levels collecting the Swarmium and DNA bits, avoiding the hazards and solving the puzzles to get a score high enough to unlock the next level. You can also replay a level and beat it quickly for a time bonus and a potentially higher score.
Some levels require that you have a certain number of DNA pieces and a minimum score on a level before in order to open it for play. That forces you at times to go back to the levels and try for higher scores through speed runs or go for the much slower run through to hunt down the DNA molecules.
