Battleswarm OB Review: Brain vs Brawn

This review is reproduced from Ajatz's MMOsite Blog.

Battleswarm is a first/third person shooter with real time strategy elements and revolves around the ever lasting cliche of marines vs aliens (have you ever seen a game where marines and aliens were friends?). Well anyways my first impressions of this game were quite good actually. I will start off with saying that I enjoyed playing the game and it was a new experience since I never played anything like this. But as time went on, it just got more and more frustrating, well anyways here is my review.

Gameplay:

The gameplay is quite good actually for a mix of FPS and RTS. Humans are in First Person or Third Person Perspective (you can alternate if you like) and Aliens are in a Real Time Strategy Perspective. The thing I like about this is that it doesn't try to mix the two together. You always see RTS and FPS try to get blending into some sort of obmonstrocity which instead of appealing to people who favour those genres. Instead it separates them and gives those who like the Strategy genre (aka Aliens) an opponent who is completely unpredictable and FPS players a swarm of cunning alien AI's being commanded at will by the Strategist. It is like a classic match of RTS vs FPS or what I like to call "Brain vs Brawn".

Each human gets 2 weapons and 6 accessories (grenades and mines..etc) and aliens have the same thing except instead of weapons you get eggs. You have 2 types of health bars. One for hp and one for armor. And both regenerate at different rates depending on the armor you wear.

Most of the missions you play either consist of humans trying to destroy alien hives or Aliens trying to destroy human reactors. It is pretty much one side attacks, the other side defends and you have a 10 mins to achieve your objective. It is pretty standard stuff.

Eggs:

Eggs are just another term for alien units. Some examples of them would be the Juggernaut which looks like a molten giant. They have huge amounts of hp and can only be damaged if you shoot it in the side of the ribs. Different bugs are capable of different abilities. Some are siege bugs meaning they can shoot slime or plasma from over long distances (think of the siege tank in starcraft). Others can heal bug units, turn invisible and some have the ability to turn into a wall or shield.