Original Review in German by Gamestar.de

Drone Swarm put to the test: An innovative RTS experience that squanders too many opportunities

In Drone Swarm you control 32,000 drones at the same time - and that works great! Apart from this innovation the space RTS too often falls short.

Who goes to war if there are drones? Drone Swarm takes this vision of the future to the extreme by giving us not hundreds, but thousands of drones. In total we get 32,000 little companions with whom we plunge into fast-paced space battles.

The game comes from stillalive studios - the developers of the commercially successful bus simulator. But over the years the passionate side project has turned into a serious strategy game that is finally seeing the light of day.

On paper, the Drone Swarm concept even sounds like a dream for real-time strategists. Because the developers not only have a unique game idea, they also promise a real single-player campaign. In the preview and demo versions, Drone Swarm often cut a good figure - but can the fascination last for more than two hours?

Innovative gameplay due to 32,000 drones

What makes Drone Swarm so »innovative« anyway? 32,000 drones, that sounds impressive. But just having a large number of units does not make a good strategy game. Even if that number is by no means eyewash.

Drone Swarm actually simulates each and every one of these drones. Nevertheless, unlike other strategy games, we do not command all of them individually. Instead, according to the name, we always give orders to a whole swarm.

In the center is our mother ship Argo, which is coupled to a white glowing sphere. The swarm of drones ceaselessly circles around this construct and thus forms a "natural" protective wall. We can neither turn the Argo nor move it, and so the ship looks like a stranded whale compared to the numerous and fast attackers - just in space.

To protect our home base the drones come in play. To do this, we don't just click anywhere on the map, but draw your flight routes with the mouse. It feels a little like painting. The longer the path, the more drones seperate themselves from the mother ship and form an individual swarm. We can assign certain tasks to each swarm. Then they attack opponents, form a wall or push the enemies into one another with a ramming attack.

The biggest challenge for us during a battle is both keeping track and managing our limited supply of drones. In its best moments it is action-packed and even strategic, but far too often the battles only end in dull hectic slogging matches.

Bugs in the release version
Drone Swarm suffered from a lot of technical errors in our test version. None of them hindered progress, but in total they still affect the fun of the game, which is why we devalue 3 points.
Some missions were skipped completely, opponents collided with each other without need, cut scenes were overlapping and once some upgrades for our spaceship even briefly disappeared.

Space battles for creatives and the enduring

Those who are enthusiastic about the basic idea of Drone Swarm will have fun in the extraordinary battles for a long time. Especially since our swarm is constantly learning new tricks during the campaign. Then we can consume enemy ships with a huge maelstrom of mini-robots or knock opponents off the map like billiard balls.

At the same time, the opponents learn to protect themselves with shields later on and are only vulnerable from behind or they fire rockets that break through even our thickest drone walls.

Nevertheless, you have to prove your endurance if you want to play through the entire campaign. This is mainly due to the fact that it is very difficult for us to keep an overview in Drone Swarm and cause and effect can hardly be traced. Sometimes enemy ships do not take any more damage for some inexplicable reason or suddenly spin uncontrollably across the map after a slight collision.

In addition, the missions seem poorly thought out or simply unfinished. In one operation, several enemy ships jumped into the system so close together they immediately crashed into each other and instantly blew themselves up. We won the mission within a few seconds without having to do anything ourselves.

Such events sometimes seem like a coincidence and can also be to our disadvantage. This tarnishes the strategic claim, especially since new enemy types are constantly being introduced, but we very often cannot distinguish between them within the short battles. The generic spaceships look too similar for that. So the battles remain innovative at the core and demand creativity, but too seldom give us the feeling that as a drone fleet commander we are always in control of the situation. A very serious point of criticism for a real-time strategy game.

The story disappoints

Drone Swarm offers exclusivly a single player campaign, which at just over 10 hours is quite short compared to other strategy games. Drone Swarm also fails to spin a rousing plot in these 10 hours.

Right at the beginning, instead, we are served a whole buffet of well-known sci-fi clichés we have already been served in dozens of other games: The earth is once again in ruins after the attack of the drones and could only be saved by that human psykers connecting their minds to those drones. To save humanity from perishing, these drones accompany the mother ship Argo on her search for a new planet.

The whole thing trickles away and offers no twists and turns that you can't see coming light years before. Our human crew members remain pure story facade and are annoying with a one-dimensional personality that doesn't change until the very abrupt finale. Here Drone Swarm is squandering a huge opportunity to add an interesting story to its exciting gameplay concept.

Still worth playing?

You can tell throughout the whole game it went through a lot of different iterations without finding a clear direction outside of the cool underlying idea. Towards the end it even seems as if the resources simply weren't enough. For example while in the beginning cutscenes in the style of pleasant animated stills occur regularly in the last third of the campaign there are non at all.

There is still a fantastic idea and impressive technology behind all of this. In the first few battles it is a lot of fun to watch the masses of drones do their destructive work. Especially with the controls stillalive studios have found the perfect way to give us the feeling of full control. But they failed because of all the stuff around it. Drone Swarm still seems unfinished, the story lacks depth.

In our opinion, it is only worth taking a look if you want to try out a little and are looking for a rather atypical strategy game. Its innovative approach definitely makes Drone Swarm an exciting experiment, but ultimately it cannot compensate for its many weaknesses.

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