So the other day I was watching a YouTube video for Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator, which I do every once in a while. One of the recommended videos YouTube showed me was for this game SwarmZ, which I proceeded to watch afterwards. The game looked reasonably interesting, and I'm always down for a good tower defense-like game as demonstrated by my love for Kingdom Rush. I checked on Steam and it was only $5. I saw that it had mixed reviews, but I figured I've wasted $5 in worse ways if it turned out to be a dud.
I won't say I regret spending the $5, but at the same time I can't say I can recommend this game either. It's a little hard to even call it a game - it feels more like an alpha demo for a game that still needs to be fleshed out. I just have so many thoughts about this game that I wanted to share, and doing a walkthrough video really feels more like justification for doing this blog post, especially since the game is so easy a walkthrough video is somewhat redundant.
There's a seed of a good game in here, but merely that - a seed. For one, the game is way too short and way too easy (as evidenced by my walkthrough only taking 30 minutes). There are only six maps total, and the "campaign" just consists of doing them all sequentially. After that the only replayability is sandbox mode, where you can custom place both the baby and the zombies on those same six maps and have unlimited funds for your defense.
The game becomes largely trivial once you make the key realization - the zombies are programmed to just make a beeline straight for the baby. They only attack your units and barricades to the extent that they are in between them and the baby. Once you know this, you realize the most effective strategy is not trying to put up defenses directly in the zombies' path, but rather to place your offensive units in lines parallel to the zombies' path, turning it into a murder zone where they are mowed down as they pass through.
It's at this point that you also realize that barricades are largely useless then, and the supremacy of the Assault Rifle unit becomes apparent. While they are the second most expensive unit, their rapid fire, high damage, and superior range makes them the perfect unit for creating death alleys for the zombies to run through. You know your design is busted when you can get by with only a single offensive unit and no defensive barriers (I do use some on the Farm map, but honestly could have survived without them).
It's because of these factors that the gameplay design just doesn't really work either. The game has a dichotomy of a build phase where you place defenses and an attack phase where the zombies then attack. There's nothing to do during the attack phase but just watch - you can't add defenses on the fly, move units around, etc.
The problem is the game is balanced in such a way that either your defense works or it doesn't. On every map there are so many zombies it makes it so that if the zombies are gaining ground on your defense at all - attacking barricades or units - then you've already lost, because there are so many of them they'll eventually break through ALL of your defense. This isn't the kind of game where you're going to survive an attack phase by the skin of your teeth, with your last-stand defenders right around the baby taking down the last zombies. Because of this, once you develop a winning defense strategy (which again isn't hard), the attack phase then becomes tedious to watch even on 4x speed, as it's just your defenders mowing down the zombies at fixed points on the map for several minutes.
The only way to fix this issue is to either drastically alter the balance of the game or (better) change it to more of an RTS style, where you can continue to build and move units around while the attack is going on. There are other changes that could be made to increase the challenge as well. Zombies need better AI, where they will actually go somewhat out of their way to attack your offensive units. Just changing them to "make a beeline for the nearest human" instead of the baby would be a massive improvement and make barricades worthwhile. In addition, making friendly fire a thing would greatly aid the challenge - it would eliminate setting up units in parallel lines to shoot at zombies in between them, which is such an effective strategy right now. I did see that in a previous patch they made it so that friendly units can't fire through each other, and I can only imagine how broken the game was when you could put together lines of Assault Rifle units two or three rows deep.
Alas, none of these things will ever happen. The last update for the game was in 2019, so it's clear that the developers have either moved on or are no more - I couldn't be bothered to research which. The game is what it is. Again, I can't say I really recommend it, but if you have $5 and a couple of hours where you're really bored to burn, there are worse ways to spend them. Here is the walkthrough, then, such as it is:
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