As a break from all that restaurant-dashing, crop-growing, puzzle-solving madness, Reflexive takes on the adrenaline rush experience in a more conventional way: with spaceships and plenty of guns. Swarm Gold is a remake of the original Swarm they created back in 1998, and with a word like “Gold” in the title, we were really expecting this return to be something more noteworthy.

A setting in space can’t be all that bad — laser cannons, aliens, and other virtual science-fiction realities rocks any shooter addict’s boat easily. You’re one of the many pilots in a resource-collection company within the Praulac Nebula tasked with harvesting the precious EZT and fending off Clangor threats in the name of business. The story dwells a lot on the deadpan, excessively mercenary attitudes of the individuals involved with little regard for human life, which could be quite an interesting premise for the game’s setting. Unfortunately, the greatest degree of narrative immersion you’ll ever experience is through lacklustre voice-acting at the beginning of each level.

Playing the game is as clear as it can be for anyone familiar with shoot-em-ups. The bulk of the controls revolve around the mouse for aiming and firing, with the shift key to accelerate in the direction you’re pointing at. Presented in a top-down view, the gameplay mostly involves rotating your ship 360 degrees within a two-dimensional space, accelerating to gather the EZT orbs as shown on your minimap, and blasting away at oncoming enemies. Sadly, the pace of action is considerably too slow for a game of this genre, and the goals issued become repetitively mundane too quickly. Visually, Swarm Gold isn’t too shabby at all, but banking on that alone is a poor approach for any developer wanting to address a shooting game.

Shoot-em-ups share a standard, almost-entirely fail-safe core mechanic: you maneuver, you aim, you shoot, you kill — and that’s enough for plenty of gratification from such a simple series of actions. With that in mind, it’s really quite a disappointment that Reflexive hasn’t been able to pull this off well, especially if you were to consider the way in which the game was advertised. In a shooting game, if the shooting isn’t fun, boasting “over a hundred challenging levels” isn’t going to make much of a difference.

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