For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch version of Night Swarm, from developer Fubu Games.
When you start the demo, it doesn't actually say you're playing the demo! when we get access to the Map, we get the first mention of this being a demo and we can make a guess as to what we can do in it. but as this doesn't say that it's a demo, nor give us any indication if this is from the final build of the game or something earlier, it's difficult to come away from this demo satisfied. i have other questions like does our save carry over to the retail release, if it saves at all.
In this video i experienced the start of the game and it sets up the story well enough but it doesn't really tie in some of the mechanics to it, for example when our run ends we re-spawn back at home and no reason is given for this. There is a tutorial at the start but it mostly focuses on what some of the controls do rather than also explaining how to play the game. it's frustrating, but i am able to make some educated guesses when it comes to the roguelike mechanics.
In Night Swarm, a surprising amount of stuff is carried over from run to run. in this demo, the only thing that wasn't carried over, of note, was the money earned in each run. the loop of the game seems to be that we head out into the world, we progress, we do tasks, maybe we stumble across someone we know, and we earn stuff along the way. when we inevitably fail, we re-spawn back at base and can then take the stuff we earned and improve our stats, abilities, and equipment so we can go further next and earn more.
I quite liked the game's art style and the music worked well with it. but it did lack feedback to the player when it came to the enemies. i didn't find it too satisfying taking out enemies. there was no rumble in the controller and not much sound to indicate when an enemy has been defeated. there wasn't much feedback when we were attacked either. so i could see the action taking place but i wasn't get much back from the controls or audio. so whilst the combat and action was fine, it was noticeably lacking.
Whilst, as a demo, it's not great the game itself does come across as a solid one of these games, a Hades-Survivor-like style game. the story seemed interesting but whilst there's not too much shown in the demo there was enough for it to get it's hook into me. i'd recommend giving the demo a try or wishlisting it if you're a fan of this type of game.
