Swarm's A-Comin'
Comet Crash's new Bionic Swarm expansion turns one of the most genuinely unique tower defense games into something else entirely: a harder tower defense game.
Published: December 27, 2010
Okay, confession time: I never did finish the original Comet Crash before heaping tons of praise upon little indie start-up Pelfast's creation. It was something different in an age where tower defense games were still the App du jour on nearly every platform that would accept them. Comet Crash wasn't just about passively sitting back and building up defenses against increasing waves up enemies, it was about building up a good offense and defense simultaneously, and witnessing sometimes an hour or more of careful planning executed as this massive, thousands-strong stream of enemies pouring out of your base was... exhilarating.
It's probably good news that Bionic Swarm, the game's first expansion, doesn't really do away with that original concept. In fact, little has changed from a sheer options standpoint: you'll get 16 new maps (if you include the challenge maps), a handful of new units and structures, and those latter two additions are playable in the game's original maps with enough upgrading. What has changed is Bionic Swarm's difficulty.
More specifically, it's where the difficulty starts, which is to say this is a direct continuation of the difficulty curve from the latter part of the original. All that really means is the sheer amount of juggled offensive and defensive steps required early on have to come from experience -- either from dozens of hours with the original campaign or almost as many with just trial and error. The allure of remote nukes may be strong, but that's something you'll only get to play with if you give the game hours, days -- possibly even weeks.
There are some added wrinkles added even early on, though. For starters, that oh so handy debris that's slowly scooting around the level can't be harvested by your normal weapons anymore and must be towed to specialized harvesters that can crack the thicker shell. This actually adds quite a bit more busy work to levels, as you're constantly grabbing and tugging in new asteroids in addition to building units.
Moreover, one of the things that really made the original Comet Crash so intense was the fact that the enemy would already have pre-built units just waiting for you when the level started, and to actually make defensive headway, often these units would have to be taken out and then immediately replaced by one of your own. That's no small task when the various anti-air and ground-based enemy weapons start strong and only start upgrading the longer you leave them alone. It gets even more insane when factoring the ability to fire off troop transports or multi-weakness units that eases the feeling of just sending attacks to be slaughtered until overwhelming numbers are met.
This is a game that unfolds -- particularly in the case of the Bionic Swarm expansion -- over the course of what may well be hours, culminating in a single moment where either your units or the enemy's overwhelms their defenses and all that building and repelling comes to an end. The actual victory is a blink in the eye of the overall conflict and because of it, almost every little action you take during that hour or more has a cumulative effect.
That of course brings up a very good point. As much as I love Comet Crash, I'll fully admit that I'm not a high-level player. Bionic Swarm hammers that point home with authority; it took me upwards of five hours of work just to pass the first level, and the second was probably double that. There are instances of split-second timing mixes with the slow unveil of what an enemy is going to throw out next. There's stockpiling resources and burning them all as fast as possible to build up new defense. These are the things that you will content with every single second of Bionic Swarm's experience, and you'll think it all happened in seconds instead of minutes... or longer.
It's been a good year and a half since Comet Crash landed on the PSN, and not surprisingly, the expansion seems to have brought along a few lessons learned about the hardware since that original release. Things feel cleaner, more smoothly anti-aliased (though it could just as easily be a resolution bump) and the camera now has no problem pushing into highlight what look like slightly more detailed units and structures. The game still runs like a dream even when thousands of enemies are filling the screen, and it really is a testament to the coding skills of Pelfast's dev team that the game can still impress when a proper showdown is unleashed.
Likewise, the audio still holds up fantastically. With so much time spent on every map, something as simple as a confirmation chime or a particular enemy unit's sound effect can end up grating over time, and will only get worse. Instead, Comet Crash's understated, ambient sound track and simple sound effects somehow manage to slip into the background when not important and let themselves come to the fore when they are. There's always something to listen to, but it's never anything you have to listen for after a couple hours.
As should be made obvious by now, I failed miserably in my attempt to actually bust through this clearly late-game suite of new challenges. Yes, there are easier difficulty levels, but why would I bother with those when I can't let this game win?! My disgrace needn't be yours, though; at just under five bucks for what promises to be dozens more hours of fun. And it is indeed fun. It's amazing, addictive, relentless, merciless fun that punishes you for mistakes and sense of wave of euphoric joy through you when you win. Moreover, it's an absolute must-have for anyone who picked up the first game and loved it as much as I did.
It's probably good news that Bionic Swarm, the game's first expansion, doesn't really do away with that original concept. In fact, little has changed from a sheer options standpoint: you'll get 16 new maps (if you include the challenge maps), a handful of new units and structures, and those latter two additions are playable in the game's original maps with enough upgrading. What has changed is Bionic Swarm's difficulty.
More specifically, it's where the difficulty starts, which is to say this is a direct continuation of the difficulty curve from the latter part of the original. All that really means is the sheer amount of juggled offensive and defensive steps required early on have to come from experience -- either from dozens of hours with the original campaign or almost as many with just trial and error. The allure of remote nukes may be strong, but that's something you'll only get to play with if you give the game hours, days -- possibly even weeks.
There are some added wrinkles added even early on, though. For starters, that oh so handy debris that's slowly scooting around the level can't be harvested by your normal weapons anymore and must be towed to specialized harvesters that can crack the thicker shell. This actually adds quite a bit more busy work to levels, as you're constantly grabbing and tugging in new asteroids in addition to building units.
Moreover, one of the things that really made the original Comet Crash so intense was the fact that the enemy would already have pre-built units just waiting for you when the level started, and to actually make defensive headway, often these units would have to be taken out and then immediately replaced by one of your own. That's no small task when the various anti-air and ground-based enemy weapons start strong and only start upgrading the longer you leave them alone. It gets even more insane when factoring the ability to fire off troop transports or multi-weakness units that eases the feeling of just sending attacks to be slaughtered until overwhelming numbers are met.
This is a game that unfolds -- particularly in the case of the Bionic Swarm expansion -- over the course of what may well be hours, culminating in a single moment where either your units or the enemy's overwhelms their defenses and all that building and repelling comes to an end. The actual victory is a blink in the eye of the overall conflict and because of it, almost every little action you take during that hour or more has a cumulative effect.
That of course brings up a very good point. As much as I love Comet Crash, I'll fully admit that I'm not a high-level player. Bionic Swarm hammers that point home with authority; it took me upwards of five hours of work just to pass the first level, and the second was probably double that. There are instances of split-second timing mixes with the slow unveil of what an enemy is going to throw out next. There's stockpiling resources and burning them all as fast as possible to build up new defense. These are the things that you will content with every single second of Bionic Swarm's experience, and you'll think it all happened in seconds instead of minutes... or longer.
It's been a good year and a half since Comet Crash landed on the PSN, and not surprisingly, the expansion seems to have brought along a few lessons learned about the hardware since that original release. Things feel cleaner, more smoothly anti-aliased (though it could just as easily be a resolution bump) and the camera now has no problem pushing into highlight what look like slightly more detailed units and structures. The game still runs like a dream even when thousands of enemies are filling the screen, and it really is a testament to the coding skills of Pelfast's dev team that the game can still impress when a proper showdown is unleashed.
Likewise, the audio still holds up fantastically. With so much time spent on every map, something as simple as a confirmation chime or a particular enemy unit's sound effect can end up grating over time, and will only get worse. Instead, Comet Crash's understated, ambient sound track and simple sound effects somehow manage to slip into the background when not important and let themselves come to the fore when they are. There's always something to listen to, but it's never anything you have to listen for after a couple hours.
As should be made obvious by now, I failed miserably in my attempt to actually bust through this clearly late-game suite of new challenges. Yes, there are easier difficulty levels, but why would I bother with those when I can't let this game win?! My disgrace needn't be yours, though; at just under five bucks for what promises to be dozens more hours of fun. And it is indeed fun. It's amazing, addictive, relentless, merciless fun that punishes you for mistakes and sense of wave of euphoric joy through you when you win. Moreover, it's an absolute must-have for anyone who picked up the first game and loved it as much as I did.
