A couple shoutouts - Swarm Arena, Super Laser Racer

I'm a big time PC gamer and built my rig from scratch. Lately the PC gaming market has been wearing thin; big name developers don't see a market in computer gaming. I've found myself playing a lot of indie games because of this and I wanted to give a nod to a couple of great games that I've come across recently.

Swarm Arena

The first game is called Swarm Arena. In the game you play an organism that relies on drones for attacking. These drones can be picked up by powerups that appear on screen and you also start with about 50. There are two types of attack powerups, Circulate and Shoot. You randomly start with one of these abilities at level 1 and by picking up powerups you can reach level 3 with either ability. Your core is what you control and the drones follow you around in different patterns depending on your attack ability. With shoot you have drones that follow you and you have to strategically maneuver your core in order to have them following you in a direction so that when you press fire they are aimed towards the enemy. If you stand still and fire the drones with shoot in random directions depending on their movement. You have a sphere of influence and once the drones leave the sphere they become inactive and can be attacked without affecting the enemies drones (usually its a trade, 1 for 1) making shoot a dangerous ability if used improperly. Circulate causes the drones to follow around you and they shoot out in a circle towards the enemy. Circulate is great for keeping drones close and in your influence but because of its attack style it is primarily a defensive ability. Each level past one causes the drones to move and attack more quickly causing you to become more dangerous. The goal of the game is to attack and kill the other players core while maneuvering around his drones. It may sound confusing but it is very unique and has a ton of depth to it and I'd recommend you watch a video if you are interested. My only complaint with this game is that it is very competitive but has almost no players so getting an online match usually requires you to browse a forum (steam is the easiest method) and find a friend who will play with you. The game does offer incredible A.I. including an A.I. called "pandora" which actually learns from your play style and tries strategies that can counter yours. This A.I. retains its memory and grows stronger from match to match depending on how well you play. You can fight this A.I. against any of the others to see how powerful it has become and it is a very rewarding feature. The game currently goes for $5 on steam and the developer sometimes gives away free CD-keys on his Facebook/Twitter.

Super Laser Racer

The other game I want to talk about is called Super Laser Racer. This game is much easier to describe
. It is basically Mario Kart set in a techno-future with bright lights and an isometric view. There are weapon boxes, speed boosts, and tons of maps. There are different modes such as Race, Time Trial, Eliminator (Each lap last place gets eliminated) and Survival (Lap count does not matter but instead you are fighting to be the last one alive, players have health bars and you basically get in a high speed shootout). The game suffers from the same problem, a lack of players online, but single player is a lot of fun and the A.I. is great (I still can't beat hard). You can create your own maps and unlock ships with different stats. Overall this is a great game, not a ton of depth but perfect to kill some time or relax and it will run on almost any PC. This game also goes for $5 on steam or the companies website.

Both of these games work best with some kind of gamepad. They both have generic gamepad support and allow you to map the controls.

I hope you guys check them out if they look interesting to you and if I get good feedback I would love to write up more quick reviews in the future, have fun! If anyone is already a steam gamer feel free to add me, I'm on there as BriianC (don't know how that extra i got in there :puz

Pretty cool, looks almost like all those fleet ships near the sun. Now we can experience it in real time. Nice find and cool looking game. Thanks.

Nice, here's one of my favourites.

Plasma Pong

reply to post by Grey Magic


Oh wow haha I've actually played a game that completely rips that idea off. Its called Shatter, it has amazing graphics and really awesome boss battles but the suction and push thing was always so unique in my opinion, that is until I saw this