The universe is expanding.
From highscore-driven single-player game-modes to team-based online-multiplayer competition - Swarm Universe has it all. You get arenas, racetracks, various mini-games and online-multiplayer modes like free for all, team-play (up to 8 players) or capture the flag. And, if that's not enough, there's a strong and ever-growing focus on user generated content.
Tropes present in this game:
- Action Bomb: Firecrackers (and their deadlier form found late in "Rush Hour") are this. Modding allows players to even design their own Action Bomb enemies!
- Attack Drone: Your best (and only) weapon, you control a number of hyperactive drones like a swarm.
- Big Bad: Parodied with Bot-7, who has to play the role of every character in the "story" of "Dark Matters"
- Death Course: Creative players can design pretty hellish levels.
- Essence Drop: Enemies drop yellow globes when killed; collecting them increases your multiplier and drone bonus, and can also increase your level.
- Event Flag: "Dark Matters" contains levels that use complex scripting to create cutscenes, control arena spawns, etc.
- Fixed Camera: The camera cannot be controlled by the player; only scripts within the level actually control the camera.
- Hyperactive Sprite: Enemy designs, or "presets", cannot simply stop their animations if they have any. And creating an enemy that can toggle between "idle" and "active" is quite limited.
- Instructive Level Design: Overlaps with Tutorial Level; The first level sequence you play is a group of levels teaching you the ropes of the game, in a narrative approach.
- Level Editor
- Level-Up Fill-Up: In other games, where your level determines your health, in ''Swarm Universe'' your level '''IS''' your health! You lose a level when you are hurt. And if your level is flashing, you die once your emergency shield wears off, even if you still have levels left!
- Kaizo Trap: A poorly-scripted level can put you in a cutscene, and still have you at risk of death!
- Mirror Match: Pretty much the premise of multiplayer levels. Some of them may have enemies, though.
- Mook Debut Cutscene: In "This is YOU!", Bot-7 introduces you to some enemies on the platform you're on. Once he lets you have control again, he'll spawn more and more of them until you die.
- Mooks, but no Bosses: Ultimately subverted; While "Dark Matters" lacks an actual "boss" per-se, custom levels from the Steam Workshop can have bosses of almost any variety!
- Multi-Mook Melee: The levels "Rift", "Invasion", "Rush Hour", and "Infestation" are levels with a score threshold that, when passed, unlocks the next level. Also, the level does not actually end until you die.
- Oh, Crap!: Bot-7's supervisors "accidentally" submit an early draft of his story, but is praised for it.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: Most Mooks can't survive a hit to their body "core".
- Scripted Battle: Overlaps with Flunky Boss and Level in Boss Clothing, in the "Showdown" level.
- Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: While you can't actually do that in the game, the Speeders and Shooters in "Invasion" will blow each other up when they collide, releasing a small spray of bullets as a result.
- Level/Enemy designers can design enemies that can target or even cause the deaths of other enemies.
- The Swarm: What did you expect from a game named "Swarm Universe"? The Player Character plays this trope literally.
- Top-Down View
- Visual Innuendo: What the Mooks in the Mook Debut Cutscene look like, compared to YOU...
- You Bastard!: Bot-7's sanity rapidly degrades late in the "story", and finally loses it in the last level, attacking the player and spawning many enemies.
