Temtem: Swarm

Vampire Survivors taught me to switch my brain off and let the numbers climb. Swarm wants slightly more attention than that, and the difference is the evolution chain. Instead of stacking one aura until the screen turns white, you are pushing a Temtem along its evolution line mid-run, watching a wobbly little starter turn into something with a genuinely different attack shape and a different reason to exist in your build. Crema took its creature-collector, stripped out the turn-based duels and the dialogue boxes, and rebuilt the whole thing as a bullet heaven where your monster fights on autopilot. As someone who came to this series for the worldbuilding, let me be clear early: almost none of that world made the trip. The run loop itself is tight. You pick a Temtem, drop into an arena, and mob density climbs until the screen is a soup of hostile creatures moving toward your hitbox. Attacks fire on their own timers, so the skill expression lives entirely in positioning and in which upgrades you take when you level. Techniques stack and interact, and the type logic from the parent game still does quiet work underneath: some damage profiles are there to shred crowds, others exist purely so the boss encounter that interrupts your comfortable snowball does not simply end the run. The synergies are the best thing here. There is a real, felt gap between a run where your picks compound into something absurd and one where you greedily grabbed raw damage and hit a wall around the ten minute mark. Between runs, earnings go into permanent upgrades and roster unlocks, which is where the long game lives. Three-player online co-op is what lifts this above a solo curiosity. Running it with two friends changes the calculus completely, because you start building around each other instead of building a self-sufficient blob, and someone always ends up as the designated crowd-thinner while another player chases the boss. It is cross-platform, it has full controller support, and it plays fine through Remote Play on a TV, which suits the format: short sessions, low ceremony, easy to put down. The accessibility work deserves a nod too, with keyboard-only and mouse-only options and the fact that nothing here demands timed inputs. This is a game you can genuinely play tired. Now the part where I get grumpy. RPG sits in the genre list and I would push back on that hard. There are no choices that matter, no companions with arcs, no writing that rewards a second read, no dragons to argue with. The creatures you collect are stat packages with animations, and if you loved the original for its regions and its characters, Swarm will feel like a lovely soundtrack playing in an empty room. The unlock economy is the other sore spot: a chunk of the roster and the meaningful meta upgrades sit behind currency grinds that ask you to replay content you already solved, which is padding dressed up as progression. Balance is uneven too, with a handful of Temtem that trivialize stages next to others you unlock, try once, and quietly never touch again. Late-run visual noise gets bad enough that on a busy screen you are reading vibes rather than reading threats. The community verdict has settled at mostly positive rather than adoring, and honestly, that feels about right to me. So who should actually play this. If you already have a hundred hours in survivor-likes and you want one with a collection hook and a co-op mode that is not an afterthought, this is a good one, and the evolution mechanic is a smarter twist than most spin-offs manage. If you are a series fan hoping for more of the story or the monster-taming depth, adjust your expectations before you start, because the depth here is horizontal, not narrative. And if you specifically want a game that holds up past hour 40, be honest with yourself about how many of those hours will be grinding unlock currency rather than discovering anything new. An hour a night, with friends, is the sweet spot. Two hundred hours solo is not what this was built for, and pretending otherwise does it no favors.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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