Anne Reviews: Swarm Gold

In Swarm Gold it’s all about the EZT!! EZT is a valuable substance found in the Praulac Nebula.  For a while it seemed that you could just collect the EZT without any repercussions and then along came the Clangor, a Giger-esque alien race apparently already resident in the nebula who seem to think the EZT is theirs.  Your job is to collect the EZT while avoiding floating space debris, dead aliens and, of course, the Clangor themselves who swarm around the EZT trying to stop you.

The narrative goes on in the background filling in the story as you go along moving up through the over 100 levels. The only part of the narrative that seems immediately relevant to your situation is the fact that you are collecting the EZT as a part of a futuristic slave trade.  Each subsequent level brings more of the alien race to swarm around you and they become ever more threatening and aggressive. I found this game a relatively simple top-down, mouse-controlled space shooter with very loose roots in the Asteroid genre but it is incredibly addictive.   I would turn on the game just for a quick ‘5 minutes of play’ only to find that an hour had gone by without me noticing.

You have a seemingly endless choice of weapons upgrades to choose from, which are floating around amongst the debris and dead aliens. There are various types of lasers, cannons, missiles, mines and even a melee weapon, which is uniquely devastating to this game.  There is the "Star Clubber", a mace-like weapon swinging around the ship’s stern like a whipping tail, crushing aliens, asteroids, space junk and other obstacles with ease.  These weapons turn this into not just a basic shoot em up but also a game of hide and seek, as once you have collected the EZT you run around the level trying to find these weapons upgrades.