Wow. It’s not often a game impresses me with graphics or technology anymore, but Drone Swarm [official site] is immediately a thrill just to look at. It’s a space-set singleplayer RTS in which you control a swarm of 32,000 drones. You click to direct them and they swirl as an undulating mass, each little ship individually simulated. You must watch the 11 minutes of video below, which shows exactly what you can do with such a swarm.



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I’d be happy with this as just a tech demo, but I like the look of the rest of the game, too. You can direct your flock of little robots to dash-attack enemy ships, using EMPs to take down their shields before bashing them to bits, shoving them into one another, or targeting their specific subsystems to disable their engines and weapons. You can also split your swarm into smaller groups, using part of it to form a wall around your fragile mothership to protect against incoming projectiles while fighting back with the remainder.

Although it’s a real-time strategy game, it doesn’t look like there’s basebuilding, resource creation or any other units than your swarm. You’ve a hotbar of skills along the bottom of the screen however, and it looks like there’s a lot of different tactics involved in winning the small skirmishes against enemy ships. This includes a “metagame surrounding” the battles, with new abilities to unlock, a galaxy map to explore and more. Otherwise there’s not currently a lot of other information about the game or when it’s out, but there’s a newsletter you can sign up to on the game’s official site.