I just killed me some Swarmites. To be more specific, I just speared, bisected, gassed, julienned, melted, impaled, bear trapped, crushed with a meteor, and roadkilled me some Swarmites. And I hadn't even left the menu screen yet.

Get the feeling you shouldn't become too attached to these blobby morons?

Just as cute, blue, and disposable as the common Smurf.

Plenty of games force us to make a few sacrifices. Pikmin and Lemmings spring to mind, and Swarm pays homage to both. But generally speaking, death is treated as mere collateral damage...sorry, little red plant man, but I'm hurling you at that strange bug-thing now -- good luck! Not Swarm. You'll find the will to kill your trusting blue homunculi in droves roughly five seconds after pressing Start. Yep...being a first-class a-hole sure helps when you're playing Swarm.

See, where those other games insist you keep the protagonist more-or-less intact, Swarm turns icing minions into a vital mechanic, rewards you for doing it in different ways, and refuses to let you advance until wasting your own guys becomes a reflex action. That requires a few entertaining changes in gaming philosophy, but the rewards aren't always what they could be.

I mean, sure, I used to steer Lara Croft into a bottomless pit once in a while just to see what happened (spoiler: screaming, death), but only after I'd carefully saved progress. Killing swarmites actually progresses Swarm.

It works like this: Each level starts with your titanic blue Momma spitting 50 stupid little buggers out of her brain tentacle onto a platform, and then things get freaky. You've got to run your Swarmite mob through a gauntlet o' death while collecting enough glowing point orbs to unlock the next level. The thing is, you'll never hit the score quotas unless you dial into the game's multiplier system. Earning more points simultaneously increases the multiplier and resets its countdown clock.

Run into the whirling blade, and we shall double our numbers!

Luckily, if you run out of orbs, if they're too far or too inaccessible to reach before the timer runs out and you lose your multiplier (while banking earned points), you've always got a solution handy. Just kill off a Swarmite. Or three. Or three dozen. Not only does that reset the timer, it actually increases your multiplier, too. Just so long as one surviving Swarmite crosses the finish line, you're golden. The rest are tiny cannon fodder.

Plus, the game rewards you with medals for mass swarmite deaths (accidental or intentional) according to their method of dispatch. Developer Hothead Games (of DeathSpank fame) even set up a worldwide Swarmite death counter, and Director of Game Technology Joel DeYoung tells me they'll do something special when it hits one billion severed.

Now, I like Swarm. I like it a lot. It's nicely sick, brutally tough in the later stages, and uses simple mechanics in smart ways to deliver a game that's as strategic as it is frenetic. I especially like how Swarm takes a time-honored gameplay requirement -- survival -- and twists it into something deliciously foul. I regularly found myself casually steering a few Swarmites into the yawning abyss with a pleasant mix of callous disregard and sadistic determination to keep a multiplier alive.

I just wish, given its importance and frequency, they'd made all that death more amusing.

Hooray! An inviting cliff with a sheer drop into spikey death!

Outside of the hysterically pointless cruelty found on the menu screen, killing Swarmites just isn't as funny as you might think. Oh, they're readily accessible as victims with no personality traits outside of "dolt," and if you walk away from the controller they'll gradually wander off, one by one, into the nearest buzz saw. But the carnage gets so thick that I often didn't even know when a Swarmite died outside of hearing the tell-tale multiplier pop. Death became incidental...even ignorable. Sacrificing a Swarmite for the greater good (or rather, for my greater good) might be more noticeable, but it's not more entertaining. Rather, it's mechanical.

Adding a heaping helping of pitch-black humor to the proceedings would've made Swarm indispensable. I feel like I should've been giggling manically from start to finish instead of slavishly devoting myself to that unforgiving multiplier timer. After all, I made Lara leap into that chasm for the morbid fun of it.

I still enjoyed Swarm for letting me be a bastard to helpless, hapless creatures that surely deserved every misfortune heaped upon them. I just wanted a few more dark smiles along the way.