If you’re looking for an arcade-style shooter with a sweet-sweet twist then Ben Walter‘s Long Live The Hive might bee the one for you.
Ignore my preposterous punning. Long Live The Hive is a solid little shooter that stands on its own without any wordplay. If anything, it uses words in a much more clever, direct, and minimalist way: It shouts them. It doesn’t shout them as in ‘please turn down your computer audio’. No, it ‘barks’ like a drill instructor, the voice in Superhot, or a hive mind might. THE HIVE MUST SURIVIVE. It’s simple, cool, effective and feels entirely fitting to the premise.
Considering that it was created as an entry to the recently ended Ludum Dare 56 — theme, Tiny Creatures — and was done well ahead of cut-off (in under 18 hours) there’s actually quite a lot going for it.
To play, you take control of one of the drones within a level, flying around with the WASD keys and firing toward your mouse cursor with the left click. You’ll fire small pellets of nectar (or honey or unspecified yellow blocks) which can clip off parts of enemies or ultimately kill them if you hit them on their core (red) body parts. Most of them will fire back, though, and your projectiles persist, cluttering up an already-busy hive.
Each of the levels are generated as you drop in, with new enemy types (and greater densities of them) coming into play as you make your way through more and more levels of the hive. Map generation and enemy distribution is mostly good, although I had a couple of spawns where enemies were dumped in as large stacks or even directly next to me. That said, there’s a moment of hesitation before they shoot so you can normally scutter away from them.
Something else that I especially enjoyed about Long Live the Hive was that if you do die, you’ll take on the form of one of the other bees littered around the level. However, these can be collaterally killed by the hive-invaders, so sometimes you won’t have any lives left after a single loss depending on the speed at which you target enemies.
Long Live The Hive is available for free on itch.io.
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