Temtem: Swarm is a mashup of Pokémon and Vampire Survivors in which you blast cute critters by the hundred, if you're looking for a post-Palworld slaughterfest

It seems Palworld has triggered a reckoning for cute video game animals. Mere weeks after Pocketpair's survival sim saw stratospheric success by letting players murder and enslave legally distinct Pokémon knockoffs, the creators of creature-battling MMO Temtem have decided they've had enough of all that collecting and training nonsense. Instead, they'll let players unleash unbridled wrath on its adorable menagerie of creatures in the "bullet heaven" spinoff Temtem Swarm.

As visible in the game's announcement trailer, Temtem: Swarm is unashamedly inspired by Vampire Survivors, with players wandering around a large map viewed from a top-down perspective, unleashing colourful and devastating abilities on teeming hordes of cute Tems.

Admittedly, Swarm makes more of an effort to be true to the spirit of Temtem than Palworld does toward Pokemon. Instead of playing a human with a gun and a grudge, Temtem has players control other Tems like Pigepic, Oree, and Platypet, thereby ensuring the violence remains exclusively Tem on Tem. Nonetheless, it is a bit weird watching these cute little critters unleash the flippin' apocalypse on their fellow Temkind.

Temtem: Swarm also adds a couple of neat twists to the Vampire Survivors formula. It folds the concept of evolving creatures into Vampire Survivors' feedback loop of levelling up to stay alive longer, with Tems getting to choose new perks as they increase in power. Moreover, according to developers Crema and GGTech studios, it's also "built from the ground up with online 3-player co-op in mind." Not only will this let players share resources and deploy coordinated attacks, but it also allows them to work together even when one or several players are downed. This is made possible by a mechanic called 'Ghost Mode', which lets eliminated players assist surviving teammates as a "spectral helper".

Temtem: Swarm is coming to PC first, with a rough release window of "Q3 2024". It'll also launch with full Steam Deck support, which makes sense given Vampire Survivors is arguably the ultimate Steam Deck game.

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.