So, so close to being an early standout for Nitrome. Genuinely a ton of fun, at least up until a certain point. You control a swatter, there’s a bunch of bugs crawling across the screen, and you have to swat as many of them as you can before time runs out. It’s a simple concept, but there’s so much variety in the things you’re asked to do. One level requires you to use the swatter to keep a beetle in the air for 30 seconds. Another gives you precisely one chance to hit a slug falling from the top of the screen… but doesn’t tell you precisely when it will, leaving you in anticipation of when and where it’s gonna fall. One tells you to swat a mere two flies… each inside fly traps, requiring you to sneak in and bolt out lest your swatter get eaten. Levels are plentiful, but short: if you don’t think a particular mechanic/enemy type isn’t a winner then you at least don’t have to stick with it for long… unless it happens to be one of the ones the game chooses to bring back. It’s fun, it hits some good arcadey beats, and the pixel art is so pretty. I was honestly so close to really liking it… but god is the difficulty curve so, so rough. The first two worlds are fun, the third is… rough (do you want to have to click on a stag beetle 150 times in 15 seconds?), but otherwise fine, then the final world amps the difficulty up wayyyyyyy too much. Some are doable with some effort, some become much harder than they should merely due to the presence of the health bar/timer, a couple honestly felt a bit like crapshoots when I did enough for the game to count it as a win, but two levels in particular are so hard as to be genuinely impossible. And, like, that’s not just me talking: I looked up guides to see how others did it and every walkthrough I saw had whoever did it complain specifically about these two levels. And, like man, I really wanna recommend this game but I’m not sure I really could if I had to futz with Flash just so the game could be beatable. It’s such a shame, because I think the difference between this being where it is and this being where I’d want it to be is merely a case of tweaking some values to make the ridiculous stuff less ridiculous, but as is… man it was so close. Close enough that I still like it, honestly, but not enough to truly bat for it.