The Ant Empire is impressive. For a moment, you might even believe it’s real macro footage of ants from a nature film, and the level of detail on the forest floor textures is incredibly impressive. However, it’s not what it seems: it may be a real-time strategy game with swarms of insects on the screen, but you’re never actually in command of more than seven units – and given the somewhat clunky way the controls have you zipping through no, to give orders, it’s mercy. You may be trapping and building nests, but there is literally nothing beneath the surface. So while it seems huge, Empire of the Ants is in many ways actually a small-scale strategy game, and the lack of variety in units and multiplayer modes makes it feel even smaller.
Multiplayer matches have a lot of nuance in how you utilize tiny numbers of units and build nests to gain technology, and there’s plenty of room for experienced players to turn things to their advantage by intelligently using power to amplify their mistakes. deal damage and weaken the enemy. It’s no different than a stripped-down version of Company of Heroes in the way you gain territory and generate two resources – food and wood – and that’s a good starting point. Ant units engage in hand-to-hand combat and cannot retreat until one or the other loses, so you can learn to hold off a unsafe Warrior unit until reinforcements arrive, or prevent retreat once you’ve finished off an enemy. And while you can quickly rebuild a lost unit if you have food available, each legion of ants has a home nest from which to respawn, which can mean a long trek back to the front lines.
Each captured slot has a set number of upgrade slots, which can be filled with a building or spent to support a unit from that slot, so upgrading is not an option – you won’t even have enough slots to upgrade a level 3 tech, which means that you will inevitably be overrun by ants with better stats. All building is done via a radial menu that appears when you interact with the nest and, cleverly, you utilize the ant as a cursor to select items. Most importantly, destroying an enemy’s nest disables all the upgrades that were there, including disabling his minimap. (Fog of war is noticeable on the minimap, but since you’re viewing the world in third person instead of the conventional top-down RTS view, it’s useful to be able to spot the moving legion of ants from a distance, even if their icon hasn’t appeared on the map.)
However, Empire of the Ants feels delicate compared to most real-time strategy games, largely because there is essentially only one faction to work with. Everyone always has the same set of workers, big-headed warriors, and “shooter” ants as their base units, and they all oppose each other in a uncomplicated rock-paper-scissors balance. (You can’t even play as the visually different termites you fight in the campaign). The only variety comes in the ability to customize your loadout by selecting four of the eight available powers that your main ant can cast, thus changing your support unit between healing aphids, armored slugs, or troop-carrying beetles, as well as one of three “super predator” unit types. . They certainly allow for different strategies, but I’m not a fan of the way locking down these choices before the match starts limits your ability to change your approach if your opponent throws you a curveball. I would prefer to be able to switch from flying wasps to acid-resistant beetles as my predator of choice if my enemy is attacking ranged units, for example, but that’s not an option.
Another major weakness of multiplayer is that there are only two modes: 1v1 or 1v1v1. This means that there is no way to play cooperatively against the AI (which is very delicate even on the highest difficulty level and doesn’t seem to know how to utilize key powers) with a friend. It has at least 21 maps and there’s a lot of variety in how they’re laid out and the creatures guarding their resource chests, such as giant spiders and mantises that are fun to watch ants kill.
This is good, because it quickly becomes clear that the bug animations lack much variety. Jumping at high speeds can be fun at first, even if the controls panic because you accidentally climb onto a tiny branch and start spinning around it like a confused ant. Watching the swarm flow over the area is compelling and, because we are so close, dramatic. The warriors grab their enemies in their huge jaws and shake them, and the dead bodies are thrown high into the air like camping boards at a high school graduation ceremony (which I guess ants don’t actually do?) and then roll down the hills. But when you’ve seen one ant-on-ant fight, you’ve seen them all. The beetles in particular become repetitive to watch very quickly due to their lunging attacks. Still, there are good reasons to play Empire of the Ants’ multiplayer, which can’t be said for the single-player campaign.
