It may be nice to look at, but the single-player campaign in Empire of the Ants is just terrible and lifeless. That’s about 12 hours of missions that range from pointlessly simple – due to the passive enemy AI that doesn’t even know how to operate the power to empower its troops, which is crucial to success – to obnoxiously complex and exorbitant that won’t let you save in halfway through the mission. Most annoyingly, there is one where nine waves of enemies appear and attack from all sides, and you immediately fail if you lose control of one of the seven nests you have to defend – there are so many of them that it is impossible to upgrade them all with effective defense. This final wave is also a doozy, which meant I had to replay it from the beginning multiple times to get past the final tricky moments where they had accumulated enough to be a threat.
Added to these combat missions are ridiculously lifeless missions in which you only control a single ant and hunt down miniature bugs – which are usually very effectively camouflaged by realistic graphics – spread across a vast map. You’re guided solely by the non-directional proximity sensor, so you have to run in circles to triangulate any mistake. There are also “stealth” missions where you don’t really care if you get detected while scanning enemy legions (death has basically no consequences either), and these are like running around the map looking for things. Sometimes they tell you to catch butterflies or fireflies that fly away when you get close – the only way I was able to do this was to wait until they repeated their recorded movement pattern and landed right in front of me, and that’s exactly the same as witty as it sounds .
Considering you can climb any object and walk on the ceiling, it’s surprising that only a few missions operate this ability at all, and those that do are mostly of the lifeless, non-combat variety. (There was only one mission where my units fought upside down, which was very witty because it rained down the bodies of dead ants.) Similarly, the one thing Empire of the Ants does with its impressive sense of scale is provide a few objects – like a glass bottle or a toy giraffe – to run around and collect diminutive glowing objects as you explore them. I admit it reminds me of seeing real ants finding out whether an item is something they want to eat, but I don’t think ants do it for fun and I don’t find it very fun to do it either.
You’re not forced to complete all of these missions to complete the campaign – you select missions by talking to the quest ants in a sequence of hub areas, which serve as a menu of sorts – but I don’t recommend any of them, or the campaign in general. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it’s not that flawed (except… you know).
Another thing you do in these centers is talk to the ants. I haven’t read the books that Empire of the Ants is based on, but if Wikipedia’s summary is anything to go by, this game’s story doesn’t even come close to following them, as there are no human characters or an ant secret weapon to make it remotely compelling. I assume that the numerous conversations about how your nest is threatened by termites and other visually identical ant species or floods do not do the novel justice. Even the ant civil war that breaks out ends almost as abruptly as it began, which means there’s no substance to it.
