Ant Empire Review

Looking at the little things and imagining what life is like for them: never gets elderly. Like the 2016 platformer Unravel and the Obsidian survival game Grounded, the modern RTS Empire of the Ants takes us into the world of macro photography. It does a great job of showing us the world from an ant’s perspective, where pebbles are boulders and a beetle is an elephant, but you have to really love the feel of it for it to work, because as an RTS campaign it’s not great.

In Empire of the Ants you rank 103,683, you are an ant from the warrior caste who fights on behalf of your confederation of ant colonies against the wonders and horrors of a much larger world. It’s a wonderfully whimsical world – taken from a series of French novels – and while the game mechanics are nothing special and the campaign missions are often a disappointment, there’s an undeniable joy in exploring this miniature world. This is a game that is all about beauty and pleasant landscapes.

The graphics almost aggressively lunge at you, with a photorealistic array of greenery, logs, and other little things that Unreal Engine 5 allows. Many insects, arachnids, and other creatures have believable exoskeleton textures that vary depending on species and type. I was particularly fascinated by the huge ferns, grasses and flowers that an ant can climb on. Surfaces aren’t always as detailed as an insect’s carapace, but the way an ant’s legs twist to grab onto a stalk while climbing or spreading out on smoother surfaces is just the kind of detail you’d expect from a zoom-in game. It’s just a very fun and pretty game to move around.

The enormous artifacts of the larger human world are also stunning. A rugged elderly soccer ball appears quite early and looks realistic with worn seams and frayed panels and the silky snail trail of a circling, curious creature. These human objects are accompanied by ant-scale descriptions, wondering what they could be: We can’t eat the ball, says one, it’s not real skin. Avoid the glass jar in summer, says another, because it gets very warm.

This makes places that are missing similar details very obvious: you can, for example, build little wooden walls for your nests, but you just step over them as you walk. The lack of attention to certain mechanical details is painful in the average mission, as most of Empire of the Ants aren’t actually RTS missions – they traverse these worlds like a little ant. It’s great fun as you traverse the area and explore, but most of the platforming segments boil down to timed scavenger hunts where you have to rush and contend with a terrible UI that focuses more on sniffing pheromones than enjoying the scenery.

The agony of failure

As a whimsical ant exploration simulator, Empire of the Ants does quite well, but in theory it’s primarily a third-person RTS. This part is sorely missing. Running around and directing ants to occupy modern nests – fixed capture points that also serve as the only base building – is often too straightforward. Battles are largely deterministic, and you can see from the start which side will win and which side will lose, as the Warrior-Worker-Spitter unit triad forms a Rock-Paper-Scissors counter system. The only problem with this gear is that sometimes you can exploit the pheromone ability from your otherwise non-combatant ant leader to, for example, speed up the movement of your units or cause an enemy to flee. It’s very uncomplicated stuff that doesn’t inspire an intriguing range of tactical scenarios.

This becomes painfully obvious in multiplayer, where battles pretty quickly devolve into who can draw and exploit resources faster – I didn’t have any intriguing or surprising tactical interactions. There is little to nothing to recommend this game as an engaging multiplayer game compared to other, more strategically diverse games that will stay fresh longer.

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In later campaign missions, it’s often frustrating to have to go through the long list of legions of ants and related creatures like beetles and wasps that you command – and looking through the list is essentially the only precise way to select units other than standing in front of them and clicking directly… which can be hard , when half a dozen enemy and cordial unit icons overlap. The base upgrade interface can also be frustrating: it’s displayed on the ground and can be obscured by cordial ants.

Both halves of the Ant Empire, exploration and tactics, are mediocre and at war with each other. It’s possible to combine puzzle platforming and small-scale tactics – typified by the excellent Pikmin series – but Empire of the Ants strictly separates the two types of gameplay. Campaign missions are always either exploration or strategic scenarios, and exploration is only sometimes mysterious or surprising enough to be justified. Pikmin-style gameplay combines two types of gameplay into a seamless whole, with larger levels or regions that reward exploration with strategic bonuses. Here I feel like I’m bouncing between an impassioned environmental technology demo and an average third-person RTS with stutters and freezes, but these environments are at least enough to recommend them, with major reservations, to lovers of insects and other minutiae.