The appearance of the Empire of the Ants is remarkable. The amount of detail on the textures of the forest floor is so amazing that you would think for a second that it is actual macro-lens footage of ants from a nature documentary. Although it is a real-time strategy game with swarms of insects on screen at once, you never really command more than seven units, which is fortunate considering how awkwardly its controls need you to cycle through them to give instructions. There is absolutely nothing underneath the nests you are capturing and constructing. Therefore, despite its expansive appearance, Empire of the Ants is a fairly small-scale strategy game in most other aspects, and its lack of multiplayer options and a diversity of units further reduces its perceived size.
There is plenty of space for expert players to use their skills wisely to increase the damage output of their bugs and weaken the adversary, and multiplayer games offer a decent bit of depth in how you employ your limited number of units and build up your nests to tech up. The way you acquire territory and produce the two resources—food and wood—is similar to a scaled-down version of Company of Heroes, and that is a good place to start.
Because ant units are locked into melee battle and cannot leave until one of them loses, you can learn to hold off a threatening Warrior unit until reinforcements come or stop a retreat while you eliminate an enemy. If you have food on hand, you can swiftly rebuild a lost unit. However, each ant legion has a home nest from where they will respawn, so returning to the front lines may be a lengthy trip. Turtling up is not an option because each nest you capture has a certain number of upgrade slots that can be used to support a unit from that nest or filled by a building. You will not even have enough slots to tech up to tier 3, which means you will unavoidably be swamped by ants with greater stats. Ingeniously, you use your ant as a cursor to select items from a radial menu that appears when you interact with a nest.
Importantly, destroying an enemy’s nest turns off all of the upgrades that were situated there, including the minimap. (The minimap features fog of war, but since you are looking at the world in the third person rather than the standard RTS overhead view, it is useful that you can see a marching horde of ants from a great distance even if their icon is not visible on the map.)
In essence, there is only one faction to cooperate with.
However, because there is only one group to interact with, Empire of the Ants feels weak in comparison to the majority of real-time strategy games. Their main units are always the same—workers, big-headed fighters, and “gunner” ants—and they all compete with one another in a simple game of rock, paper, scissors. (Even the visually dissimilar termites you battle throughout the campaign are not playable.) The sole variation is the ability to alter your loadout by selecting one of three “super predator” unit types, switching out your support unit between troop-carrying beetles, armoring snails, or healing aphids, and selecting four of the eight available powers for your main ant to unleash.
These can allow for a variety of tactics, but I do not like how committing to those decisions before a match starts makes it harder to change course if your opponent surprises you. For example, if my enemy heavily relies on gunner units, I would prefer to be able to switch from flying wasps to acid-resistant beetles as my predator of choice, but that is not a possibility.
The fact that there are just two multiplayer modes—1v1 and 1v1v1—is another significant drawback. This implies that there is no way to play cooperatively with a friend against the AI, which is quite poor even in the hardest settings and does not appear to understand how to employ very important abilities. At the very least, it has 21 maps, and there is a good deal of variation in the way they are arranged and the creeps that protect their resource caches, such as enormous spiders and praying mantises that are entertaining to see your ants defeat.
That is fortunate because it quickly becomes apparent that the bugs’ animations essentially lack variety. Even when the controls freak out because you unintentionally climb a small branch and begin spinning around it like a confused ant, it might initially be fun to skitter around at fast speeds. Because we are so close, seeing a swarm move across terrain is dramatic and believable.
Dead bodies are thrown high in the air like mortarboards at a high school graduation ceremony (which I doubt ants do?) and then roll down hills, while warriors will grab adversaries in their large teeth and shake them about. However, once you witness one ant-on-ant combat, you have witnessed them all. Because of their lunging strikes, beetles in particular become monotonous to watch very soon. Nevertheless, there are compelling reasons to play the multiplayer version of Empire of the Ants, something that is not true for the single-player narrative.
Verdict
You scurry around as a commander delivering orders and casting buffs on your armies of bugs in Empire of the Ants’ multiplayer modes, which include some ingenious concepts for how insects fight. The game’s amazing, hyper-realistic graphics are only let down by animations that get monotonous after a few bouts, and managing its deceptively small-scale conflicts poses some intriguing challenges. Its lack of unit variety and multiplayer modes—which do not offer the ability to play as a team or against a skilled AI—are what most seriously impair it. It isn’t easy to imagine this game having a lot of legs without that.
