I put Empire of the Ants on my PSN and Steam wishlist as soon as I saw it. It looked really unique and won a bunch of indie gaming awards. It was designed for console, so I went ahead and played on on PS5. Besides, I had a gift card balance on PSN at the time when it released, but my Steam wallet was empty, so ...
As the title implies, the game is about playing as an ant. More specifically, players are an ant "general" so to speak, and commands legions of ant soldiers in wars against other bugs. Your ant character is from a colony within a "Federation" of cooperating ant colonies, each with their own queen who are subordinate to a single "queen of queens". A flood ravishes the colonies of the Federation, and so your character is assigned to rally the troops to rebuild the infrastructure destroyed in the flood, and fight off termites, spiders, and other ant species who are trying to expand their territory after the disruption of the floods.
If bugs give you the heebie-jeebies, then this may not be the game for you...
The game combines some exploratory platforming with simple real-time strategy concepts to create a unique -- but sadly under-cooked -- experience. The bulk of the game is a series of "strategy" and "tactics" missions strung together in a story campaign. Each map contains nests (little ant hills) that must be captured by a faction's legions, and then that faction is able to construct new legions or infrastructure, upgrades, or abilities in those nests.
This game also features a wide variety of different bugs. If bugs give you the heebie-jeebies, then this is probably not the game for you. No cockroaches though...
Ant's-eye view
Empire of the Ants has some pretty simplistic strategy. There's 3 basic units, which have a simple "rock-paper-scissors" relationship: warriors beat workers, workers beat gunners, and gunners beat warriors. There are a few other types of units representing different bugs that the ants can recruit to their cause, such as beetles, wasps, snails, and so forth. These special units might provide support roles, or be powerful combat units with special abilities. Beetles are heavily-armored and immune to ranged attacks, for instance. Wasps can fly, and so can only be damaged by ranged attacks. The ability to fly also means wasps can move across the map quickly, and they can freely disengage from enemy units.
The strategic battles are pretty straightforward. What makes the game standout is its unique perspective.
There is a simple rock-paper-scissors relationship between units, and some special "hero" units.
I'm used to playing strategy games from a "bird's-eye view", with a wide-angle overview of much of the battlefield. But because of Empire of the Ants' novel premise, the view is actually quite the opposite. Instead of a flying bird's-eye view, the camera is at ground level at the ant character's perspective. This limits the player's view to only what your ant character can see. If you want a broader view of the arena and activity, you need to find some physical high ground, such as a large rock or a climbable plant, and park yourself there.
Even then, your options become limited, since the game requires you to physically go to a nest, object, or unit in order to perform most interactions or abilities. There are a few things that you can do from a distance. You can select units and give them movement or attack orders (if you can see the destination or target of the attack). You can also order Worker units to harvest food or wood in this manner. You can also point at a nest and upgrade its unit from a distance. This temporarily disbands the unit while the upgrade is performed (essentially, you have to re-build the unit), and the upgraded unit will spawn at that nest and have to walk back to the front lines.
You'll need to find physical high ground to get an overview of the whole battlefield.
Other than those things, you need to move around the map in order to perform many tasks. Constructing new infrastructure at your nests, or unlocking new powers requires walking or running back to the given nest. Each nest has a limited number of slots for infrastructure and abilities, which means you have to run around between all your nests in order to spread your construction around the map. This is actually the source of a lot of the game's strategy, since you want to avoid putting important upgrades in nests that you won't be able to defend. Using your pheromone powers to buff your units (or de-buff enemy units) requires you to be in close proximity to the unit(s) being affected (with the exception of the speed boos, which applies to all units on the field). As such, you are constantly running back and forth across the arena, and having to take your attention away from the front lines.
This is an interesting concept, and it is actually grounded in realism to a certain degree. Prior to the invention of radio, battlefield commanders could not instantaneously give orders to distant units in the field. They would have to send "runners" or mounted messengers across the battlefield with written (or spoken) messages for those units. Similarly, your commander ant in Empire of the Ants acts as the general, giving the orders, and also the messenger relaying the orders across the battlefield, and also a forward scout, uncovering the location of nests, enemy units, and other objects of interest (or you can send out a swarm of gnats to do that for you, at the expense of using up one of your valuable ability slots).
Your movements around the battlefield are just as much a part of your strategy as the orders that you give to your units. Efficient planning and movement around the battlefield can often be the difference between victory and failure. Later in the campaign, missions get very hard, and require optimal play from the player, especially early in the mission.
Basic RTS functionality (like the mini-map) is locked behind upgrades that must be created each and every mission.
In fact, you generally don't even start with a mini-map available, as the map is unlocked by a Cartographer upgrade at one of your nests. I'm not sure how I feel about this particular feature. The idea of needing to establish a cartography specialist in order to see the map is interesting. The problem is that, given the low-to-the-ground camera and limited view, the mini-map is almost essential. As such, the Cartographers is often the first thing I construct in any mission, which just adds some tedious extra busy-work to get my base set up.
I think I would prefer if the map itself were always unlocked, but the Cartographers were necessary for other functions. For example, if you loose visibility of a point of interest, its map icon will be replaced with a question mark, since you "forgot" what that point of interest was. So maybe the Cartographers could remember what everything is, so that locations on the map no longer disappear back into the fog of war. The Cartographers could maybe also reveal map region boundaries. This would make them much less necessary, unless you need help remembering where everything is.
In addition to the battle strategies being simplistic, the economy is also pretty simple. There's only 2 resources: food and wood. Food is mostly used to create new legions and replace dead legions. Wood is mostly used for creating infrastructure in the nests. There are no other resources that might be tied to ability usage or special abilities of specific units. All your abilities are tied to simple cool-down timers, and there are no additional resources that might be used to reduce cool-down times (though there is an upgrade that can be built in a nest that reduces cool-down times).
There's also "exploration" missions that do not have battles in them. In these missions, your ant must navigate obstacles to reach a destination, hunt NPC bugs like fireflies or butterflies, or go behind enemy lines to scout out enemy positions. These missions usually require some platforming over water, which kills you if you stay in it too long. Navigating around with the ant is one of the highlights of the game, but these exploration missions can often be tedious, with instant-death traps and objectives that are difficult to find.
For example, many exploration missions require you to find certain things hidden in the environment. These missions often boil down to pixel-hunting. You have to scan the environment with the cursor until it shows a distance to an objective. Once you get close enough, the game will activate a "hot-or-cold" proximity sensor that is supposed to guide you to the actual objective. But aside from that, there is no indication as to where you are even supposed to look for the mission objectives.
There are hidden collectibles or objectives in missions that require pixel-hunting to find.
Similarly, the game gives no indication of where to look for hidden collectibles within missions (including within strategy missions, in which optimal movement might be essential to victory). The pause menu tells you that there are collectibles in a mission, but that is it. They can be hidden under any nook or cranny, and the game won't give you any hints at all as to where to look. Hey! Maybe that's another function that the Cartographers could have been given!
A disjoint and anti-climatic campaign
I probably wouldn't mind the simplistic strategy of the individual missions if the broader campaign required more any strategic thought. The campaign is just a series of disconnected missions. There are multiple ant colonies that you travel between, each functioning as a hub for new campaign missions. Usually, you'll be given a handful of optional missions, and must complete a sub-set of those missions in order to unlock the next main campaign mission that progresses the story. But there is no connective tissue between these missions, and it makes no difference what missions you choose to play or not play, or in what order you play them in. Every mission is completely self-contained, and nothing that you do in any given mission carries over into future missions or the broader campaign.
War is brewing between the ants and termites.
Missions do not have any kind of rewards for completing them, or punishments for losing them, nor any bonuses for completing any optional objectives. Here's a few examples of things that the game could do to connect mission in the campaign, and make your choices more meaningful:
- There are some missions that require you to rescue friendly ants and bring them back to the nest. Perhaps completing these missions could give you extra units in future missions in that campaign region?
- There are missions that require you to harvest a certain threshold of resources within a time limit. Perhaps completing these missions could grant additional resources (or faster resource collection) in other missions in that campaign region?
- There are "stealth" mission requiring you to do recon of enemy positions. Perhaps completing these missions could grant you visibility over the enemy nests in other missions of that campaign region?
- Perhaps winning strategic battles, or completing optional objectives in those battles, could grant free levels of veterancy to your newly-recruited units in future battles within that campaign region?
- Other missions could do things like grant certain abilities or upgrades for free in future missions in that campaign region.
And so on. The game could then limit how many of these missions you could do in any given campaign region, so that you have to make meaningful decisions on which missions rewards are most important to you. Alternatively, there could be things like cumulative campaign resources that could be spend on top of the resources that you collect within a mission, which could allow you to speed up the development of your bases, or to get more units out in the field quicker.
Missions pay lip-service to preparedness and consequences for missions.
Worse yet, some of the most climactic and important events of the campaign story happen offscreen! At one point, mid-way through the game, while moving from one nest to the next, I passed by a series of memory pheromones describing a massive war in which over 100,000 ants in my colony were killed. There were spies and traitors. The player character met 2 important friends during the conflict, one of which was murdered by traitorous ants, and the other became the queen of her own colony. Heck, without spoiling too much, the player character ant even changes allegiances (to a certain degree) during these events!
All of this happened to my player character ant, and the colony, between missions, off screen. I didn't get to play a skirmish in this massive conflict. Heck, it wasn't even a cutscene! Just textual memories of the events, after the fact. Then I get to the next nest, and the game has me going right back to hunting fireflies for the 3rd or 4th time, as if nothing has happened.
Climactic events and plot twists happen off-screen, in flavor text.
Made-for-console strategy
Playing on a gamepad instead of with a mouse and keyboard is already bad enough for a real-time strategy game. I was really hoping that the game would make up for that with a well thought-out U.I.. I actually think that the control scheme works fairly well, but the U.I. and HUD are missing some elements that I really think should be there.
For example, the resource overview in the top right does not show your current count of deployed legions, or the cap of legions that you can control. By later in the game, I remember how many legions I can have, but earlier in the game, it's a lot harder to keep track of whether all my available legions have been created and deployed.
I would also like to have seen an on-screen count of how many nests I control (and maybe also a count of how many nests each other faction controls), and for there to be a count of how many Mushroom Farms and Woodyards I have (displayed alongside your food and wood stockpiles). It would also be nice to have some indication of how fast your resources are accumulating (like a display of food and wood incomes per second or per minute). Similarly, I wish each nest in the mini-map would have a little mark or icon to indicate that a resource-gatherer has been built on that nest, or whether the nest has any open upgrade slots left. The lack of these numbers being available at a glance means that I often have to stop dead in my tracks to manually point the camera at each of my nests, one by one, to count how many of each resource producers I have, or to figure out which nest(s) don't have one yet.
The U.I. could do a better job of indicating what infrastructure exists, and in what nest.
Another nagging U.I. annoyance is how legions are removed from groupings if I upgrade them to a higher tier. This requires me to find the upgrade legion in the list at the bottom of the screen and manually move it back into the grouping slot that it was supposed to be in. Why can't the game remember that a legion is in a grouping when it is upgraded, and apply that same grouping to the upgraded legion? Speaking of groupings, it would also be nice to be able to select multiple legions without having to re-group them, in case there's some special circumstance that comes up that requires me to pull legions out of multiple groups to deal with that circumstance.
There's also no way to set movement waypoints or to queue orders for legions. This means that you can't navigate around an obstacle or threat (like a mantis or spider guarding a resource node) in order to get across the map. I have to manually move the unit away from such threats, watch them in real time, and then move them to their final destination after they've successfully navigated around that obstacle. This makes it much more of a pain in the ass to do thing like move Workers around enemy melee units in order to attack Gunners in the back line.
The inability to set waypoints means legions sometimes walk right into predator ambushes.
Uneven, but at least it isn't buggy
I want to love Empire of the Ants, I really do. It's a very unique game that I think I will probably remember for a long time. But the lack of strategic depth and interesting decisions holds it back from true greatness. It's also a really uneven experience overall. It has some fun highs, but also has long bouts of tedious, repetitive missions.
There are frequent difficulty spikes, with missions that feel borderline impossible unless you play them multiple times to optimize your play. It isn't that the A.I. is particularly smart or anything; they just upgrade all their units way too quickly. I'll often be attacked by level 3 legions before I've even upgraded mine to level 2. I don't know how they manage to get both the Chemical Laboratory and Chemical Factory so quickly, while also being able to build units and resource-collectors. Unless, of course, they're cheating.
I wasn't expecting this to be a masterpiece requiring deep strategic thought, but I was expecting a little bit more than what I received.