This review covers the single-player campaign of Empire of the Ants. For the multiplayer modes (which are much better!), read the multiplayer review.
It may be nice to look at, but Empire of the Ants’s single-player campaign is outright terrible and dull. It’s around 12 hours worth of missions that pivot between being pointlessly easy – due to a passive enemy AI that doesn’t even know how to use powers to buff its troops, which is crucial to success – to obnoxiously difficult on a dime, and it doesn’t let you save mid-mission. Most infuriatingly, there’s one where nine waves of enemies spawn and attack from all directions, and you instantly fail if you lose control of a single one of the seven nests you have to defend – so many that it’s impossible to upgrade them all with effective defenses. That last wave is a doozy, too, which meant I had to replay it from the start multiple times just to overcome the final challenging moments where they come in large enough numbers to be a threat.
Mixed in with those combat missions are absurdly tedious ones where you only control your single ant as you hunt for tiny bugs – which are usually very effectively camouflaged thanks to the realistic art style – spread across a big map. You’re guided only by a non-directional proximity sensor, so you have to run in circles to triangulate each bug. There are also “stealth” missions that don’t actually care if you’re detected as you scan enemy legions (dying has basically no consequences either), and these similarly amount to running around a map looking for things. Sometimes you’re told to catch butterflies or fireflies that fly away when you get close – the only way I found to do it was to wait for them to repeat their scripted movement pattern and land right in front of me, and that is exactly as much fun as it sounds.
Considering you can climb any object and walk on the ceiling, it’s surprising that only a couple of the missions make any use of this ability at all, and those that do are mostly the boring, non-combat variety. (There was only one mission where my units fought upside-down, which was very funny because the corpses of dead ants rained down.) Similarly, the only thing Empire of the Ants does with its impressive sense of scale is give you a few objects – like a glass bottle or a toy giraffe – to run around, picking up little glowy things as you explore them. I’ll grant you that this does remind me of how I’ve seen real ants figure out if an object is something they want to eat, but I don’t think ants are doing this for fun, and I am not having much fun doing it either.
I don’t think ants are doing this for fun, and I am not having much fun doing it either.
You aren’t forced to do all of these missions to complete the campaign – you select missions by speaking to quest-giving ants in a sequence of hub areas that serve as a sort of menu – 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 all that buggy (other than… you know).
The other thing you do in these hubs is talk to ants. I haven’t read the books Empire of the Ants is based on, but if the Wikipedia synopsis is anything to go by this game’s story isn’t even close to following them because there are no human characters or secret ant weapons to make it remotely interesting. I’m going to assume that its numerous conversations about how your nest is threatened by termites and other visually identical ant species or floods don’t do the novels justice. Even the ant civil war that breaks out is over almost as abruptly as it begins, ensuring there’s no substance there either.
