Empire of the Ants Review (Trippy Crawl)
Ok, yes, it's a visually stunning game, much thanks to the UE5, and their photorealistic scans.
Now that thats out of the way:
RTS: It's so barebones that any RTS fans would get frustrated at how few options you have. The ants also don't move like you anyone would expect ants to move, they basically move in a circle formation, and just attack whatever circle bugs they need to fight and just the edge of the circle starts fighting the edge of the other circle. It's extremely simplistic programming here, and it really shows.
You also are limited to one type of worker ants (they can double as a melee ant if needed), melee ants, and ranged ants. That's it. You can upgrade those to "veteran" or "elite" versions, but visually they don't change. And you can only have a set amount of "legions" (which is one circle, if you refer to what I said earlier), which is less than 10 if I remember correctly.
You do have some other unique unit types you can add in there, but they're not really that relevant. It's a "healer" type of bug, and a "tank\taunt" type of bug, I'm sure you get some more unique types of bugs as you move along the story, but I didn't really care enough to bother getting past my refund time to find out what a snail would be like to ride in battle.
You can't even have any sort of organization, or grouping, you either command ONE circle, or ALL the circles. And this includes your worker ants, which are supposed to be gathering resources (which there are only 2 of: food and wood).
And instead of being a "top down" camera god, you're one of the ants running alongside them. Can you do anything other than "buff" your units? Nope. Can you fight? Nope. your ant is just a glorified camera that can jump.
So anyone who's every played RTS games can agree that this game's RTS aspect is aligned with what you would expect from a mobile game RTS... But even those are getting more advanced than this.
And what about the rest? Well, the rest is like I said mediocre. You're allowed to "explore" the map they've made, and you have some minigames like "catch 3 fireflies", which is just walk on them and they disappear, and other collection and discoveries, like circling a football, or some other stuff that just gives you a journal entry you can read.
There's a story in there as well, about ants fleeing a flood and so on, but anything that isn't you battling something is just added on top as sprinkles. You really feel that they didn't really put much depth into that either.
And you have about 25hours of the story mode, which is mainly doing one battle after the other.
Pricing a glorified tech demo about ants at 40€ is ridiculous. Had it been at 20€, I'd be less critical of it, but you get WAY more depth in a 10 year old RTS game for 20€ than you do from this game. This game just looks pretty.
You can't even crawl into the ant nest. Seriously. At certain points you'll have a cutscene where you enter the nest and after a loading screen with a video looping of you walking, you'll end up in a chat room with the queen, where you get told what to do, and then you automatically leave and you're on the surface again. Wanna go back in and check what else is in the hive? Nope, black wall blocks the entrance. You're an ant, in an ant colony, and you can't even enter the main base of operations.
Wait until a sale puts it at\below 20€, then you'll feel a lot better with the visual nature tour you got, with some RTS elements in there. 40€ is extremely overpriced.