Empire of the Ants review

Our VerdictEmpire of the Ants features a lavish rendering of the world from a few millimeters high, but fails at the basics of interesting RTS play.

Our Verdict

Empire of the Ants features a lavish rendering of the world from a few millimeters high, but fails at the basics of interesting RTS play.

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Need to knowWhat is it?Photorealistic third-person ant-vs-ant RTSExpect to pay:$40/£35Developer:Tower FirePublisher:MicroidsReviewed on:Radeon RX 6800 XT, Ryzen 9 5900, 32GB RAMMultiplayer?Online 1v1 and free-for-all PvPLink:Steam$39.99View at Amazon$49.99View at Best Buy$51.99View at WalmartSee all prices (7 found)

Need to know

What is it?Photorealistic third-person ant-vs-ant RTSExpect to pay:$40/£35Developer:Tower FirePublisher:MicroidsReviewed on:Radeon RX 6800 XT, Ryzen 9 5900, 32GB RAMMultiplayer?Online 1v1 and free-for-all PvPLink:Steam$39.99View at Amazon$49.99View at Best Buy$51.99View at WalmartSee all prices (7 found)

$39.99View at Amazon$49.99View at Best Buy$51.99View at WalmartSee all prices (7 found)

$39.99View at Amazon

$49.99View at Best Buy

$51.99View at Walmart

See all prices (7 found)

Zooming in on tiny things and imagining what life is like for them: it never gets old. Like 2016 platformer Unravel and Obsidian survival game Grounded, new RTS Empire of the Ants plops 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’ve really got to love that feeling for it to work, because as an RTS campaign, it’s not great.

In Empire of the Ants you’re 103,683rd, a warrior-caste red wood ant who fights for their confederation of ant colonies against the much larger world’s wonders and horrors. It’s a wonderfully whimsical world—drawn from a series of French novels—and although the game mechanics aren’t anything special, and the campaign missions are a letdown more often than not, there is an undeniable delight in exploring its tiny world. This is a game about beauty and enjoyable scenery above all else.

That does make the places that lack similar detail very obvious: You can build little wood walls for your nests, for example, but you just clip right through them when walking. Lack of attention to certain mechanical details is painful in your average mission, because much of Empire of the Ants isn’t actually RTS missions—it’s platforming around these worlds as a little ant. And that’s fun when you’re traversing and sightseeing, but most of those platformer segments boil down to timed scavenger hunts that have you rushing about and fighting with the awful UI for smelling pheromones more than enjoying the scenery.

(Image credit: Tower Five)

Empire of the Ants screenshot

The antgony of defeat

As a whimsical ant exploration simulator, Empire of the Ants does pretty well, but it’s in theory a third-person RTS first and foremost. That part of it is lacking quite sorely. Running around and directing your ants to take new nests—the fixed-in-place capture points that also serve as your only base building—is often too simple. The battles are largely deterministic, where you can see from the start which side would win and which will lose because of the Warrior-Worker-Spitter unit triad forming a Rock-Paper-Scissors counter system. The only wrench in those gears is that sometimes you can use pheromone abilities from your otherwise non-combatant ant leader to do stuff like boost your units' movement or cause an enemy to flee. It’s very simple stuff that doesn’t inspire an interesting range of tactical scenarios.

That becomes painfully obvious in multiplayer, where the battles devolve pretty quickly into who’s quicker on the draw to take resources and leverage them—I didn’t have any interesting or surprising tactical interactions. There’s little to nothing to recommend this as a committed multiplayer game over other, more strategically-varied games that’ll feel fresh longer.

Image1of6(Image credit: Tower Five)(Image credit: Tower Five)(Image credit: Tower Five)(Image credit: Tower Five)(Image credit: Tower Five)(Image credit: Tower Five)

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(Image credit: Tower Five)(Image credit: Tower Five)(Image credit: Tower Five)(Image credit: Tower Five)(Image credit: Tower Five)(Image credit: Tower Five)

(Image credit: Tower Five)

Empire of the Ants screenshot

(Image credit: Tower Five)

Empire of the Ants screenshot

(Image credit: Tower Five)

Empire of the Ants screenshot

(Image credit: Tower Five)

Empire of the Ants screenshot

(Image credit: Tower Five)

Empire of the Ants screenshot

(Image credit: Tower Five)

Empire of the Ants screenshot

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The Verdict60Read our review policyEmpire of the AntsEmpire of the Ants features a lavish rendering of the world from a few millimeters high, but fails at the basics of interesting RTS play.

The Verdict

60Read our review policyEmpire of the AntsEmpire of the Ants features a lavish rendering of the world from a few millimeters high, but fails at the basics of interesting RTS play.

60Read our review policy

Empire of the AntsEmpire of the Ants features a lavish rendering of the world from a few millimeters high, but fails at the basics of interesting RTS play.

Empire of the Ants

Empire of the Ants features a lavish rendering of the world from a few millimeters high, but fails at the basics of interesting RTS play.

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I really enjoyed running around as a tiny ant in this upcoming RTSThis ‘photorealistic’ RTS about ants is the second RTS about ants to be based on a 1991 French novel about ants

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I really enjoyed running around as a tiny ant in this upcoming RTS

Image for This ‘photorealistic’ RTS about ants is the second RTS about ants to be based on a 1991 French novel about ants

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Our Verdict#

The antgony of defeat#

Our Verdict

The antgony of defeat