Windows, releasing 7 November 2024
After those first few super chill games I’ve had bad luck getting Next Fest demos to run on my Steam Deck (no shade – none of them claimed they would and they’re not even finished games yet) but of the couple that have I really wanted to highlight this one. It’s available for pre-purchase so we do know what the pricetag will be – a hefty NZ$70, so I’m guessing about US$40-50 – but the graphics alone are impressive. Empire of the Ants is a tactical RTS in which you play as an ant – if you’re old enough you might remember an early Maxis title (the studio that became a division of EA and was responsible for the Sim games back when games had to work at launch) called SimAnt. SimAnt was a simulation game in black and white released in 1991, and while there were regions of a larger map which contained competing red ant nests that you could conquer, and humans living in the house that would eventually pack up and move if you took over enough of the yard, Empire of the Ants is (as you might imagine from the intervening 30 years of game development) both more, and somehow also less, detailed.
The demo has a short tutorial mission that introduces you to the concepts of creating “legions”, units made up of a single type of ants (workers, warriors, gunners, aphids, and Dor beetles) and using them to advance on hostile territory, taking over nest sites that can be fortified by adding defenses as well as utility chambers. Then it gives you another mission to clear an area around a neighbouring “sister” nest – a flood is coming and as many of the colony’s breeders as possible need to be evacuated to safety. There’s still a lot more to learn here, such as how to spread upgrades and legions across different nests to work with your resource limitations and how to capture more ground without leaving your existing territory undefended. It took me just under an hour and a half to complete and according to the splash screen at the end there’s going to be a story campaign with 25 hours of gameplay, three mission types (exploration, tactical, and strategy), and multiplayer with a ranked ladder, custom lobbies, and 3-player free-for-all ranked games.
I will say that when you compare it to SimAnt the ants don’t entirely feel like ants. You don’t get to play with pheromones (at least not in the demo, though I saw some hints that there might be mechanics that at least pretend to be related to them later), the ants don’t have the highly organised single-minded behaviour of ants aside from a nod to their distinctive line-based travel during the very start of the game, and I’m not sure whether or not warrior ants are really supposed to pick up termites and repeatedly bodyslam them against the ground as I spotted one doing. Which was, accurate or not, kind of entertaining.
Is that worth $50/$70? Obviously that depends on your budget. I’ll be waiting for the price to drop, especially since I’m less interested in PVP, but it is going to stay on my wishlist for when those sales hit despite me not traditionally being much of an RTS player. It does seem from the couple of negative reviews that more has been promised than is evident from the demo, which could add another point towards it being better to wait for a sale, but the demo has over 100 reviews at this point and is ranked “Very Positive”. The studio (Tower Five) seems to be largely unknown but they did have another RTS title, Lornsword Winter Chronicles, that came out in 2019 to mixed reviews. Most suggest the problems were largely to do with requiring a controller (Empire of the Ants can be played with a keyboard according to the game settings, but obviously I didn’t use one and I can’t speak as to the experience) as well as repetitive gameplay. A few have descriptions of gameplay that make it sound like Empire of the Ants has at least some similar mechanics in the base “building” aspect, where you move your ant onto the menus laid out around the circumference of the nest to select choices. The actual publisher of course has put out quite a lot of games, including quite a few Agatha Christie titles, some Smurfs, and last year’s dreadfully hilarious Survivor: Castaway Island.
In terms of accessibility they have an arachnophobia mode (which I also didn’t test, but then I didn’t see any spiders in the demo anyway), vibration setting, and some minor visual changes but nothing like colour-blind mode and the ants might be difficult to see against the ground for some players. Heck, it’s even a little hard for me to spot my player ant now without its movement in the first screenshot above (it’s in the shadow, right in the centre).