Watch our Empire of the Ants review on PC by Dan Stapleton. Also available on PS5 (PlayStation 5) and Xbox Series X/S.
Empire of the Ants’s multiplayer modes have some clever ideas for how insects do battle, having you scurry around as a commander giving orders and casting buffs on your legions of bugs. Managing its deceptively small-scale battles presents some interesting challenges, and the impressive, hyper-realistic graphics are let down only by animations that grow repetitive after a few matches. What undermines it most is the lack of unit variety and multiplayer modes, which don’t include multiple bug factions or any options to play as a team or against a competent AI. Without that, it’s hard to see this game having a lot of legs.
While Empire of the Ants’s nearly photo-realistic world looks incredible at first glance, its boring and annoying real-time strategy campaign is the ant-ithesis of that. Combat missions are mostly trivially easy because the AI doesn’t seem to understand crucial mechanics, and those that aren’t are obnoxious because you can’t save mid-mission to replay the tough parts without trudging through the easy setup; Meanwhile, all of the non-combat missions are tedious searches for needles in haystacks and the story fails to make ant politics intriguing. It’s easily the worst single-player campaign I’ve played in years.