Empire of the Ants review: A unique mix of strategy and platforming

Tower Five and Microids present a beautiful title with a rare premise

Tower Five / Microids

103,683rd probably has the most unwieldy name out of all the video game protagonists I’ve ever played as, but for some reason, I’ve gotten oddly invested in her story. It probably starts with her looks. You can’t tell her apart from the myriad of other worker ants on the screen at a glance, but a closer look reveals several battle scars crossing her lower torso. Another clue is how other ants from the nest of Bel-o-kan speak to her – with respect and admiration. Our main character clearly is an ant of experience. A living legend.

What kind of person – or ant – do you need to be to stand out from a crowd of millions? My own adventures with 103,683rd tell me that she’s basically the ant version of Zhuge Liang with a bit of action hero sprinkled in. Secondly, what kind of society allows a single ant to rise so high through sheer ability? Obviously, the ant nests we encounter in the game are led by queens and roughly resemble city-states, some of which have organized themselves into an alliance they call the Federation – they are great builders, militaristic, and expansionist. They’re the Romans of the insect world.

All this we can surmise simply by taking in the beautiful visuals and the optional dialogs Empire of the Ants provides – it’s a game teeming with cool worldbuilding for those who are willing to get engaged with it.

103,683rd might be the most badass video game protagonist of the year. / Tower Five / Microids

Loosely based on Bernard Werber’s sci-fi novel from 1991, Empire of the Ants follows the story of 103,683rd, a worker ant from the nest of Bel-o-kan – the capital of the Federation. 103,683rd is held in high regard not only by her sisters, but also by her mother, the queen of the city. As is the lot of especially talented people, 103,683rd gets assigned the most difficult tasks.

A devastating flood threatens a nearby nest? You need to scout a safe path there and assist the local queen in evacuating the population and resources, all while fending off hordes of termites. Rival ants are besieging another allied nest? You are tasked with breaking the siege. 103,683rd is kept busy. What’s especially cool about this, though, is that there is a reason for that – there’s something else going on behind the scenes, of which you only catch glimpses due to the series of challenges thrown into your path. Then, somewhere along the way, Empire of the Ants turns into Game of Thrones – there are twists and betrayals, threats suddenly come from inside and 103,683rd gets caught up in it all, having to choose between loyalty, duty, and friendship.

Empire of the Ants’ is a very human story despite the perspective it’s told from – and while it’s not one you probably haven’t seen or read at some point, it’s one you can get engrossed in.

However, the way this story is presented can be a little spotty. A lot of the key events are told in little slices of pheromone memories you can pick up in the hub areas or during missions – but with the map design being relatively open and players being able to choose their own paths, the pheromones can easily be missed. Imagine following Game of Thrones without the context of Jamie Lannister pushing Bran Stark from the tower window.

Such memory pheromones provide important context for the story, but you can miss them. / Tower Five / Microids

In terms of gameplay, Empire of the Ants features two major components. The smaller one is essentially 3D platforming. Some missions will have you dive behind enemy lines at night and you’ll feel like a six-legged ninja, jumping from leaf to leaf as you scout enemy bases. Others make you hunt for prey such as fireflies to supply your legions with food. In general, movement feels smooth and satisfying in this game, especially with the controller – the title has been designed for that – though it doesn’t come without faults.

103,683rd sometimes gets stuck on the tiniest of plants sticking out of the ground, interrupting movement, and the camera is not always helpful when it comes to climbing in tight spaces. In the effort to make the game immersive, useful UI elements like a directional indicator for jumps or visual target indicators have been neglected, which makes the hunt missions frustrating at times.

Empire of the Ants has some majestic views in store. / Tower Five / Microids

While exploring the world, you’ll sometimes encounter points of interest – the bones of a deer, a plastic bottle, a thrown-away tire, and so forth. You can scan these for your collection by finding a certain number of points on the objects, which are shown as little white bubbles. I found these incredibly hard to spot, especially in bright areas.

Though some of them are timed, these exploration missions allow you to really take in the sights and sounds of the world. Empire of the Ants is visually stunning and some of the sound design is wonderful as well – a bumblebee buzzing above you sounds like a helicopter and the giant spider clacking with its fangs behind its net is terrifying. A car driving on the nearby road is basically an earthquake. The game has this Pikmin-like quality of showing us things we know and don’t even think about – an abandoned railway, a plastic bottle thrown to the wayside – as these majestic, almost alien landscapes.

You will fill your collection with discoveries as you play. / Tower Five / Microids

Much meatier than the platforming sections are the tactical and strategic missions, which are the heart of the game – and it’s important to note right away that you remain in the third-person view for these. You stick with 103,683rd and command all of your forces from her perspective. Mount & Blade is the best comparison I can come up with for it.

Maps are littered with nests you can take over and build up as well as points of interest like pine cones, which can be harvested for wood, or pears that provide food. You can work these resources with worker ants continuously, increasing your income. Other resource points need to be freed from neutral enemies and provide a one-time boost to supplement your stocks.

The base-building is quite immersive – instead of a build menu you can access from afar, you need to walk into a nest and interact with it, navigating the options by physically walking on them. It’s quite a clever way of keeping the UI non-intrusive and adds a tactical element to the game – managing your nests and building reinforcements will take you away from the frontline, so you need to choose the timings carefully. I won’t lie, though: It feels like a hassle sometimes.

Empire of the Ants features a sleak and immersive base-building UI. / Tower Five / Microids

The good news is that 103,683rd is a speedy sprinter, skilled jumper, and can use her burrow power to quickly teleport to a nest, if need be. Aside from controlling your army and building up bases, your powers are the most direct way to influence battles – despite the Mount & Blade perspective, you are not doing any fighting yourself (you could do little in this regard anyway, being a mere worker ant). Instead, you can use powers like shield spores, regeneration spores, or fear spores to have a decisive impact on engagements and aid your forces.

Like the requirement to be physically present at your bases to build them up, this adds a tactical element to the game – getting down into the fray can be crucial, but you will lose your overview of the big picture in exchange. This can be especially devastating in skirmishes with more than two parties.

The combat system follows a rock-paper-scissors approach – workers beat gunners, gunners beat warriors, and warriors beat workers. Each of these unit types has three tiers and a few special troop categories further spice things up. Support units like aphids and snails can heal or provide slimy shields to your frontline troops, while apex predator units like beetles or hornets function as shock troops. It’s not an overly deep system, but given that you’re expected to be your army’s primary scout and manage all of your bases at the same time, it couldn’t be much more complex without outgrowing the limitations of the vision.

You command your forces from a third-person perspective. / Tower Five / Microids

I’d like to once again give props to the gamepad controls – they are pretty simple to learn and extremely smooth. You can sometimes find a high spot with good visibility, sit there, and then conduct your army’s maneuvers like a military maestro from afar, your fingers dancing as they tap buttons and move sticks. It’s the best execution of gamepad controls for a strategy game I’ve ever seen – though, granted, this game doesn’t have the same complexity as something like Age of Empires.

Learning from the all-time great StarCraft 2, Empire of the Ants puts much effort into providing high mission variety, though not all of them hit the mark equally. There is one mission that has you collect resources on a timer, which involves a lot of sitting around and waiting – though I appreciate that the mission made you think about the order of doing things to succeed. The campaign could have introduced the game’s additional units sooner than it did and I feel like the game would greatly benefit from a little more unit diversity in general, but such are the limits of the setting.

There is some good mission variety in the campaign. / Tower Five / Microids

A ranked and custom multiplayer mode rounds out the game’s offerings, providing space for those who crave more battles after the campaign – at a very reasonable price of $40 USD.

On a technical level, I can’t find much fault in this game – I’m getting great performance and fast load times on my system and small visual glitches like some floating pebbles are the greatest of the issues I encountered in this regard.

A unique genre mix, Empire of the Ants positively surprised me with its beauty, story, and smooth controls. Tower Five and Microids didn’t deliver perfection, but something thoroughly enjoyable.

Score: 8/10

Version tested: PC (Steam)