What is it? Photorealistic third-person ant-vs-ant RTS Expect to pay: $40/£35 Developer: Tower Fire Publisher: Microids Reviewed on: Radeon RX 6800 XT, Ryzen 9 5900, 32GB RAM Multiplayer? Online 1v1 and free-for-all PvP Link: Steam 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.