Empire of the Ants Multiplayer Review

ign.com:

This review covers the multiplayer mode of Empire of the Ants. For the campaign, read the single-player campaign review. In short: It's very bad!

Empire of the Ants is striking to look at. For a moment, you might even believe it’s real macro-lens footage of ants in a nature documentary, and the level of detail on the textures of the forest floor is extremely impressive. It’s not really what it appears to be, though: this may be a real-time strategy game with swarms of insects on screen at once, but you’re never actually commanding more than seven units – and given the somewhat clumsy way its controls make you cycle through them to give orders, that’s a mercy. You may be capturing and building up nests, but there’s literally nothing beneath the surface. So while it appears vast, Empire of the Ants is actually a pretty small-scale strategy game in most other ways, and the lack of unit variety and multiplayer modes make it feel smaller still.

Multiplayer matches have a fair amount of nuance in how you use your small number of units and build out your nests to tech up, and there’s ample room for skilled players to turn a situation to their advantage with smart use of powers to boost their bugs’ damage output and debuff the enemy. It’s not unlike a slimmed-down version of Company of Heroes in the way you capture territory and generate the two resources – food and wood – and that’s a good starting point. Ant units get locked into melee combat and can’t disengage until one or the other loses, so you can learn to hold off a dangerous Warrior unit until reinforcements arrive or prevent a retreat while you finish off an enemy. And while you can quickly rebuild a lost unit if you have the food available, each ant legion has a home nest they’ll respawn from, which can mean there’s a long hike back to the front lines.

Each nest you capture has a set number of upgrade slots that can be filled by a building or spent to support a unit from that nest, so turtling up isn’t really an