Empire of the Ants review

pcgamer.com:

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. This is a game about beauty and enjoyable scenery above all else.

The art almost aggressively leaps at you, with as photorealistic a set of greenery and logs and other tiny things as Unreal Engine 5 can muster. The many insects and arachnids and other creatures have believable texture to their exoskeletons that varies between species and type. I was especially enamored by the huge ferns, grasses, and flowers your ant can climb all around on. The surfaces aren't always as detailed as insect carapace, but the way your ant's legs twist to clutch at the stem as you climb or spread out on smoother surfaces is just kind of detail you hope for from a game about zooming in on details. It's simply a very fun, and pretty, game to move about in.

The huge artifacts of the larger human world are also delightful. A rugged old soccer ball features quite early on and looks realistic with its