Empire of the Ants Single-Player Campaign Review

ign.com:

This review covers the single-player campaign of Empire of the Ants. For the multiplayer modes (which are much better!), read the multiplayer review.

It may be nice to look at, but Empire of the Ants’s single-player campaign is outright terrible and dull. It’s around 12 hours worth of missions that pivot between being pointlessly easy – due to a passive enemy AI that doesn’t even know how to use powers to buff its troops, which is crucial to success – to obnoxiously difficult on a dime, and it doesn’t let you save mid-mission. Most infuriatingly, there’s one where nine waves of enemies spawn and attack from all directions, and you instantly fail if you lose control of a single one of the seven nests you have to defend – so many that it’s impossible to upgrade them all with effective defenses. That last wave is a doozy, too, which meant I had to replay it from the start multiple times just to overcome the final challenging moments where they come in large enough numbers to be a threat.

Mixed in with those combat missions are absurdly tedious ones where you only control your single ant as you hunt for tiny bugs – which are usually very effectively camouflaged thanks to the realistic art style – spread across a big map. You’re guided only by a non-directional proximity sensor, so you have to run in circles to triangulate each bug. There are also “stealth” missions that don’t actually care if you’re detected as you scan enemy legions (dying has basically no consequences either), and these similarly amount to running around a map looking for things. Sometimes you’re told to catch butterflies or fireflies that fly away when you get close – the only way I found to do it was to wait for them to repeat their scripted movement pattern and land right in front of me, and that is exactly as much fun as it sounds.

Considering you can climb any object and walk on the ceiling, it’s surprising that only a couple of the missions make any use of this ability at all, and those that do