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Now that video games have become so big it takes millennia to come up with new ideas and implement them, most gaming companies have resorted to remaking old games with a more modern palette to continue to ship games. Games like Mafia, Resident Evil, and Final Fantasy have received remakes recently, changing the look and feel of the games. In the strategy sphere, Microsoft had remade Age of Mythology and released it with a completely new look and feel as Age of Mythology: Retold. Another favorite strategy game of our childhood – Empire of the Ants – has also been remade and released last month. We had a chance to pick it up and dig through it to understand how the game is – and how different it feels from the original game.

Empire of the Ants is a strategy game developed by Tower Five and published by Microids. It came out on Steam and Xbox on November 7, 2024, and on PS on November 4, 2024.

Beneath the Surface

Empire of the Ants tries hard to keep the game as rooted as possible but fails to do so without major unnecessary game changes. The remake has removed a lot of strategic elements from the game. The top-down view known for the main game has been changed into a third-person view, and allows the players to view themselves – one of the ants of the colony. The game transitions from a Age of Empires clone to a Mount and Blade clone, with its own features on top of the boilerplate. Many of the deeper micro-management features that the original game shipped with have also been removed. The gameplay formula has been simplified to – build resource structures, train legions, kill enemies, and rinse and repeat till the objective for the map has been fulfilled. I have fond memories of the original, ordering ants to do my bidding by clicking them all and ordering them on their objectives – this change in mechanics came as a brutal shock for me (and for many of the other players, no reckon).

Empire of the Ants changes a lot of mechanics from the original game.

Empire of the Ants ships with two modes – Campaign and Multiplayer. In the campaign mode, the player plays as one of the ants in a huge colony and through a systemic story about the ants and their ecosystem. In multiplayer, a custom game can be set up, or one such hosted game can be joined. The game supports 1v1 maps currently, there is no 2v2 or 3v3 maps as of yet. All of the maps are very small – it would not be possible to have a big enough playground for 2v2 or 3v3 scenarios without constant back-and-forth battles that make the game last for an eternity. Custom battles can be set up against the AI and played as well, with the objective being to crush the enemy’s headquarters while ensuring that your own is still standing. Considering the duration after which the remake came out, I was expecting better architectural support for the game – which wasn’t present.

Tiny Tyrants

Empire of the Ants tries to portray how awesome it would be to lead an army of ants as a standalone ant. I’m not sure if the portrayal agrees with biology because most ants are pretty self-directed towards whatever goal they want to achieve. Anyways, the game tries to push the player into the boots of one of the ants who is placed in a commanding role in treacherous terrain. The job is to complete all of the objectives – which mainly is to crush the enemy’s base of operations. There are several enemies encountered throughout the story, but most of them have unit types similar to those of the ants themselves. Combat boils down to a rock-paper-scissors fight where certain types are strong against other types. Yeah, it’s as simple as it gets – no hard micromanagement of buildings and resources, no tabs to check various aspects of the colony, and even no hard and fast mechanics for resource gathering (the only resource gathering the game offers is allowing the player to order Worker ants to harvest food or wood or just build Woodyards and Mushroom Farms in conquered nests for passive resource income). The third-person view is also slightly bothersome as it shifts the focus from the strategy elements of the original game.

Empire of the Ants feels simplistic yet frustrating at times.

There are a few sections in the game that involve careful traversal of terrain or interaction with the environment (AKA missions where you don’t have to trash up a termite or ladybug base). In one of the missions, the player needs to navigate an underground hole and jump on top of glow bugs without alerting them. This is more difficult than it sounds because approaching the bugs tends to make them fly away. The challenge is to traverse the difficult environment and find an opening to jump on them. Environment traversal in the game is slightly tough, and ants can travel on grass, logs, and other treacherous environment – which leads to the camera being inverted or turned several times, making it difficult to understand the direction the player ant is piloting towards. There are search and rescue missions, which are some of the most annoying missions in the game – asking the player to rescue a certain number of ants from hidden locations. These hidden locations are difficult and frustrating to track down, and I was very glad once I had finally collected the last ant from the rising water levels. If the main idea of the remake was to reduce the complexity and make it more readily available to new players, why are some of the missions designed to be so frustrating and taxing on the players’ patience? I guess there were some gaps in communication between the design team and the development team.

Combat is the main part of Empire of the Ants, even though other missions help explore the world more.

Now we can come to the real parts of the game – the strategy sections which Empire of the Ants was originally known for. Players need to construct quarters inside a base, improve its defenses, build and upgrade pheromone upgrades, and train legions of ants. Defenses ensure that the nest stands out against attacks from rival colonies, while pheromones help out as “special powers” in combat. These pheromones come in clutch during battles, as the activation of one can speed up the movement of the ants or replenish fallen numbers in combat. I remember clutching out an attack on an AI headquarters in multiplayer, where I barely won because one of my squads was left standing after being healed from the “Replenishment Call” pheromone (yeah, I did not have any Aphids in support).

Ants come in three main types – Warriors, who fight enemies at melee range and are the backbone of every ant operation, Workers, who counter enemy ranged attackers and transport resources from resource spots, and Gunners, ranged attackers who like to take the high ground for attacking. Once the player levels up, they can train Aphids, support units that heal and replenish ant squads, and Dor Beetles, a heavy melee unit that steamrolls every other unit in the game. The change of mechanics was very disappointing for me, but I did find myself having some good times playing the battle missions and in multiplayer against AI (even though I miss the original Empire of the Ants).

Colony’s Abound

Empire of the Ants received massive visual upgrades to keep it at par with the generation. The game looks stunningly good on high graphics. The ant design was done with painstaking detail, which makes them look very realistic. There are some lighting issues in the game which I dislike (some parts look too bright and some parts too dark), but other than that I did not find any issue with the design or visuals as such. Sadly, this level of visual fidelity could only be achieved after butchering the mechanics of the original game (OK, I’ll stop).

Environment design is very well done in Empire of the Ants.

The game has some soothing music that helps one stay in the mood while playing it. The grasshoppers, birds bees and other rodents and insects could be heard on the map while the ants go about their daily routines. The ambient sounds have been magnified to make the player truly feel like the Lilliput they are inside the world.

Empire of the Ants did not have any major performance issues as such even when run on high graphics. There were some issues with framerate drops in some areas, like rendering the lighting of the glow bugs – most of the other environments were rendered without any hiccups.

Real Talk

Empire of the Ants is a remake of a cult-classic original that tries to simplify the game mechanics and reinvent it for a more modern audience. The strategic depth of the game is reduced a lot, but it does allow for a more casual audience to be invested in it (even though it may not appeal to hardcore fans of the original game). The visuals look really well done and without significant performance issues (which is quite a standard to be held up in today’s games). The game is worth a play if you can afford to get it right now!

FINAL RATING: 70/100

Empire of Ants

Empire of Ants
70 100 0 1
Empire of the Ants is a photorealistic, third-person real-time strategy game where you command your insect legions in epic battles.
Empire of the Ants is a photorealistic, third-person real-time strategy game where you command your insect legions in epic battles.
70/100
Total Score

The Good

  • Visuals and environment design is awesome
  • Game is simplistic and easy to pick up
  • Variety of missions in singleplayer to master world traversal and combat

The Bad

  • Might not feel too strategy-ish for fans of the original game
  • Mission design feels slightly frustrating
  • Combat feels super one-dimensional sometimes
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