After being dazzled by its trailers over the previous few months, the time has lastly arrived for Empire of the Ants to scuttle onto Steam. It’s one of the vital intriguing technique titles I’ve seen in a very long time, and it’s gone fairly viral within the construct as much as launch because of its photorealistic visuals. Nevertheless, on the day of its full launch, it doesn’t appear to be it’s setting the world alight.
Whereas RTS games are sometimes all about troopers, gods, spaceships, and the like all smiting your enemies, this time it’s woodland bugs. As a substitute of huge kingdoms, battlefields, and galaxies, it’s a small patch of lovely woodland. Empire of the Ants does really feel like a breath of recent air within the present technique scene, and it places you within the sneakers of an ant that’s basically the commander of a bug military. There’s a narrative-driven single-player marketing campaign to play by means of, however many RTS followers will likely be wanting to get aggressive and dive into ranked 1v1 matches and a free-for-all mode too.
You patrol the forest and command your varied items – which vary from ant troopers, to therapeutic aphids, to tanky defensive beetles – to reap sources, conquer different ant nests to broaden your affect and home your rising military, and decimate different colonies. As you might be tied to only the principle commanding ant in a restricted third-person view you don’t actually get an general, zoomed-out view of the battlefield round you, so your consciousness must be on level.
You additionally don’t really enact any of the harvesting, attacking, or constructing your self – one thing a couple of gamers in early Steam critiques are a little bit dissatisfied by. Commanding your items and being the strategic bug mind behind the battle is what Empire of the Ants is all about, relatively than getting your individual antennae soiled.
Speaking of Steam critiques, the early reception has been pleasantly optimistic, with 77% of Steam customers recommending the sport, however there are after all some detrimental critiques too which are holding it again from being an actual RTS hit. Participant counts too have been pretty modest, peaking at simply over 1,200 gamers on Steam, however as with all mid-week launch, there’s all the time scope for issues to select up because the weekend approaches. Because it’s additionally out there on GOG and Epic, this isn’t the full image of its PC efficiency both.
Empire of the Ants is out proper now on PC and consoles too. If you wish to study extra about it, head over to its Steam web page here.
For extra tactical experiences, check out our information to the best strategy games. If you happen to simply want one thing to scratch the aggressive itch, there are a great deal of nice choices on our record of the best multiplayer games too.
You can even observe us on Google News for each day PC video games information, critiques, and guides, or seize our PCGN deals tracker to web your self some bargains.
