Empire of the Ants Review — War of the Tiny Worlds

If you’ve spent any time online, chances are you’ve seen ads for mobile games depicting brutal bug-on-bug conflicts. Usually, these ads show you leading and upgrading legions of ants, tackling stronger insects like beetles or spiders, and winning food to further upgrade your colony. If you’re like me, you were immediately intrigued and subsequently disappointed when the game was nothing like the advertisement. You may be left wondering: how hard can it be to create a game like the one advertised? Surely, there’s a market for a real-time strategy ant game; otherwise, these ads wouldn’t be so successful.

Wonder no longer, as Empire of the Ants is likely everything you wanted, with all the polish and features of a full-fledged game rather than a phone app.

Empire of the Ants is based on the novel of the same name. More specifically, it’s a recreation of a 2000s strategy game based on the novel. In this tale of speculative fiction, the capacity of ants to communicate is drastically increased, and the complexities of their social structure are expanded upon and viewed from a more human perspective. You play as 103,683rd, an ant of the warrior caste with a unique mind; you command the legions of your nest and wage resource wars against rival nests, firebugs, spiders, and anything else you might imagine in the world of an ant.

Empire of the Ants is a real-time strategy game, and beyond its uniquely buggy perspective, follows genre conventions pretty closely.

Whether in one of the campaign’s many missions, an offline practice match against AI, or an online ranked game against a human opponent, your experience will be similar. From an ant’s perspective, rather than the usual top-down view, you command several groups of ants, or “legions,” to capture nests, gather resources, and fight hostile bugs.

There are multiple types of legions, following a basic rock-paper-scissors format. Warriors are tough, melee-focused bugs that tear apart other insects but are weak to the ranged attacks of gunners. Gunners are your ranged, acid-flinging ants who decimate warriors but, strangely, are weak to workers, your basic gatherer units sent to retrieve food and wood for your nests. Each type of legion has specific roles in combat and becomes stronger by exchanging resources at your nest for upgrades.

Special bugs like snails, beetles, and spiders can also be encountered as friends or foes. They act as specialized units with unique roles and are almost always more powerful than a group of ant legions.

Beyond upgrading your troops, you’re also tasked with building out your nests. These are your…well, nests, and where you produce and upgrade legions and build specialized upgrades to affect your entire army. Each nest has a limited number of spaces where things can be built, allowing you to specialize each nest and forcing you to decide between simple upgrades like defensive walls (made of sticks) or more advanced upgrades, such as pheromone production that scares off enemy bugs.

While interesting with its presentation and some real strategic depth, the RTS mechanics aren’t nearly as complicated as some other titles. Many battles boil down to simply having more or stronger ant legions and playing into the basic rock-paper-scissors counter system. While player matches can come down to whoever thinks and acts faster, you’ll rarely find yourself overwhelmed in most AI scenarios, especially after picking up a basic strategy for your nest upgrades and production order.

The game suggests more in-depth strategic elements, such as using high ground and line of sight with your ranged ants. While the game certainly seems to feature some aspect of this, I hardly found it ever mattered, as my ants would simply fire in an arc that either negated obstacles or outright ignored them. Not once did I notice friendly fire being accounted for, either.

While not the newest, most advanced RTS game, Empire of the Ants isn’t trying to be anything more than a game that presents bug-on-bug violence with photorealistic visuals. While I wouldn’t quite call them photorealistic, the game looks amazing, taking advantage of Unreal Engine 5’s fantastic lighting and rendering capabilities to deliver stunning visuals and a convincingly insectoid perspective.

That is, of course, when the game is working as intended. During my playthrough, I found that one specific texture used a lot in the ground’s modeling would fail to load, leaving giant, transparent gaps that allowed me to see into the skybox. While this broke my anty immersion, it was the only instance of the game malfunctioning, and beyond it, everything else looked great and ran phenomenally well.

Try Hard Guides received a PC review code for this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Empire of the Ants is available on Steam, Epic Games, PlayStation, and Xbox.