Empire of the Ants – PS5 Review

Empire of the Ants is a real-time strategy game from French studio Tower Five and it’s very different to the usual RTS games we get generally.  As the game suggests, you’ll be controlling an army of ants but there’s a lot more going on here.

You play as a lone ant, known to her friends as #103,683.  She ends up being tasked with various missions to help ensure the survival, expansion and viability of Bel-o-kan, her nest.  These missions vary though from exploration missions to RTS battles and so before you get into any of that, you’ll need to get to grips with the game’s controls.

#103,683 is your avatar in the game and she can crawl on the floor, walls and undersides of any structure.  She’s good as long as she doesn’t touch water.  She’ll get you to new areas and you can use her mobility to get a better viewpoint of the action during battles.

Some missions involve you traversing long, tricky routes in order to show your nest sisters the best way across things like rivers and here you’ll need to crawl, run and jump to get where you need to go.  Jumping is charged and you only get a little bit of mid-air steering so you need to be careful.  Sometimes they’ll get you to collecting things which takes a bit more skill, and luck sometimes.  The thing is, these sort of missions aren’t great.  There’s one where you have to collect fireflies and it’s absolutely awful.  Aside from the mechanics of the mission, it’s just boring.  And there’s a real visual issue with how the areas you need to explore are connected, it literally looks like you’re going out of bounds during it even though you totally have to go that way.

The other missions are your combat ones and this is the real meat of Empire of the Ants.  The way these work is that on a battlefield you’ll have empty nests.  Once you travel to them, you’ll be able to create a legion type – such as workers, warriors, gunners and specialist units – and use the nest ‘chambers’ for economic, defense and ability upgrades.  These will allow you to get a foothold in the arena and start taking on enemies.

Using your units is just a case of picking the unit with the shoulder buttons, aiming at where you want them to go with L2 and then hit R2 to send them there.  At that point they’ll travel to where they need to go, only stopping to attack any enemy squads that are in the way.  But does it work?  Well, yes… kind of.  The viewpoint, literally from just above your ant, isn’t a great way to view the battles and it all feels a bit automated and simplistic.

What you don’t get is that Command and Conquer viewpoint or a lot of visual information.  Even the battles just involve your squad mostly just standing around while occasionally an enemy termite gets flung in the air.  There’s no carnage to it.  It doesn’t feel like a battle but is more like two puddles trying to absorb each other.

And really that’s the issue here.  The combat isn’t great and the missions are a little bit dull.  And that hurts because of how lovely the presentation is here.  The game looks like a nature documentary, leveraging the power of the Unreal 5 engine to create what the publisher describes as a ‘photo-realistic’ look.  That’s maybe a tiny bit generous but the game does look great.

It’s kind of wild that at times it just feels like you’re playing some sort of normal open-world adventure game and then you realise its true scale.  You really are seeing the world from an ant’s perspective.  It usually happens when you come across some sort of trivial item – a bottle, a bit of fruit, a toy – and then you snap back into how unique this setting and viewpoint is.

This all gives Empire of the Ants a unique look and feel that makes you root for it.  We wanted to love it but the gameplay just doesn’t live up to those sweet, sweet visuals.  Sure, it’s all playable enough but there are too many times where it isn’t fun and the twenty-hour running time for the story mode becomes a bit of a brutal endeavour.  This is a game where a bit, well – a lot, of editing would have worked wonders.  If you stripped this down to a more memorable five hours, you’d really have something.

But we applaud Tower Five for their vision and while they didn’t quite manage to nail the gameplay, there’s still a lot to like about Empire of the Ants.  If only because it teaches you quite a bit about ants.  Even if we’re sure they probably don’t have such nuanced conversations in real life!