Ants Are Us
As we go deeper into the year, it seems more and more that this is the year of RTS passion projects, with several new and old developers trying their hand at rejuvenating the genre after a decade of relative silence.
Empires of the Undergrowth is one such game, undertaking the timeless pursuit to bring to the world of gaming what many a child’s eye is fascinated with: the anthill.
For many children, the experience of playing with an anthill is their first taste of power, or rather control over many minions that need to be nudged and coerced into action by food or force. It might seem natural to gamify that experience, yet it has been an elusive dream that most games have not succeeded in.
While the first game to come to mind from the early PC days that tried and succeeded is SimAnt (1991), the real inspirations, as the developers have said themselves, are Dungeon Keeper and Starcraft, both genre-defining games in their own right.
Empires of the Undergrowth takes some great elements from both games and combines them into a solid fast-paced experience with strategic depth.
The Game
The game is played on two maps simultaneously, an underground hive that needs to be dug out and explored to expand and build your base and an overworld of the surface where resources and enemies, such as insects, spiders, frogs, and other anthills, can be found.
The base-building element is very similar to Dungeon Keeper. The underground map is dark and unexplored initially, the darkness interrupted by green silhouettes of food and red exclamation marks for danger. Your workers dig out hexagonal tiles of dirt into chambers to clear space for the placing of either resource storage or ant nests. Every tile can house one ant (except for the fire ants), so the larger the available space, the more ants are available to fight and collect food.
Furthermore, every tile can be upgraded up to three times, with each level giving a benefit to either its storage capacity or the strength of the ant housed there. There are two ways in which the game differs from Dungeon Keeper: there aren’t any traps and the placement of nests influences how squads are formed.
By fielding large numbers of ants, separated into squads and control groups, the player is expected to control the unit flow across the map through pheromone tracks.
Control groups are formed by assigning squads to them. Squads tie into the base building and give some order and restraints to how the base is planned. Groups of adjoining ant nests of the same type form a squad. Combined with how units are upgraded and how war is waged, base building becomes much more interesting than it would seem at a glance.
But the game is not about building a dungeon but expanding the hive and overwhelming your enemies as fast as possible. Control groups can be given a target location for resource gathering and fighting. Individual ants are not given orders and act according to what is happening around them, with combat always lasting until death. This makes “micro” almost impossible and forces players to concentrate on the “macro” game. That means that the game is much less reliant on reflexes and unit abilities and much more on resource management and army positioning.
There are several game modes, of which “Story” acts as the main campaign. The campaign is separated into several stages, each introducing the player to a new set of ant units and enemies. Much like in Starcraft 2 – the Heart of the Swarm, the player is given the choice between two upgraded versions of the base units, each giving different abilities and stats.
While the campaign structure is great, allowing for replayability, parts will require grinding for resources in order to advance, and that can be frustrating and repetitive. On the other hand, the “gateway” missions that advance the campaign are well done and have some great voice acting, making for a fun overall experience.
Other than that, the player can try his hand at a skirmish mode and experiment in a battle arena, throwing bugs at each other. The custom game, or skirmish, is straightforward and enjoyable. Add to it that you can play with your custom ant colony that you built throughout the story campaign, and it seems even better. Sadly though, there are just a handful of maps, and they get old fast.
With such a long time in development and seeing the lamentations of their players for new maps go unanswered for years, I hope that the developers will eventually release a map editor, which is the only feature that gives an RTS title longevity apart from multiplayer. At the moment, the game has neither, and that will mean that, sooner or later, it will get boring.
Conclusion
Compared to some of the classics out there in the RTS genre, this game might seem somewhat simple, with very little unit and map variety on offer. But as far as games that simulate ants go it just might be the best yet, and it is not even halfway through its supposed development process at version 0.31 at the time of writing. More than the sum of its parts, this game is one to try. And if there’s a kid in the house, it’s definitely a good starter strategy game.
P.S: One more thing comes to mind, and that is “Life in the Undergrowth,” the fifth episode of “Supersocieties.” With the show’s twentieth anniversary just around the corner, it is still the best documentary of the life of the smallest inhabitants of our planet, and this game obviously takes a lot of inspiration from it. The only regret I have is that they didn’t get David Attenborough to narrate the game, even though the narrator does a great job as well.
P.P.S: Astonishingly for a game in Early Access, I did not encounter any bugs while playing.
Filip is interested in games and how they are created. He’s particularly interested in the art, story, and how they’re integrated with the game systems. He considers that a great game is one where all the elements fit together seamlessly. When he’s not discovering new games and writing about them, he works as a freelance illustrator and likes to read and write fiction.