izigame.me

Empire of the ants
Intro:
i am very disappointed,i feel decived, cheated. the demo for this game was definetly not the main gameplay. the best way i can put it is, mobile games, the way you are shown a small section that is the actual gameplay but is only around 30% of the game, it's the same here, most of the game is platforming around random objects sparkled with a bit of actual RTS gameplay in repeated levels. i will give credits to the devs when you play the actual RTS element it is kind of fun, but definetly lacks quality of life.
anyway lets begin

Subjects will be:
1. Story
2. Gameplay
3. Visuals
4. Performance
5. Monetization
6. Summary

Story:
for some reason there is some kind of story here, it is nicely made, chill music and visuals story telling, it is all decent, but it feels like this is all a tool to repeat levels.
you are the chosen ant number 340433244524, and you go around doing some missions given to you by the queen they are all told with very high importance but in the end what you actually do is jump onto fireflys inside tunnels. very rarely you do a mission that somehow saves the colony from a flood by killing a bunch other nests, but that is kinda my opinion about the story, it hinders the game.

Gameplay:
this game is advertised as a RTS and the demo also lets you only play the RTS part, however most of the game is completing random objectives and jumping in between rocks and branches.
your ant which is your commander unit has a few skills\features whatever you want to call them.
for the platformign sections you can sprint, jump and scan fro bugs to catch, pretty simple and boring but sadly it is around 50% of the game.
for the RTS part of the game you are mostly forced to complete strange objectives, like hold a few nests in a big area and let 0 of them be captured, you are given selected units whithout the ability to edit them or anything, some of these levels are very easy while others just force you to play as the devs want to actually complete the level, no need to try and innovate.
in the combat itself you get a few units, like melee, ranged, healer (whcih are total useless) and a bunch more like flying units that don't matter at all, becuase you dont need strategy, just throw numbers and you are good.
there are 3 tiers for everything, from ants to spells, each one costs more resoucres than the previous tier, you upgrade thosse ants or buildings by unlocking a building that lets you build higher tier stuff and repeat for 3 tiers and that's it for the whole game.
some buildings you can upgrade are things like
Army
Economy
Defense
and spells or skills as they are called in the game.

there are 2 resouces to mange, food and wood, each bulilding takes different veriation of those 2 to build and as i said before, higher tier=more resources needed.
to be honest i can continue to detail what the game has but it has no use, you can complete the game without using your brain, just point and click like a good boy, or GIRL, should.
most of the RTS levels will be reused as you progress the story under the reason the something changed now, like water level or enemy status, so just go clear the same things again, this time less water in the map.
i am being vey negative but it is not all trash, the sense of scale is fun to experience seeing the world from the view on an ant or a small creature gives different perspective on things like whenever u see a bug crawling on someting and it goes back and forth a few times to asses what is the object, you have the sasme feature in the game, you can explore objects to add the into your libray of collections, which hold no importance besides completion goals.
there are quite a few quality of life problems with this one, that should have not existed in the demo even let alone the main game, and i said the same in my first impressions whenever i played the demo, very basic things like upgrade your legions without having to go back half the map or giving us an aerial view if you want us to manage a few armys in a very large map, otherwise i just keep hitting the wrong things and sending my armys in weird directions.


Visuals:
i think visuals is the only part i am willing to give a 9 on and the only reason i took 1 point away is becuse of the repeated use of the same maps but with different color filter on them,getting the ant perspective traveling under a log slowy so a spider won't catch you is exciting, you can clearly see that the ground and foliege has been copied from real life somehow maybe from a picture into the game, it is very realistic, i love it.

Performance:
short and simple is how this segmet should always be i experience 0 bugs, glitches, crashed or freeze throughout my whole playtrough demo included. just a small heads up, sometimes you will attach to things you dont nessarly want to, so keep an eye for that

Monetization:
the games costs 42$ or 53$ for the early access verion, this is all converted from my currency so im not sure about the exact amount. but it is way too much for this game, i would say 20-30 dollars for what the game has to offer, it has many quests that repeat. either you jumping on bugs or completing strange objectives, and even with all the bloat, it is 15 hours, and i didn't even talk about how much i hate paying more to play a few days early access, it feels so scummy. there are no other monetizations methods that i saw.


Summary:
this game starts out fun and amazing but after a few hours turns into i think i have seen that and after a few more, you start saying
"okay, come on i was just playing this map an hour ago"
or
"didn't i already catch 4 fireflys"
best comparison i can make is watching some random shonen anime, it is someone interesting but there is so much filler and unlike animes, here you cannot skip the filler episodes you expeirnce them in full.
strategy is not needed in the supposed RTS game just aim your ants and wait for the health bars to disapear, pretty simple, only during 1 missions i had to actualy try and it was becuz i was forced to play with a set of units the game gave me without the option to change. overall controling your ants feels bad, you cant group them into smaller armys to guard different points you are forced to either select all or select 1, can't upgrade units without runnig all the way to the start of the map, which really hurts on big maps, and the reusing of maps doesnt realy help the overall feeling that someone had an idea that it would be cool to play as an ant but then had to idea what would be cool about playing as an ant.
in my opinion this should have been a more linear lone ant platforming game with a more deep story and meaningful characters bcuz as the game is now, it is neither a good RTS or a good platforming story game.
with a heavy heart i am giving this game, a 5\10, i had a lot of expectations and you can see it by how much i love the game in the first impressions video, truly a shame.