Ant War Review

In the turn-based strategy game Ant War, the player is charged with management of an ant colony and given the lofty goal of transforming a modest anthill in Mr. Suburbia's backyard to a sprawling supercolony of over one billion individual units, all hellbent on overthrowing the human world.

Any player that acheives that task has my respect -- I could barely force myself to play 2500.

The interface of Ant War is deceptively and unnecessarily complex. For those that skip the manual, even the basic operations of controlling ant populations take several turns to discover. New items in the shop are hard to notice and options in the menu are named ambiguously.

Each turn, the player assigns a percentage of ants to either scout, nurse, carpenter, or soldier. Scouts find food, nurses produce new ants, carpenters expand the nest, and soldiers defend it. Ants can only be assigned in increments of five percent.

Forecasts (which only cover one day) and other data provided to plan your turn are very frequently grossly off-target, even after purchasing upgrades that supposedly increase accuracy, rendering all such data utterly useless and proving Ant War one of the most terribly designed games I've ever played.

Currency is accrued at level-ups and is awarded at random intervals between upgrades. Transplanting your anthill, an action the game expects you to perform many times, uses this currency, as does buying items or upgrades from the shop. The player's inability to control this resource is another demonstration of Ant War's failure to consider even the basic requirements of its players.

The art direction only adds to the impression that Ant War is hopelessly out of touch; hiding a messy interface behind cartoony buttons does not make it any less messy.

The sounds are repetitive and unimpressive, but suitable.

Ant War is a bland, unengaging, and out-of-touch turn-based snoozefest. The interface is clunky and unrefined at best; Political Machine-esque but nowhere near as intuitive. No usable information is provided, nullifying any chance of strategizing in this strategy game.

Ant War sucks.