Empire of the Ants is visually striking. For a moment, you might even believe it’s real macro-lens footage from a nature documentary, thanks to the incredible detail in the environment. Unreal Engine 5 truly delivers here. However, beneath the stunning visuals lies a small-scale real-time strategy game that performs well in multiplayer but falls short in its single-player campaign. I’ll review these two experiences separately, as they’re quite different.

Multiplayer

Despite having swarms of insects on-screen, you never control more than seven units at a time. This is somewhat of a mercy, given how clunky the controls are when cycling through units to issue orders. You’ll capture and build nests, but there’s no going inside them—there’s literally nothing beneath the surface.

While the game appears vast, Empire of the Ants is a small-scale strategy game in most respects. The lack of unit variety in multiplayer makes it feel even more limited. Matches have a fair amount of nuance when it comes to how you use your small unit pool and manage your nests to tech up, but there’s only so much you can do with the same few units. The game’s approach to territory control is somewhat like a simplified version of Company of Heroes, where capturing territory generates food and wood resources, which is a solid foundation.

There are strategic elements, such as ants being locked into melee combat until one side is defeated, allowing you to hold off dangerous units until reinforcements arrive or to prevent a retreat. While you can quickly rebuild a lost unit if you have enough food, each ant legion has a home nest that it respawns from, which can mean long delays before your forces return to the front lines. Every nest you capture has a limited number of upgrade slots, which restricts your ability to tech up to higher tiers, making it difficult to keep up with enemies that have stronger units.

The building mechanics are streamlined through a radial menu that pops up when you interact with a nest. You use your ant as a cursor to make selections, which is a neat touch. Taking out an enemy nest disables all the upgrades associated with it, including turning off their minimap. This adds an interesting tactical layer to the gameplay.

One of the coolest aspects of the game is how you experience Fog of War. Because you’re viewing the world in third-person instead of from the traditional RTS overhead view, you can spot a moving legion of ants from a distance, even if they haven’t shown up on the minimap. However, Empire of the Ants feels thin compared to most RTS games, largely because there’s only one faction to play, with the same set of worker ants, warrior ants, and gunners. There’s no option to play as the termites you fight in the campaign, and the unit variety is limited.

You can customize your loadout by choosing four powers for your main ant, swapping out support units (like healing aphids or troop-carrying beetles), and selecting one of three super-predator types. While this customization opens up different strategic options, I’m not a fan of how you’re locked into these choices before a match begins. I’d prefer the ability to adapt and change strategies on the fly if my enemy throws a curveball. For example, it would be nice to switch from flying wasps to acid-resistant beetles if my opponent leans heavily on gunner units, but that’s not possible.

Another major weakness of multiplayer is the lack of modes—only 1v1 or three-player free-for-all are available. There’s no option to play cooperatively against AI, and since the AI is weak even on the highest difficulty, that doesn’t leave much incentive to play. There are 21 maps, though, with decent variety in terms of layout and the “creeps” guarding resource caches. It’s fun to watch your ants take these down, but soon it becomes apparent that the animations for the bugs are repetitive. At first, it’s entertaining to see ants skittering around and watching swarms move dramatically over the terrain. But after a few matches, especially when beetles’ lunging attacks repeat over and over, the excitement wears off.

Overall, Empire of the Ants has some clever ideas for insect combat, and the hyper-realistic graphics are impressive. But the limited unit variety, lack of cooperative play, and repetitive animations hold it back from being a standout multiplayer experience.