Does every kid have a period of ant appreciation? I never had an ant farm, but I did once have other ant-related ambitions. I wanted to find a way to grow ants to the size of cows and have a petting zoo. Just an incredible example of childhood delusions. Like, clearly, the only reason we don’t have giant ant petting zoos is because no one has thought of it before. I’m a visionary.

I also played SimAnt, which, I want to stress, is not what Empires of the Undergrowth is. It’s also not Empire of the Ants. Neither the 2000 version, nor the 2024 remake that seems to mainly pride itself on its graphics. No. Empires of the Undergrowth is something distinct that takes liberally from the RTS genre and lightly from 4X to create an experience that feels smart. And I don’t mean educational. But also maybe that.

CHILDHOOD DELUSIONS

If I haven’t made it clear: Empires of the Undergrowth is a game about ants. You’re put in charge of a colony, the core of which is a queen and her seven workers. From there, you dig out chambers, set up nests for your brood, and build your army. You spend food to build brood tiles. If an ant dies, it will respawn as long as you have enough food to spawn a new ant. So, not only do you want to keep spending food to create more ant soldiers, you want to keep some in the larder for when they die.

And they will die. Don’t get too attached. Like real world ants, they put the well-being of the colony before their own lives. You don’t even directly control them like you would in a normal RTS. Instead, you put your ant piles into groups, and then you can drop a pheromone marker that will draw them toward it. They’ll then gather food or attack enemies in their path, unless you specifically tell them not to do that.

It’s interesting, because it’s very hands-off, lacking in a lot of the micromanagement that can bog down traditional RTS games. You can coax ants into groups in order to mount a concentrated attack, but, in general, as long as your ants stay in a line – going back and forth from a horde of food, for example – then they’ll generally be able to protect themselves. Like real ants. Kind of. I don’t know. Throughout that mad ant science phase in my childhood, I don’t think I learned anything. I think ants do that, though.

FOR THE GREATER GOOD

The main campaign of Empires of the Undergrowth is rather inventive. It’s framed as a colony of “Gene Thief” ants under the watch of a pair of scientists. You grow that colony as best you can, but you’ll run out of food and territory eventually, at which point you need to do missions to get more.

Despite how it might sound, missions are the meat of the game. The science experiment is more of an unconventional hub world. When you pick a mission, you’re transported to the wilds to take care of a different colony. Each of its missions has a different hook to it. Sometimes, it’s gathering food and building an army under adverse conditions, while other times, you might have to fight a (comparatively) giant creature.

Succeeding in the challenges nets you big piles of food, additional territory tiles you can dig out, and royal jelly you can use to unlock new types of ants and upgrade them. You can run the missions repeatedly, but just doing the same mission at the same difficulty nets you considerably fewer resources. However, each one has a challenge mode and a selection of difficulties that will give you another good haul. Or just grind your favourite missions for diminishing returns. Either way, you’ll need the plunder.

Why? Because each chapter caps off with a test from the scientists, and they’re pretty brutal. Considering you’re not really limited on how many times you can run the challenges and how many ants you can grow, these bookends don’t have to be difficult unless you’re reckless and unprepared. Which you might be the first time, because it’s hard to know what to expect.

ANYONE KNOWS AN ANT CAN’T

As an RTS, Empires of the Undergrowth is interesting because you’re constantly doing a lot, but it’s made manageable by your limited options. You can only have, at maximum, six groups of ants, with one group relegated to chores around the nest. I rarely needed to use the whole five of them, since it seemed more effective to pile as many into, maybe, two groups to ensure that they were able to maintain their own safety.

But while you won’t need to constantly be commanding your troops, you often find yourself juggling between maintaining the nest and creating new broods, finding additional caches of food both topside and below ground, making sure your ants aren’t walking into predators they aren’t prepared for, and completing any objectives the mission throws at you.

And it throws a lot at you. Often, you have limited time to complete objectives. There’s a day-night cycle and things can change a lot from day to day. There’s one mission where the water level constantly rises, and it challenges you to build a colony large enough that they can join together as a raft. And while that may seem like it just means grabbing food off the lowest layers of the map, it actually means that, as the water level rises, new areas open up that you can bridge across to, but only for a limited time. While foresight that comes from repeated plays through a mission can be a huge advantage, you’ll also need to be able to manage your ants and juggle tasks efficiently to succeed at higher difficulties. I hope you can multi-task, because there is no active pause.

It’s satisfying. It never loses pace, and always presents a new twist. There are a few missions where you play as a type of ant that relies on termites as a food source. So, you have to pillage a nest, but not too much, because if you deplete their numbers, they have trouble replenishing. The next mission, you have to both plunder the nests, as well as protect them from another species of ant with less self-control that will wipe them out if left unchecked. The mission after that, you are the termites, and you want to be the last nest standing, so the ants will keep you alive as a food source. Really inventive stuff.

BRUP BRUP BRUP BRUP

Just to top it off, the soundtrack is notably fantastic. It has this deep brassy quality to it that adapts to what’s happening on screen. I’ve never heard a tuba wielded with such confidence.

I might be even more fun in the standalone challenges, but the campaign was enough for me. Steam has me clocked at 25 hours, but I think I left it idle for significant periods? But I can tell you there were days that I had trouble tearing myself away. What I can tell you is that there’s a lot more to dig into than what I played, and it’s worth doing.

My review version also had the added DLC, Exploding Ants, which is somewhat misleading because there are also exploding termites. This didn’t tie into the campaign much, so I don’t have much to say about it aside from: there’s even more.

Which is cool, because I went into Empires of the Undergrowth with curiosity but low expectations, and wound up being deeply impressed. It’s an RTS that is distinctly informed by its subject matter, being less Command & Conquer with ants and more its own things. And it works. It all works. It’s an exceptional little game that is maybe only held back by the impersonality of the ants themselves. Maybe if they were bigger…

8/10

This review was conducted using a digital Steam copy of the game. It was provided by the publisher who once sent the author a plushie from a different, unrelated game.