The Wii and DS game puts you in charge of a budding black ant colony. But these aren't just any black ants. They're specially engineered ants that a Professor made to battle the invading forces of alien red ants. Stay with me.
The game is presented in an overhead view. If anyone played SimAnt way back in the day they can probably imagine what it looks like. Or, you know, if you've ever looked straight down at ants in real life, that would give you a good idea, too.
DGS-Online writes: "They swarm everywhere, searching for food or reinforcement for their nest. They are black, and small can make the biggest buildings. They are often burned by mischievous boys with a magnifying glass. They are insects that fifty times their own weight on their own and they have their own game. The creatures? Ants. The game? Ant Nation."
Controlling various groups of ants/dots, you have to gather food, attack enemies and expand your colony. Aside from the lack of visual stimulation, there's no option to speed things up once you've placed units on the map, so this is achingly slow. It's hard to think of anyone who'd get any enjoyment out of this, apart from gamers who've accidentally ingested large quantities of horse tranquiliser.
Game Vortex writes: "Considering this is Real-Time Strategy (RTS) for the younger set, Ant Nation provides all the proper window dressing to appeal to kids. The ant characters conform to what we all imagine as "cute," thanks to films like Antz, but even kids' movies depict more struggle and strife than Ant Nation. The picture painted for an ant's life in this game is pretty vanilla. All work and no play, unless you consider battles with alien insects to be much fun. The detail view, when you zoom in to inspect individual ants, is where the game creates most of its personality. Your top-down strategy view literally depicts the ants like so many little bits of pepper on the screen, making it hard to sustain great interest beyond the first few hours."
