"Do you yearn for the simpler days when you could spend an entire Sunday afternoon torturing ants with various tools of anguish? What's that? You say you were too busy having a conscience or playing video games? Well now with Konami's Ant Nation you have the opportunity to virtually manipulate an entire colony of ants without cumbersome ethical concerns like pondering the existence of an ant heaven."
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."
