Ant War is a turn-based strategy game in which you take control of an ant colony. Your ultimate goal is to build your colony until you reach 1 billion ants and take control of the world. The game itself is fairly easy to learn, and you should be able to get breeding in about 5 minutes.
First, choose your modified ant type (Builder, Warrior, Harvester), and you start making decisions about what percentage of your ant population is to do what. There are four categories: building the nest &mdash (bigger nests mean more ants and food storage); harvesting (you have to keep your ants fed); defense; and breeding. The lifestyle of an ant is a precarious thing, and you'll find the ant count going up and down like a yo-yo.
During the turn phase of the game in which the action occurs, there are a couple of things that can happen: you can find or lose food; find gems; or get into a fight. Fighting is interesting and allows you to fight everything from a simple cricket to the National Guard in later stages of the game. The actual combat mechanic is fairly simple. Your attack and defense values are derived from the strength of your nest and the amount you have contributed toward defense. These totals are then put up against a computer opponent. Keep in mind, though, while it might look like you have a considerable amount of health available, each "Hp" is one of your ants. Use enough of them, and you won't be able to recuperate.
Also, during the course of a day, random events will happen. Some are negative, causing damage to your ants or nest, and some are more positive. You can find gems that you can save and use to purchase benefits that improve your ants in all aspects. You'll also be able to purchase improvements that net you even more gems.
Colony management is accomplished by a variety of screens that each let you do different things. You can move your colony around via the map screen; with plenty of indoor and outdoor locations available, each location offering its own benefits and negatives. For example, the kitchen is loaded with good stuff to eat and protected against the weather, but it's more dangerous due to those large mammal things that just hate bugs for some reason.
There are other screens available, the ant shopping mall, where you can spend some of the gems you've acquired to boost your colony and lastly, a stats screen in which you can see how you've been doing as the ant king ... err, Queen. You'll be able to see what enemies you've vanquished, what bonuses you've managed to accumulate and what your war stats are like.
One thing I would like to point out: As you meander through an ant's life, you'll gradually build up levels — each level corresponding to a number of ants. As you progress through the levels, you'll gain a fair amount of power and bonuses.
I found the game to be fairly fun and interesting in the early levels. It's not very complex and has enough variation at the start to keep most people busy. However, this game suffers from a fairly serious flaw. It is, for the most part, unfinished. The game runs well, up to a point of about one million ants, at which point it becomes repetitious with the same events happening over and over.
Ant War will keep younger children busy, though you may want to supervise at the start. Once they understand the controls of the game, they should do fine. Older children or adults with a hankering to see the ending of the game, however, most likely will become bored with the product and, eventually like most ants tend to do, wander off.
Got started in the gaming industry with the beta for Asheron’s call. From there I’ve pretty much done a huge amount of beta’s for the industry. I’ve beta’d games, worked in customer service for games – been a game cop (kinda like a higher level gm…), written articals for games, about games, hint’s and tips for games.
It’s probably pretty safe to say that I have either beta’d or played every MMRPG game that has come out onto the market since 1999 – And I’ve played muds, moo’s and mush’s as well. My likes about the game industry. Oh so much creativity! So little time. Dev’s doing what they say they will. Hmm, What else do I like about games. Well, I do like to explore… Some dislikes. Well, I really, really hate buggy games. Especailly buggy games that are actually really interesting. There’s nothing worse then having this super-hyped game that’s groundbreaking in many new ways – only to have it unplayable due to stupid little bugs that should have been cleared up waaaay before release.
