Game Reviews

Ant Raid

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Ant Raid
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A casual glance in Ant Raid's direction might lead you to suspect that it's a casual real-time strategy game, overrun with cute stylised insects and lush, cheery greenery for backgrounds.

Get about eight levels in, however, and you'll discover a savagely difficult RTS that seems calculated to make you walk a constant knife edge between failure and success.

Getting ants-y

While it seems kind of irrelevant in the thick of the action, there's a reasonable story crammed with deliberately quirky characters - like the Queen ant, who's worried about you damaging her beloved tea set.

Your nest is under relentless attack from over-sized bugs, snails, and worms, many of them zombified (obviously), and you have to marshal your bug forces to protect it.

Selecting a small group of blue-coloured soldiers is a simple matter of tapping on them and then tapping their target, but the real Midas touch is the ability to select larger groups by just holding down until you encircle them in a glowing ring.

This is much simpler than the old Command & Conquer, box-stretching approach. The system is a cinch to master, and even if you pick up too many ants by mistake there are lots of spare bugs surrounding your base to ensure you don't run out.

After a gentle start, the enemies quickly get bigger, badder, and more plentiful, meaning that you'll always be frantically drafting in troops and then sending other squads to revive fallen heroes.

Fortunately, you have a mad professor cooking up potions and researching powers that help you harness the slime from fallen foes to recharge vital special powers. The earthquake, which kills most enemies with a single touch, is the most powerful, but there are buffs for speed and recovery that are invaluable too.

Under the microscope

The problem is that although the combat is frantic and rewarding (watching a snail explode into a pile of goo sending ants flying in directions never gets old) the margin for error is never thicker than a fly's wing.

Enemies reach your base very quickly, and it only takes a few hits to end the mission, meaning that making a tiny mistake like not seeing a worm wriggling in from the other side of the map is often fatal.

A lot of the blame can be hefted onto the rigidly zoomed-in view that, while accentuating the game's impressive looks, forces you to swipe around to spot incoming threats and creates constant blind spots in the process.

Ultimately, this creates an acute difficulty curve that only steepens when irksome extra challenges - such as timed stages and resource-gathering mid-battle - are piled on the more you progress. The brutal endless Survival modes available outside the campaign offer little respite, though the lure of leaderboard success could hook some.

Serious strategy fans might welcome Ant Raid's unforgiving mentality, but casual players drawn in by the sweetness of the artwork will soon skitter away in droves to safer ground.

Ant Raid

Stunning to look at and, mostly, intuitive to play, this impressive insect-themed RTS conceals a real sting in its difficulty that often frustrates more than it challenges
Score
Paul Devlin
Paul Devlin
A newspaper reporter turned games journo, Paul's first ever console was an original white Game Boy (still in working order, albeit with a yellowing tinge and 30 second battery life). Now he writes about Android with a style positively dripping in Honeycomb, stuffed with Gingerbread and coated with Froyo