Empires of the Undergrowth
“Your queen has set up home beneath a rotting log. She is fat, and vulnerable. Her first brood will need to move quickly if the colony is to survive. Their priority now is to find food, and there is plenty around; but there are other hungry creatures in the undergrowth. The workers will need to be vigilant.”
Empires of the Undergrowth is an ant colony management game, in a fast-paced real-time strategy style. The player excavates their nest underground, constructing tunnels and chambers to store food and raise brood. On the surface, the ants claim territory, gather resources, overwhelm fearsome arachnids and clash with other colonies. Nest design, army size, composition and attack timing are key to securing victory.
Missions are narrated from the perspective of a documentary film maker studying the ants, who offers intelligent insight into the goings-on of the colony and the undergrowth beyond. The primary game mode in early access is Formicarium, where you take ownership of a home colony of unique DNA-harvesting ants as they work to assimilate the desirable traits of their foes. You can upgrade them by playing one-off missions, sometimes with your home colony and sometimes with other ant species.
Empires of the Undergrowth Features:
- Carve out and construct your underground nest to suit your strategy
- Engage in fast-paced colony versus colony combat above ground
- Play as different ant species and explore their unique traits and weaknesses
- Encounter and overpower dangerous beetles, arachnids and other awesome arthropods
- Grow your pet formicarium over time by completing missions
Empires of the Undergrowth Review
While it might take a few minutes to figure out how to get the ants doing what you want them to be doing, there’s more to managing a colony than meets the eye. There are 2 basic classes of ant – the workers and the warriors. There’s a queen too, but she doesn’t do much – she’s a liability: you have to defend her at all costs because every other ant can be replaced. If the queen dies, the colony dies.
The goals are simple and realistic: ants need food to make more ants. More ants = good. But more ants means food gets used up. No food = bad. So your main task involves getting more food for the colony and all that entails: food has to be stored. Food sometimes belongs to other critters who don’t want to share. And sometimes the food just doesn’t want to be eaten. Even worse, sometimes you run into things that think ants are food. How wrongheaded can you be?
While this could get boring quickly, the devs have designed the game in an interesting way: You have a basic, simple and vulnerable colony. To improve this you need to play scenarios to improve your colony by researching different ant abilities, etc, or just getting more food for your colony. You need to do this to survive the next step, which is the colony challenges. In challenges all the decisions you’ve taken will be tested and failure means your colony and your queen dies. Thank goodness for save games!
Hopefully as this game is developed the devs will up the ante even more or include some sort of randmization to allow replayability which is one eventual drawback that might show up in the future. However after a couple hours I still can’t survive that first challenge and my colony still needs work.
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