Topic: Ant Nation

Spent 30 minutes with Ant Nation and it's pretty quirky. Only completed 10 missions and not enough time to form a full conclusion on it yet.

The audio and video is decent. You start with 5 ants and have missions available. Your starting items are a magnifying glass that zooms in, haven't figured out how to fry them with it yet. You have a suck tube that can be used to transport the ants around and a finger that can poke the ants.

The first missions are pretty tutorial like. 1 you have to call the ants out of the hole, then investigate them and move them. I got stuck at the leveling up mission for a second, but figured out I had to use my finger to squish them a little. Once they're toughed up they go up in level from what looks like 1 to 99. Each ant has stats and their scream when squished is pretty funny. Eventually I bought them a sugar cube and brought them to it with the suction tube. They liked that.

I got the food by using the magnifying glass I looked around the level a lot and found some gold. Gold is obtained this way and on missions. It's used for buying food for your ants and probably tools and stuff eventually.

Kind of an interesting little game and I hope to play it a lot this week and see what some of the missions have in store.

Nice. Glad to hear some impressions. More thoughts are appreciated as I am planning on getting it.
Anything to add with regards to the graphics? What are the different modes of play?

I've heard that comparison many times in impressions for this game in the past.

Good to see someone finally took the plunge on this. I know your not that far in, but what you think of it so far?

I played a bunch more missions today. It's still pretty fun. Some of the missions have a high testing curve. It isn't quite apparent what to do sometimes so I've had to experiment until successful.

Feeding the ants is fun and my army is getting pretty large. I've gone to war with a couple bugs successfully and that's fun. I have ants that are getting pretty tough, and I squish them to toughen up frequently. I still get a kick out of how they scream, or a halo floats away when I accidentally kill one. I was mashing them with a hammer which hurts a lot at once.

There's 100 missions and I'm only up to about 30. There's also some bonus games/scenarios I haven't tried out yet.

I am adding you on TWPGA10 :3

I don't understand this virtual ant squashing and burning stuff. It is required in the game? I'm not into that in real life and would avoid the game as a result.

So far you don't have to kill your ants. Squishing them a bit toughens them up and raises their levels. It seems pretty open about allowing you to hurt them if you want, and they can level up normally from damage in battles. 100 level 1 ants will do some damage, but to properly win big battles you need some tougher ants.

One time I sent out my army to kill a lady bug and one slacker ant stayed behind in the hole. I squished him to make an example.

Ha! Well, that sounds okay then -- do I understand correctly that squishing them makes them tougher rather than killing them?

Yeah they have health points, a level 1 ant has 100 points, so if you squish them it slowly goes down. You can squish them until they die or let them scurry back to the hole and heal. They level up after enough damage is taken. They get more health points as they level up too, maximum level appears to be 99. You have a suction tube to suck up ants and move them to battle/find food, you can even modify the suction tube to only pick up ants between certain levels.

In the main game you help your ants. But in the bonus game your task is to kill the ants as quickly as possible. Sometimes this requires squishing them with your shoe, but mostly it involves shooting them with wacky items like lasers and rocket launchers.

I've suspected they would have some ant-killing games in the bonuses but have been only going through the main game so far.

The horror! Of course ants invading my house have died by my own hands in the past; still I presume these are outside minding their business?

Is this game coming out in Europe?

If there's encouragement for gratuitous athropod slaughter and/or torture, then yeah - I'm not about that. I imagine a LOT of other people won't be either. So I better get this game before they remove it.
PS: My mercy only applies to innocent little creatures. You'd lose sleep over my views on what we should do with certain criminals, terrorists, and rogue nations.

@Sean
Not only are they minding their own business, but if they are hiding underground you must coax them out and then stomp on them. The horror indeed!

@Vendetta
I don't think you'd describe these ants as 'innocent little creatures' after you saw them swarm a ladybug unprovoked, kill it, and then carry the corpse back to their lair...one piece at a time.

@Gabbo: Now I'm definitely getting this game, thaaaaaaaank you!

BTW: I once saw a hornet versus bee deathmatch. I watched them duel it out in the air for minutes, then they took it to the ground, where the hornet - I swear to God - decapitated the bee and then flew away with his severed head.

@Gabbo are you going to be the one reviewing this?

PETA will be all over this, maybe they'll send the dev team all humane ant traps just like Obama got some fly traps.

If you haven't seen 1000 ants zergrush a beetle you haven't lived. That sucker didn't last very long. Especially since I just spent 10 minutes cooking my ants with a flamethrower to toughen them up a bit. Nom nom nom.