My thoughts as a SimAnt fan

[SynGen]

If you’re here, you may have heard of a game called SimAnt, released in 91’, or 93 on the SNES. Personally, the SNES is where I played it. The game to me was revolutionary in the Sim space and won the “Best Simulation Program” at the CODiE awards in 92’ for good reason. If there was a way to clock hours back then, I certainly would have had well over 100 of hours in the game. Even for how repetitive it was, the need to infest the persons house and wage war against the Red Ants kept me coming back for more as if it was an Ant version of Command and Conquer.

How does this game stack up? Thankfully, pretty close. It could be said it’s a spiritual successor, and I couldn’t agree more. While this is a game that is in Early Access, you can see the foundation has been set for what can be an amazing Sim in its own right.
What’s different? SimAnt is a finish product, so to me it’s not really fair to stack them against each other yet. However, I’m going to do it anyway, with a * that again, EOTU is NOT a finished game yet. They both have a story. SimAnt saw you as infesting someone’s home for territory, where as in EOTU, you are lab ants in what I’ve come to think may be a mad scientist laboratory. I liked this approach taken in EOTU, as it gives way to some very interesting scenarios you will find yourself trying to survive in. Through this lab story, you will accomplish what I’ll call Scenarios which in turn help you unlock other ants or get points to upgrade the versions of ants you currently have.

The world in EOTU feels a lot smaller than SimAnt, which should be obvious, since in SimAnt, it’s all about taking over a backyard and a house. Whereas in EOTU, your main game is situated in an isolated formicarium where there really isn’t too much to do since being able to expand your lair, forage for food and other things are dependent upon you beating Scenarios repeatedly. Even when you do beat these scenarios, there’s nothing else in the formicarium other than your ants. When you beat these Scenarios, your formicarium will be awarded with food, upgrade points, and a # of tiles you further expand/dig out in your colony. Certain options can make the Scenarios harder, or add other elements like different insects into the mix to freshen it up as well as award more resources, but once you beat them, the level layout is the same as before. Because of this, the formicarium feels very restrictive.

I am beta testing the Freeplay mode, and for me, that’s where the most fun is. There are no restrictions to the size of your colony, and it feels more like SimAnt. I would like to see some type of Nature Campaign mode to where maybe there’s a few plots of land, and eventually you have to take over the entire area level by level rather than one off freeplay modes, but this gets the job done for what it is. For extra motivation to complete the scenarios in the Lab, if you beat scenarios and unlock new species of Ants to use in your formicarium, you can use that colony in the Freeplay mode with the additional ant species in your colony.

I didn’t see an option to do the classic Red vs Black ant battle, where each side tries to build up their colony, but again, this is an unfinished game and I’m sure the team has read the dozens of posts asking for this, and they’ve mentioned in the past this is something they would like to do.

In SimAnt, you have your worker ants, soldier ants, and winged ants which are used to colonize other areas. In EOTU, you start off mostly with worker and soldier ants. Right now, you can also get another type of ant with range capabilities (I’ll let you figure out which one on your own), but there is no drive to colonize other areas as you can’t.

The map size for EOTU when your underground is a decent size, and the map above ground isn’t too bad either, but it does feel smaller than SimAnt but not really in a detrimental way due to the amazing detail of the level. One thing I did like however in SimAnt more, was you could create holes to your colony that would open in different areas of the map. In EOTU, you’re restricted to the one hole it shows (I may be wrong here, as I’ve seen screenshots of multiple holes, so maybe I haven’t gotten that far yet).

All in all, I think this is an amazing game for ant and sim enthusiasts. More ants, locations and features are rolling out from this small development team and I give them kudos for the great work and visuals they have done so far. As well as what I think is a funny storyline within the formicarium.

I hardly take the time to post or write reviews, but for how giddy this game makes me, I couldn't help but put down some thoughts floating in my head.

Play Free, Laugh Hard, be kind.