Game: Ant Wars

Ok since finding this game via Quanta, I’ve been playings Ant Wars for several hours(around 3 hours last night and 3 hours so far tonight) and I quite enjoy it (no I don’t, I just play games I really hate for hours on end 🙂 ).

It’s a bit like Sim City – but with Ants. You start off with around a dozen ants, and then you’ve got to hunt for food, enlarge the nest or hatch more ants. Only thing is – you can only select one “action” to do at a time. Sometimes the ants will act on their own initiative and enlarge the nest slightly or discover some food – but you’ve got to guide them.
And, like Sim City, you have disasters. Instead of Earthquakes, you have Buster the Bully with his magnifying glass burning the ants, or he’s starting an ant-farm and needs some specimens – you’ve also got floods (lots of rain), “monster attacks” (birds) and other things to look out for. You also get the chance to fight with other ants – don’t be lulled into thinking you win the fights against enemy ants everytime, they do win occasionally so check the odds (I didn’t and one of my colony’s was wiped out).
It’s hard to get to a population of 3,000 ants, and it’s extremely difficult to maintain it at the 5,000 level – but it is achievable (at least in the short term). This game, unlike many of the others I have mentioned here, just needs a standard web browser – no plugins (Flash or Java) required. However, because of that fact – every move you make is sent back to the remote server so it is slow… Perhaps if the designers of the game had made it into a Java applet, it would be even more addictive!