Saturday 18 Nov 2006

It seems there are a flurry of CG films hitting the circuit now days, attracting hundreds of kids and a considerable amount of adults too. And yes, as we’ve all come to expect, a film tie in game. The Ant Bully game was released before the movie had even come out in this country (South Africa), although it didn’t really spoil the film as the plot of the game is only loosely based on that of the movie.

A brief rundown

Just to fill you in on the story behind The Ant Bully, Lucus was your average young kid who loved to burn ants with his magnifying glass (Man I miss those days), kick down ant nests and generally terrorize all insect kind living in his backyard. Then, through some mysterious way “The Destroyer,” as the insects referred to him, was shrunk down to their size. Suddenly he finds himself living life from the eyes of his helpless victims and soon starts to help out around the colony and realize that the ants are just like people and he can’t be mean to them anymore. Yes folks, the story is so soppy and barney-like that it’s enough to put you off right from the get go, but we gave it a chance anyway.

You gotta larvae this game… NOT

It’s simple and basic. Yes. It is. The game, not based on the film, sees you having to perform tasks in the different sectors of the colony. You will become a worker ant, a breeder ant, a foraging ant and a scout ant throughout the game. There are probably about 30 missions in the game, which are all kind of simple for us grown ups, and knowing that you can’t actually die in the game just makes you want to rush through the missions as quickly as possible. The level design is fairly good but the fighting mechanism falls short in that it is really difficult to target enemies or judge their distance from your character. This often leads to frustrating camera angles and often you’ll end up dead because you couldn’t lock onto a target and kill him.

Making war from nature

Some missions will see you going out into the wild to look for items to forge new weapons. These come in the form of a stick (ooh, how intimidating), seed bombs, bow and arrow and silk gun. They are all pretty boring, nothing special here. Most of the time you’ll find yourself defending the colony from the Wasps. They try to infiltrate your caterpillar fields whilst the spiders just like to kill ants… probably because they need to feed.