Empires of the Undergrowth

Great game, I first played it in Alpha on Gamejolt and having been waiting a while for the game to slowly finish but it was definetly worth it,

Loved the play style and the challenges. Had a great time building up my own empire.

Love it.

I had a fascinatation for ants as a kid and this game really made me love these creatures even more, I do have a suggestion for like a dlc though. I noticed the only level you played the counterpart colony is the other foot, I think as a dlc or addition you can make an alternate story mode for the colony.

Maybe scientist 1 might pick up a new colony to expriment on and give new information for the counterparts.


Ps; I would make this my main youtube game as a gaming channel and spread the love for you 4

Been playing for a since early access and the game is just as much fun as it was than. recently saw a lot of updates and knew I had to see whats new, and with little regret on said decision. Currently loving all the additions and new features.

played for 9 hours roughly. game itself is quite interesting to play but lacking the ability to save during game makes it bother to try completing campaign which is the main focus in single player game for many if not most players. i am fine with challenging missions but not when there is no ability to save or at least checkpoints during 1h missions. no wonder according to steam achievements very few people went progressed far in the campaign. also, the ability to pause and look around like in total war series would be nice to have. even if to strategize how beat a new map. atm it feels like you need to start a mission, carefully look around and than restart the mission which is not fun. replaying 1h or more just from 1 mistake near the end of the mission makes me feel like my time isn't valued and wanting to close the game. i have read that the team isn't big and implementing saves will take time but i am not willing to spend my time curretly on it. will probably return to the game if they will add either saves or checkpoints.

Great game, fun, cool ants, but not very RTS.

- Overall, it's fun to play.
- Funny story. I didn't expect the ending, lol, but it’s quite short.
- Each mission has a voiced narrator, very cool and BBC-like.
- Cool and unique ants to play.
- Very cool and unique game.
- Nice-looking symmetrical nest-building system.
- A lot of enemy types.
- Easy-to-understand mechanics.
- Cannot save in missions is sometimes quite inconvenient.
- Pathfinding and controls can be a little buggy; sometimes ants just stand still or don’t move at all.
- AI's prioritization system is very confusing; I choose not to attack, but some ants will still attack.
- Not a lot of content, especially in the main story mode.
- FPS drops when 300+ ants are on screen.

yes i would recommend this game even if the update standard have drop drastically compare to the first few. i understand maybe for fire ants and woods ants there is more to play about but seriously the new ants can only feed on termites it is quite sad that a game i would look forward to its update end up like THAT. throw big monster in just for the difficulty or for termites .. dun termite make home where their foods are? why do we need to leave nest for food?

The game is really fun, I wish there were more scenarios. It's over kinda quick for 30 bucks. That said I could squeeze out 30 hours playing through the game again on harder difficulties and messing around with the custom games a bit.

This shit kinda took over my weekend, so it's hard to complain. Absolute steal on sale IMO.

Really good fun challenge, game runs very smooth with no buffering or glitches and the graphics are lovely.

I played this game almost all the way to the end and my overall impressions were negative. Whilst the game does start to explore some interesting concepts and mechanics it ultimately falls short in almost all of them.

The premise of the game is that your ant colony is being raised in a lab, with two disembodied human voices providing a very basic story. From here you can select missions to play which will unlock territory (the amount of soil you can mine out), food (your currency) , jelly (a special upgrade currency) and some new ant types. Even after playing to the end I'm unsure how these missions are in any way supposed to link to the lab story. The lab story also contains its own gateway missions set in the lab, which unlocks the next set of external missions.

The lab missions have 0 strategy. You basically use the rewards from the external missions to build a load of ants, mass them at the entrance to your nest and sit and wait for 20 minutes or so whilst the game throws hordes of enemy ants at you (supposedly the "mad scientist" testing your colony). I played along for the first of these, and then went and read a book for the remaining missions...

Each mission is based around a particular ant type, to the exclusion of all others. The only place you can use all ant types is in the lab missions which, as previously mentioned, require 0 strategy and so somewhat defeat the point of the diversity. Therefore, each mission is heavily weighted towards the mechanics of that particular ant type, making them feel one dimensional and staged.

The ant mechanics don't vary massively, it still basically boils down to "find a way to get food, build a tonne of the specific ant type and then complete the objective using overwhelming force". Some of the mechanics are downright stupid. For example, the final ant type can only get food from termite colonies, introducing a "raider" style gameplay. However, the moment you attack a worker termite, hordes of soldiers jump out of the nest, annihilate any ants not quick enough to leave and then HANG AROUND FOR AGES, meaning you can do exactly one raid before needing to go elsewhere. This results in the game mainly involving snoozing whilst sending ants halfway across the map between termite colonies to do their single raid, punctuated by having to fight irritating randomly spawned enemies which, if you aren't careful, will wipe out half your raiding party - negating the point of the raid as all spoils will go towards birthing new ants to replace the ones you just lost. This makes the final few missions a test of endurance, patience and boredom thresholds rather than strategy.

This mechanic also highlights the awful system used to control your ants. In most RTS games, you issue orders which are immediately carried out. In this game you lay pheromone trails and have some basic behaviour controls such as "don't collect food" or "avoid combat". Except ants don't obey the pheromone trails immediately. Nor do they avoid combat or drop food when issued the corresponding commands - Food already carried will continue being carried and, if attacked, the ant will always stop and fight back. This makes raiding almost impossible - Your ants will not disengage if another tasty worker termite approaches them, and will continue fighting the overwhelming mobs of termite soldiers, wiping themselves out and leading to a net loss of food from the raid, rendering the entire exercise pointless.

However, my main complaint with this game is it is S.O. S.L.O.W. Each mission has a day/night cycle which lasts ages and, depending on your ant type, can almost completely cripple their ability to take any meaningful actions, resulting in large periods of twiddling your thumbs waiting for something interesting to happen. When ants *can* take actions, those actions mainly involve wandering incredibly slowly to a food source, fighting anything on the way or micromanaging your ants to prevent them picking up the 2 point value food over the 35 value one and carrying it all the way back to the nest (remember you can't drop food once its been picked up!), followed by building an army of your one ant type and charging at something. If you win, mission complete. If you lose, spend 20 minutes gathering more food and repeat..

I really wanted to like this game, but these fundamental gameplay design decisions made it more of a fight to the bitter end than a pleasant gaming experience

Discovered this game through Mauler/ EFAP.
Liked the premise.
Like the execution and gameplay.
Replayability high.
Narration superb.

An excellent and challenging strategy game that merges gameplay in natural habitats of different species of ants, with some laboratory challenges. Every map has unique mechanics that can be accomplished using each species' specialized skills.

Love the strategic aspects of growing the colony and having to micromanage resources.
Also love the scientific names of everything and the care that went into the game

I was looking for a relaxing Ant colony game to watch, not a fast clicker RTS that strains my reaction times.
Was loving it till the 3rd quest arrived, which is a time based challenge.

I played SimAnt as a kid, i was hoping this would be more like that game, it plays nothing like it.
I didnt like the way food was managed, or the way the ants were upgraded, i didnt like the annoying way you have to move your ants via scent trails. The ants never seem to interact and i really didnt enjoy the way combat was managed. Just too much playbook RTS and not enough creative unique.

The passion and love, not just for the game, but for ants as a subject is truly outstanding and i could only wish for more and more. If you don't have an obsession with the ultimate lifeform yet, you will soon. EOTU is fun, deep, entertaining, and can have hundreds of hours sunk into it. Here's to the next chapter of Slug Disco's games!

This was the first game I ever played on a PC, and I still come back to it whenever I'm bored with my other games. It has great mechanics, and each mission introduces a new one. The campaign is super fun, and I cannot recommend this more.

Great game. Harder on later difficulties but that is to be expected.

this is a great game to play, you have multiple game modes such as the campaign. you also can play other levels aside from the levels in the demo. overall i rate this game a 10 out of 10. oh you also got the arena which is also very fun to play.

Really fun, interesting game that I've followed since it was in early access. Quite re-playable.

a quality RTS, a stable game, attentive devs, and a whole lot of ants. What's not to love?! It's definetly challenging at first but over time you'll lean the tricks to work the system in your favor and begin to feel the game is to easy! (I've been doing regular runs on "Impossible" difficulty to grab all the achievements and I can painfully recall struggling on "normal" difficulty.) It might not be as pretty looking as Empire of Ants but in terms of gameplay it's a thousand times better.

Great missions design, unique challenges, growing playable ant breeds. Overall pretty colony simulation experience

Wow, I played Empire of the Ants before discovering this game, and while EotA was a more cinematic and beautiful looking game, this is the one that is more all encompassing and complete. As an amateur child entomologist I had the privilege of growing up in the Caribbean and having ant and termite farms of the same species and pitting them up against each other and this has remarkably accurate simulation. My favourite ants were fire ants and they always won against termites and here it is difficult to win against them when playing as termites. I had the pleasure of raising fire ants, leaf-cutter ants, termites (both Nasutes and Reticulitermes) and much more. I even managed to capture a queen termite but totally forgot about the king lol. Thanks for making my dream come true to re-experience my childhood now that I live as an adult in a temperate country far away from these fascinating creatures.
REQUEST PLEASE: Please add the Nasute termites, they built mounds on tree branches and had smaller soldiers with toxic glue gun snouts that they'd use to shoot at ants! Their workers were fatter and bigger.

hope theres a sequal or a additional story for the ants and the scientist in the outside world and we have to face humans or new creatures, it would be amazing and we must have new ants to play around with,even if they are custom ants it would be so fun

I'm a myrmecologist (that's how they call ant researchers!) and was naturally drawn to this game. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to give it more chances due to Steam's strict refund policy, but what I saw wasn't that great. I played the tutorial and the two first missions, and it was too repetitive. There wasn't anything besides doing the same two simple mechanics over and over again.

The setting and implementation of ant stuff seems nice, but when it cannot overcome boring gameplay even for somebody that work with ants, you know there is something wrong...

And developers, STOP BEING PETTY WITH SAVING GAMES. Yes, you cannot save your progress mid-mission here, not even a "save and quit" option. I've read the same "excuse" as other games, "it's a small team and it would take too much effort to implement this and blablabla". Guess what, if you don't have the time to implement a decent save system, your players have even less time in their lives to lose doing repetitive stuff.

This game is amazing! The ants march in a pattern each time they walk in to get the food or the army's. Also making other teams of ants being on your side like a 2v2 is perfect if you want to fight!

this game great because the quality and ants are too good the matlebele and termite are really good ants to you use and this givia some tips

I really like this game but this game does not support my language. Can I know when this game will support Vietnamese?

An amazing game about how ant colonies work and how they face real-life challenges. A must try game for people that love ants

This is a fun game that actually teaches you more than you ever wanted to know about ants, what they, and what eats them.
Still in the campaign mode, and the chapters are challenging but interesting and nicely varied. Not too long either.
Looking forward to getting to the full sandbox level and building a monster colony...

A great and very innovative RTS game. The main campaign is very varied and clearly a labor of love for the developers.

Hooded Horse makes addictive games, it just is what it is. I play the hell outta them for dozens of hours and then on to the next one. Reasonably priced and fun games, something different. Highly recommend.

Awesome game.

It's similar to Warcraft 3 but the pheremone system simplifies and raises the skill floor of the gameplay significantly. Very satisfying. Also Mauler does some cool voice acting and lines. Each level is unique and interesting. The hub gameplay is a great touch and all games of the genre ought to have something similar, this does it better than 'They are Billions' imo.

Was way better than I thought it would be! Some odd UI choices and not the prettiest game in the world, but overall I loved it.

- It's fun, keeping players engaged and entertained.
- The game is scary, delivering spine-tingling moments that raise heart rates.
- The excitement factor is high, making it an exciting experience overall.
- Most importantly, it's well thought through, with meticulous attention to detail.

In a nutshell, this game hits all the right notes! 🎮👻👍

This is a truly excellent RTS.

Challenging, changeable, and needing different playstyles as the game progresses and different levels unlock.

Reminds me of Sim Ant which feels like a game I hallucinated but I'm sure I played.

Empire of the Undergrowth - The Fall of a Promising Game

When I first picked up Empire of the Undergrowth in early access, it stood out as one of the best ant-based strategy games available. It had a unique charm, solid mechanics, and felt like a fresh take on the genre. Sadly, as development progressed, the game began addressing difficulty in arguably the worst possible way.

The AI now has access to infinite resources—never needing food or worrying about resource management. This gives it an overwhelming advantage that feels less like a challenge and more like a cheat. To compound the issue, the AI's behavior was "adjusted" by making it overly aggressive, without adding depth or strategy.

At the same time, critical mechanics like group control remain outdated. Managing a group of more than 100 ants can take over 10 seconds to respond, making it frustratingly slow during critical moments. Many older levels were designed with the earlier system in mind and feel broken or unbalanced under the new mechanics.

The difficulty now feels artificial and punishing, not rewarding. The introduction of overwhelming waves of enemies—such as a sudden onslaught of 50+ frogs if you haven’t completed a level quickly enough—turns the game into a grind. Instead of feeling strategic, it often feels like a waste of time when a sudden wave crushes you after an hour of effort.

Summary: If you can tolerate poorly implemented systems, don’t mind wasting time only to get crushed, and enjoy unfair difficulty spikes, this game might still appeal to you. For everyone else, what was once a standout title has sadly fallen short of its early promise.

absolutely amazingly fun game to play, hard at time especially as you go further up the difficulties (htf do you do i insane i can never learn :D)

but very fun and engaging the narration is excellent and the music is sublime

The game crashed three timses in less than 1 hour. I did get the option to send the crash rapport to the publishers so I hope they solve it. I like the concept of the game a lot though. Maybe if the problems are solved in the future I will try the game again. For now: not playable so not recommended.

Fun little ant game, a bit more difficult than I was expecting but it's still fun to learn and redo levels you fail

Fun and challenging spiritual successor to SimAnt. Probably the closest thing we've gotten and are going to get. I really like the campaign storyline, and the challenges weaved in. Some missions are very difficult with different timed pressures acting on you, until you figure out the optimal way to build your colony and achieve the objectives.

You can't really sit idle; you need to constantly have your ants on some kind of mission. I also enjoy the addition of being able to tailor your ant colony with unlocks. Adds a lot of fun and variety and makes it feel like you can make your own "build" though it's not super deep.

Haven't played any multiplayer and only a few times the other game modes, but I've had a blast with the 30 hours I've put in.

Mixed feelings. Overall I like the game in concept, but the scaling and usability are absurd. Here are pros, cons, and some example cases for what I didn't like.

Pros:
- Ant Farm Simulator
- A Modern Take on Sim Ant Style Game
- Amusing Documentary Style Narration
- Leaf Cutter Ants!

Cons:
- Incredibly Frustrating Difficulty Curve (1)
- BS Achievements (2)
- Obtuse/Uninformative UI (3)
- No Pause or Speed Control (3)
- Too much on the RTS side
- Poor Unit Control (3)
- Performance (CPU?) can start to suffer once units number in the hundreds (and lets be real it is a game about ants)
- Not really that much content (You'll mainly just spend your time failing and retrying the same maps, replayability is questionable)


Example Case 1: The game has an incredibly frustrating difficulty curve which is compounded by the long play times for each map. One example is the first Leaf Cutter ant map where you are drowned in new fungus farming and unit dynamic mechanics and a status quo that's been flipped on it's head, with a mission objective to collect a certain number of leaves before your opponent. The problem is you are immediately put up against an established colony that is already stripping the map bare out of the gate, and their side of the map has most of the larger plants! And yes you can scale faster than them in theory, but it leaves no room for error even on normal difficulty. Repeated failure is arbitrary goals weighted against you is unfun.


Example Case 2: The game does have achievements as well but many of them are far too hard to obtain. For example on the beach level one of them is to prevent ANY enemy from entering your colony at all during the three nights. Each night your base is invaded by enemies. The problem is if you station ants outside the base they do their own thing. In addition to the scripted invaders you have large amounts of hermit crabs and spiders which spawn. You can have dozens of units by the end of the first day and still fail due to BS. Either a stray ant picks a fight and the non-scripted enemy invades your base in retaliation, or ants are busy fighting and ignore a new enemy that makes a beeline for your tunnel, or a giant hermit crab comes along and there is no retreat, therefore ants continue to fight in one place and get stomped in seconds. I tried about 20 times and spent over 8h trying to get this achievement and couldn't even make it past the first night. Later there are lightning fast spiders, DOZENS of them! I have no idea how I would keep those out as they generally rush past your soldiers and invade your brood chambers.


Example Case 3: The game is very RTS heavy but has very poor unit control and UI. You can only give general directions to ants using pheremones, and have no direct control. Ants may keep fighting with no way to retreat or reposition, aggro additional enemies, do their own thing, spread out, stream back and forth from base (without carrying anything and for no practical reason) when you want them all in one place for a fight. Often you'll order a group to point A and half the (previously in formation) group does f**kall while moving there, Your first dozen soldiers get wrecked followed by the second and third group (because they arrive/fight in waves like dummies). Things are constantly hectic yet you have no speed controls to pause or accelerate time, which makes it frustrating to set things up under pressure. Additionally there is a general lack of information about what certain things do. For example I have X resources and I can spend that on expanding the nest and making more brood chambers (units), or I can spend them upgrading the existing Brood Chambers (Units). The problem with this is that, for the most part, the game doesn't have a way of conveying what you get with each upgrade; At best you can see vague descriptions like "Increases damage and slightly increases health", but only for specific units and only in the formicarium map. The UI is just so incredibly obtuse.


Conclusion: Do I recommend this game? If you like ants and ant simulations, or have nostaligia for Sim Ant, then yes. But expect heavy RTS elements, and expect to play on easy difficulty if you actually want to enjoy the game. Seriously, do not attempt higher difficulties after the introductory levels unless your a masochist, and even masochists should probably stay away from trying for most of the achievements.

Expected more from what I was advertised.

I am a little unpatient when it comes to these type of games and like to see improvement after 2-4 completed missions. And hate repetitive

I had to play something in a background so I dont get bored. This game is good if you dont engage yourself in a story and just play like its something to fill time good choice. But in terms of being engaging it's content of 30 hours than you most likely get super repetitive

Refunded, there is a game breaking bug that does not allow you to play "Error: Cannot save game setup", could not find a fix for this.

it is a different kind of strat game. it is very fun and can make for some very long epic games

This game reminds me of simant ALOT. Honestly its successor. There is RTS mechanics yeah, but the simulation is ACTUALLY there. Food gathering, pheromone markers, types of ants, above and underground of land and nests, etc. Even a campaign that really tests you. Skirmish, free play, etc. I played Empire of the Ants thinking that was going to be SIMAnts successor, nah not even close. That game is just a rock paper scissors style rts that lacks depth that just looks pretty and is about ants lol, not really any real simulation besides groups of bugs fighting and the pretty world around you that you cant even interact with. Def recommend this game if you need that itch scratched if it relates to an ant colony sim game.

Very good unique strategy game, that really puts you in the minds of an ant colony struggling for survival :), played the game since early beta and have been really impressed by the continued effort the team have put in all the way up to 1.0 release

A very unique take on RTS genre - namely the underground vs above ground levels and where in the former, you need to decide which areas to excavate. There are some frictions such as figuring out how ants are grouped - basically, you need to keep their tiles separated. Some of the UI needs love and the underground lighting is not the best.

It's so refreshing to play a game where each mission is truly unique and new mechanics are introduced at the perfect pace. I wasn't expecting the overarching story to be so funny and engaging but after 27 hours I finally completed the game and somehow feel like it ended too soon! Thankfully there is a skirmish and a New Game + mode so still lots of content to keep you busy.

This game is just perfect. I loved ants as a kid and was so happy while i was waiting for the installing to load. The graphics are amazing, the mechanics are amazing, everything is the best. I actually have more than 1,000 hours on this game. It's incredible! Good work creators.

Amazing game that helped me squash my League addiction. I feel like I learned a bit from this game too! Really great game and looking forward to anything the dev does moving forward.