Game:

MilitAnt (2016)

Duration: 12:43

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2

Steam store page: http://steamcommunity.com/id/thugnificent/myactivity
My Steam review: http://steamcommunity.com/id/thugnificent/recommended/454520/

MilitAnt is a 2.5D shooter. Termites, Wasps, Scorpions are trying to destroy your colony and you must go to war against them. The concept is pretty neat. With gameplay inspired from Shoot Many Robots and has many similarities to it.

Graphics:

The graphics of this game are not the best. When you start off, you’re in a cave or underground setting. The colors and the backgrounds look colorless, dulls and boring whereas the second level is outside and much better compared to the first one. I think if they went with a more 2D cartoony or even cel-shaded art-style, it would’ve been much better choice given the theme of the game. Still, you can consider the graphics to be good post level 1. The game is locked at 60 FPS and I didn’t notice any major framedrops and majority of the time the game ran fine and smooth.

Sound:

The music in this game is pretty good. It sounds like one of those epic war/battles theme orchestra music. This makes the boss battles pretty intense. There is voice narration between levels telling the story of these military ants. The voice narrator does a good job in my opinion.

Gameplay:

Ok if you guys have played the game called “Shoot many robots”, you’d feel right at home. This game is clearly very much inspired from that game. You can move left and right, jump and double jump, dash/dodge. You can even dash midair like Megaman. You have guns and a melee attack. The melee attack can deflect bullets if timed correctly and the bullets will fly back to the enemy shooter and kill/hurt them. You can hold 2 weapons at a time and have 2 sets of weapons. You can switch them on the fly, though both hands’ weapons would be changed at the same time if you press ‘Q’, there is an option to switch each weapon individually too. You regularly have to switch weapons as they can get hot and won’t work till they cool down. You can shoot both weapons at the same time as well.

You start off with 2 puny pistols which overheat super-fast and don’t do much damage. Later you can unlock more weapons such as flamethrower, rocket launcher, machine gun etc., using gems which you can get from playing the levels. The first level’s enemies are termites, the later levels start throwing more enemies at you like the annoying wasps in second level, beetles. Etc. There’s a lot of variety of enemies. There’s a background layer as well where enemies can spawn and shoot bullets at you in the foreground. To kill these enemies, you must aim directly at them and once you lock on and shoot them, your bullets should go towards the background instead of straight 2D in line. The boss battles can be pretty nice as bosses don’t die that fast and are sort of bullet spongy.

You have health bar with little dividers in between. So if your health is higher than any of these dividers, it’ll regenerate health till that little part is full. You get these health drops from enemies and the big health packs are also in specific spots, like before boss battles etc. Checkpoints are plenty and generous.

The game has its fair share of problems too. I noticed the controls are not that great. They are just not responsive. The controls are also a bit delayed, like if you want to deflect bullet you better press ‘E’ (melee/deflect button) like a second before the enemy bullet is next to you or you’d miss and get hurt by the bullet. On the other hand, you can just stand at one place and spam ‘E’ and kill most enemies like that. The way enemies spawn is also a bit weird. You’d be walking and a whole bunch of enemies would come out of the ground right next to you and right behind you. Thematically that makes sense as termites/bugs can crawl out of the ground but it’s annoying. Once these enemies surround you they throw you all over the place and when you’re getting hit most of the time you can’t do anything about it as there is a bit of a pause when you get hurt.


Graphics: 6/10
Sound: 8/10
Gameplay: 6/10
Overall: 7/10

Conclusion:

The game has an interesting story and very nice music and okay-ish graphics. The boss battles are interesting and can be challenging. The game itself can be a bit hard. There are some control responsiveness issues as mentioned above but the game is playable nonetheless. I would recommend to pick this game up during sales or if you’re a fan of 2.5D scroller/shooters, then go ahead and buy it.

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