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MilitANT – PC Review – by K3W3L
Genre: Indie Action Platformer
Developer: Xibalba Studios
Publisher: Xibalba Studios
Release Date: Jul 12, 2016
Possibly one of the best puns I’ve ever seen in a game name (well, since Catlateral Damage in my opinion at least). MilitANT is a side-scrolling 2.5D platformer shooter game from Xibalba Studios – their second title (and first on Steam).
If the capitalised ANT in the game name isn’t already a good enough indicator, you play as an ant. In a nutshell, the insect factions are going to war with each other, and the ant you play as has to defend his colony from the other factions.
For some reason, I instantly got a Mega Man vibe from watching gameplay. Some of the gameplay itself is somewhat reminiscent of it, and of games like Metal Slug. Each level consists of you controlling your ant from point A to point B. Each level also features at least 1 boss as well once you reach specific points in the level.
You primarily use ranged pistols and other assortments of guns which you can purchase from the Armoury after you have enough crystals (which are acquired by finding secret crystals throughout the levels, or by completing certain objectives in each level). You also get a melee attack that you can use to cut down enemies at close range, or reflect enemy shots back to them, killing them with their own shots. In addition, your ant character can also double jump, and dash – again movement elements of gameplay that really would not seem out of place in a Mega Man game.
The nifty part of being an ant is that you walk on a pair of legs, while the other 2 pairs of legs wield your weapons (though only one pair of weapons can be wielded at any one time), but the weapons will overheat if used for too long, encouraging players to switch between the two pairs to either prevent overheating, or when a pair of weapons has overheated. A nice touch and one that takes the anatomy of an ant into account.
Your methods of input include standard keyboard and mouse, or controller. I personally feel that mouse and keyboard would be a better choice of input method here, as you have to aim at the enemies manually. However, the developers have made the aiming system on the controller (right thumbstick) automatically snap to nearby enemies, making aiming slightly easier. This simplifies the process somewhat for controller users. What’s annoying though is that if a controller is plugged in, input automatically defaults to that and I cannot use mouse and keyboard – to do so I have to unplug the controller.
The opening cutscene before the first level actually looked quite impressive. The subtitles need a bit of polishing though. I spotted a few transcription mistakes, and unlike most subtitles they appeared BEFORE the next line was spoken, which can prove to be a slightly disorienting experience.
The positive visual experience didn’t stop there – while the graphics themselves are decent for a game made in Unity, it was the fact that I could really run the game on highest settings at full screen 1920×1080 resolution that really gobsmacked me. The FPS did not drop too much, and it ran at around the mid 50s, which was genuinely a surprise as I could not usually do that with most other games, despite my PC specs.
But something has to unfortunately give in order to present these visuals. In this case, it is the load times. Everything from the menus to the levels takes longer than average to load than in most games.
While we’re on the subject of long length, what else is also long? The levels. A friend of mine that played through the game live on stream would take approximately 30 minutes on each level for the first 4 levels. I experienced similar playtimes while trying out the game on my own as well. Theoretically, they can be completed in under 15 minutes, but that’s only really if you avoid the enemies and miss out on collecting crystals. In that regard, it’s a rather gruelling experience, and I would have preferred shorter levels, with a larger number of them to compensate (since the game only has 9).
On the subject of level design, the developers took advantage of the game’s 2.5D perspective and put enemies in the background to kill – a particularly skilful trick. But some enemies just like to spawn in your face, sapping any momentum that you have, which irks me a bit.
Lastly, the game is integrated partially with Steam features – leaderboards to compare scores, achievements (though for some reason I couldn’t get any to trigger despite fulfilling the condition – are they broken?) and Steam cloud. I definitely wish they implemented trading card support.
Pros:
- Inventive enemy placement utilising the third dimension (background perspective)
- Decent graphics can actually run at highest settings without lowering FPS too much
- Controller input compensates its relative lack of precision relative to the keyboard reasonably well
- Great visual, cutscene and audio design
Cons:
- Load times a bit too long
- Levels are a bit too long (though there aren’t that many of them)
- Cannot freely switch between keyboard and controller controls
- Enemy spawning really saps momentum
- Achievements apparently broken
K3W3L gives MilitANT a Drastik Measure 8.0 out of 10 (80).
It’s not entirely perfect and could definitely do with some polishing here and there in some locations, but it’s still a very solid platformer game.
