A port of The Ant Bully
Based on the animated movie, The Ant Bully puts you in the role of Lucas, a 10-year old boy who passes his time by tormenting an ant hill. Before he knows it, the ants use a magic potion to shrink him down to their size. Then they put him to work for the colony, giving him a fresh perspective on life. The game is played from a 3D third-person perspective. Most actions are context-sensitive, performed with the press of one button, e.g. Lucas automatically jumps when running off a ledge. You play various missions, and receive medals upon their completion. These medals are worth varying amounts, depending on how well you played: gold is 50 points, silver is 30 points, and bronze is 10. You use these medals to unlock special abilities every time you reach 300 points. The missions mostly involve fighting enemies and collecting items scattered in the game world.
Reviews View More
This review contains spoilers
The game is reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda in that it's a top down game, has combat and puzzles, though the progression is fairly linear. One neat addition is radar, that can show items, NPCs, enemies and the objective marker. You can also view a map from the main menu to see the whole overworld, and the objectives list. There's not much exploration until you actually beat the game, where you can try and find all 100 fire crystals for completion and to unlock extras, like sound and music players. The combat is pretty stale though, when you use a spear, you always stand still, which kinda makes the upgrades for it (adding more attack swings) pointless because you usually knock the enemies back, you can't move and attack at the same time which limits combat potential, not to mention that the combat itself is fairly basic, there's little variety. There are a couple extra weapons you gain through the progression, a crossbow, which can be used to fight enemies from a distance, though it's not super strong and really only required for bosses, and bombs that are more useful for puzzles and one boss. The puzzles are also not very difficult, usually revolving around using telepathy and other ants to do certain commands, like carry a leaf as a platform you can walk on, push heavy objects together or make them stand on a mushroom switch, etc.. It sounds like a cool idea, but the ants are only limited to puzzle elements, they can't aid in combat, pikmin style, in fact they're all cowards. There's also a lot of slow block pushing and pulling, that's fun. There are three boss battles, and they're actually pretty challenging, and kinda fun, though the last boss isn't much of a boss, and more of an autoscroller where you avoid hazards, and it drags on for a bit. Still, the two bosses that are actually bosses use different tactics and patterns and are pretty good to fight. The game offers fairly generous checkpoints, usually after some major puzzles and right at the boss battle, though I didn't die very often, most of my deaths are from bosses. There are also turret sections, and they're... alright. You just shoot enemies or break a barrier and move one. There are stationary ones and ones on caterpillar that act as autoscrollers. One issue is that these can become fairly repetitive. At least the music's good.
Speaking of music, let's talk about graphics and music. The graphics look pretty decent. The menus and cutscenes are styliazed as prehistoric paintings, though the ending uses shots from the movie, which are meh. The envoirements look good and characters look alright. The soundtrack is pretty good, leave it to Shin'en once again to create great sounding music for the ol' GBA.
Overall, The Ant Bully is a perfectly adequate game that has some neat ideas, not a bad game but not quite special.