MilitAnt

In Xibalba Studios' 2.5D side-scrolling shooter platformer you're controlling a lone solider ant that must defend his colony from other bug nations. The story sounds simple, and it really is. If you're looking for a deep and memorable narrative, this isn't the game you're looking for. Sure, you'll get a picture with a few lines of text before each mission, but all of the action is pretty straight forward: you're to kill every last bug you see in the eight levels.

That's a fairly daunting task, but your arsenal of weapons helps a lot. At first you only have two pairs of regular pistols, but you'll earn gems by finding secrets and completing certain tasks. These are used to buy new weapons. Shotguns, machine guns, heat seeking rockets, grenade launchers, miniguns and an electricity shooting rifle are just some of the weapons you can buy. As you can carry up to four different weapons in each mission this lets you use a wide variety of combinations. Want to go all out Rantbo (see what we did there?) and use four grenade launchers? Go ahead. Personally we found a favourite combination by using a grenade launcher, machine gun, minigun and turret. This way we were prepared for every kind of eventuality.

This is because you'll meet everything from fast, flying wasps to slow, giant beetles. The weapons vary in damage output, fire rate, projectile speed and cool down. Cool down is particularly important, as you have infinite ammo, but the stronger the weapons are the faster they will overheat. When this happens it'll be unusable for a few seconds. That's why it's a good idea to learn how many shots each weapon can make before overheating, and how long the cool down rate is. Being a weapon short in a heated battle is a big disadvantage, so keep an eye on the heat meters on the bottom of the screen.

Unfortunately the aiming system takes away a lot of the fun. Xibalba has chosen to go for a very imprecise and troublesome auto aim system. On the PlayStation 4 version you'll use the right analogue stick to determine your target. This is a complete mess, especially when you're fighting enemies in different dimensions. Enemies will spawn in the foreground, centre and background, so when you have an enemy in each dimension it's very hard to snap the aim to the enemy you want. As if that wasn't enough, your aim will often reset if you jump. Considering that jumping is one of the most important ways to avoid incoming bullets, this gets annoying very fast. We've lost count of how many times we died after shooting the wrong target or when we were shooting into the air because of unpredictable auto aim. This isn't a big problem in the first two levels as we just melee attacked, that also reflects incoming bullets, but that's not a good option for the rest of the game.

The auto aim also makes the combat feel very repetitive. Find your target, jump wildly in the air while shooting, swap weapons, find a new target, and repeat. There's a decent variety of enemies, but this tactic works for pretty much everything. Except many of the bosses, that is.

Each level lets you fight one or two bosses. Everyone of these feels very different, and demands different tactics. We've fought a giant beetle that had three weak spots, a shogun beetle that could only be harmed by melee attacks, a flying wasp that fired rockets, a butterfly in a Gradius-like level, and a few more memorable bosses in-between. Some of them demand perfectly timed attacks, patience and environmental awareness. A very challenging, but mostly fair, aspect of the game.

If you've ever played a 2D platformer you know what to expect in terms of the challenges you'll find in {Militant}. Jumping or dashing to platforms that are moving in different directions, navigating spinning wheels over a deadly drop, and wall jumping between lethal spikes; these are just some of the things you'll have to do when you're not fighting. Most of these are fun and challenging, but there's one major problem: the frame-rate. Having a stable frame-rate is very important when playing a game like this. We've spent hours discovering what an unstable frame-rate leads to in {Militant}. Control inputs not being registered is by far the most irritating. Each level usually lasts about 15 to 20 minutes, but prepare to lose hours to both the fourth and final levels due to falling to your death because of the hitching frame-rate. This is just unforgivable in a platformer that gives you little room for error.

2D side-scrollers are very popular amongst the so-called indie studios, and {Militant} does very little to distinguish itself from similar games. Being pretty much forced to auto aim removes a lot of the fun from what are otherwise good ideas. Combining four different weapons would have been great if the aiming felt better. Right now it'll only get very repetitive because it's more luck rather than skill that determines the outcome of many of your enemy encounters. Fortunately the very varied boss fights do their very best to alleviate some of this by demanding different tactics.

The same goes for the platforming. {Militant} does nothing new in terms of challenge, but does a nice job of challenging you in different ways. Unfortunately the biggest challenge comes from having to fight a very unpredictable frame-rate. Our blood boiled with frustration after spending multiple hours trying to make our ant soldier respond to our commands in two difficult platforming sections that kept making the frame-rate stutter. If you're willing to look past these shortcomings {Militant} might be worth its low price. Otherwise this "ant" worth your time or money.