Soldier Ants Hands-On

The Motorola A1000 smart phone hasn't made it to North America yet, but virtually every gamer, regardless of nationality, will recognize one of its killer apps immediately. Soldier Ants, a game for Nokia's Symbian OS developed by one Tom Cooper, takes full advantage of the A1000's licensing of Symbian and enormous touch screen to put a nifty, resurfaced version of Worms in your pocket. The wiggly warriors had better watch out; it seems that a new great power may be rising over in Europe.

As imperialist insects, soldier ants will go to great lengths to protect their colonies--but while their real-life counterparts might fight primarily with mandibles, these guys break out the heavy hardware. We're talking about bazookas, missiles, grenades, firearms, and other insidious devices such as the "atomic carrot." You shoot at your enemies on a timed, turn-based basis, performing all in-game actions with the stylus. Although the aiming mechanic is a little on the funky side at first, the touch screen turns out to be a very effective method of getting bazooka shell A to enemy ant B.

Of course, the game's interesting control scheme can't disguise the fact that it's basically a very carefully focused riff on Worms, the classic strategy game of annelid annihilation. The similarities hold straight through to the game's goofy 2D graphics and whimsical sound effects. Also, you're going to be fighting over randomly generated, fully destructible landscapes that range from jungles to food. Soldier Ants caught our eye nevertheless. For one thing, this game incorporates some great visual effects that you didn't see in the original Worms, including vector graphics in explosions and even a rudimentary smoke effect. Another mark in Solder Ants' column is the campaign mode, which combines the core combat gameplay with a bit of Risk-style grand strategy over a map. Factor in four-player multiplayer over Bluetooth and downloadable content packs, and you can see that Soldier Ants is expanding on the old idea with a lot of new goodies.

We're not sure when the Moto A1000 will make it stateside, but Soldier Ants is already available for a few select smart phones over certain Internet portals. We'll have a review ready as soon as we can get our hands on the full version.