Ant Attack

Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum

You find yourself in the city of AntEsher, named after we presume Dutch mathematical artist, MC Escher.  You have to rescue your girlfriend or boyfriend, in a nice change you can choose to play as a boy or a girl, more of this please software developers. 

Rescue from what you say? Why giant ants of course. 

You start at the outskirts of the city and have to explore the city to find your trapped partner, and lead them to safety all the time pursued by the aforementioned ants desperate to make you their dinner. 

To help you have some grenades you can fire at the ants to send them to ant hell, or jump on them to paralyse them. You can be bitten 20 times before it’s game over, but be warned, once trapped 20 bites can come very quickly.

So you have probably noticed from the gameplay footage but this game is graphically stunning. The author Sandy White is a sculptor and this understanding of 3D construction has enabled him to make what must be the best looking Spectrum game we have ever seen and we can’t see how graphics can get much better than this. 

You can change the camera angle if you disappear behind a bit of scenery so you’ll never get stuck and the whole city is so beautiful you’ll just want to explore every inch, however this is where our major gripe of the game comes in. 

When you are being pursued by the ants, in a panic this has caused us more deaths than we care to mention

The controls are rather unintuitive, instead of a key for each direction, you need to rotate your character and then walk forward in the direction they are facing. When you are being pursued by the ants, in a panic this has caused us more deaths than we care to mention. With additional keys to throw your grenades at different distances and the camera changing keys there are 12 keys to learn, we find this far too many to be a good gameplay experience.

But even with the control gripes we have to recommend Ant Attack. The graphics are just so beautiful, and once you manage to get the controls working the city is so well designed and interesting you just want to play more and more. 

With 10 different levels all in the same city you will manage to complete the game eventually, while you do you’ll have an amazing time doing so. 

If Ant Attacks controls were better this would have been an easy 10, but with the control difficulty we are awarding it an 8/10. But we still recommend this highly.

Cheats & Pokes

Description Cheat
Infinite lives (rescuer) 36673,0
Infinite lives (rescuee) 36714,0
Infinite bombs 36122,0
Infinite time 36322,0
Publisher
Quicksilva
Release Year
1983
ROM Link
Download

Ant Attack Score

Graphics
10
Sound
6
Playability
8
Overall
8

Gameplay Video