Empires of the Undergrowth

Empire of the Undergrowth was provided by Hooded Horse for review. Thank you!

Empires of the Undergrowth takes my childhood dreams of maintaining an ant farm and dials it up to eleven. It has been around for quite some time. It made its full release last summer after seven years in Early Access, and is a great example of letting a game cook without rushing development.

Developed by Slug Disco Studios and published by Hooded Horse, this is an impressive journey into the world of ants. Its strategic depth, combined with its educational value, makes it a profoundly engrossing title. The fact that it runs surprisingly well on the Steam Deck is just the icing on the cake. Not that I recommend eating a cake made of ants, of course.

Empires of the Undergrowth is a hard game to get into at first, as the amount of content it offers is staggering. A fully voice-acted story campaign, skirmish mode, sandbox mode, dozens of separate scenarios, and even an arena mode are just scratching the surface of what's available. There is something here for everyone, and nearly everything can be customized to your preference with a stack of modifiers, whether you want a brutal challenge or to assert your god complex on enemy colonies.

I appreciate how Slug Disco Studios approaches the tutorial. They included a separate tutorial mode and seamlessly integrated it into the campaign. The story unfolds like a science documentary, complete with fully fledged missions, and it doesn't throw you in the deep end. Some games have a separate tutorial that leaves you hanging, but I'm glad that isn't the case here.

If you have played a base-building or real-time strategy game, learning the basics won’t be difficult. Digging tunnels through the colony by selecting blocks for your ants to mine is reminiscent of Dungeon Keeper, but without the demons. By carving out tunnels, ants can deliver food to the queen, who naturally is the cornerstone of the game. If she dies, your colony is destroyed. Food tiles must be added for adequate storage, and food is necessary to breed new ants. It is a simple yet effective gameplay loop.

There is a wide variety of maps, and they hide a range of enemies to deal with. Anything from smaller earwigs to opposing ant colonies is a threat, and early on, it can be challenging to manage. You control your soldier ants through pheromone markers, which is another superb way of blending education and gameplay mechanics. It eliminates micromanagement when defending the colony or sending out warriors to eliminate threats on the map, which feels more natural than traditional RTS unit controls.

The base campaign is not particularly long, and you can complete it in a handful of hours, but it has enough variation in research unlocks to make it replayable. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, and Empires of the Undergrowth bulges from the seams with content. The skirmish/sandbox modes have dozens of modifiers and maps to experiment with, and you can even replay story missions with the same form of sandbox tweaks as you desire.

For a top-down RTS, I must commend the visual design, even if it isn't the most visually appealing. I oversee an ant colony like a biologist, and the diverse range of animations for the insects and ants feels well-researched. Despite the various menus available, it never feels too cluttered. The interface isn’t perfect, but it is surprisingly solid for a strategy game.

As with everything, no game is perfect, and I had some minor issues. Small text sizes can make some things difficult to read, and with so much happening on the screen, it can be challenging to determine what to prioritize. With so many options, determining where to invest your time can be a challenge. It's also surprisingly intensive, and it can push even high-end PCs quite hard, and the inability to save mid-mission during the Story mode was annoying.

Oddly, I spent a considerable chunk of my time messing about with the Arena mode, where you can put two sides of insects and have them fight to the death. Given how much I enjoyed doing this in my modded Rimworld playthroughs, it is a fun palette cleanser when you fancy a quiet evening.

I have been tracking Empires of the Undergrowth for a while, and watching it go from strength to strength is a delight. It is quite a unique strategy game, boasting depth and breadth with various game modes and modifiers. With everything on offer, you will struggle to find a more refreshing base-building RTS game than this.

Empires of the Undergrowth - Steam Deck Performance

Empires of the Undergrowth's controller support is fully implemented, meaning all game functions can be controlled using a gamepad, and it works well overall. The interface is also surprisingly easy to read, considering the numerous menus available, but the amount of information displayed on screen can make navigation challenging. Although it drains a significant amount of battery, it is enjoyable on the Steam Deck.

Recommended Settings

There are numerous settings to tweak, more than most strategy games I know of. It defaults to Ultra settings on the Steam Deck, but I do not recommend using this setting because it tends to dip. The Medium graphics preset is the most efficient balance between visual quality and performance. The performance is stable, with a 60FPS lock and an untouched TDP.

While the game maintained a stable 60 FPS most of the time in standard settings, I observed a couple of frame dips when zooming out or during intense battles, particularly when dozens of ants were on screen. These drops weren’t frequent and happened on more powerful hardware, so I found this acceptable.

Empires of the Undergrowth can be heavy on battery life if you crank up the visuals. Oddly, the menus experienced higher battery drain than a colony map, which was interesting, although I observed an average of 13 watts in regular play with the Medium graphics preset. You should see an average battery life of around three and a half hours on a Steam Deck OLED, which is good going for such an intensive game.

Battery Saver Settings

There are some ways to improve battery life. This is an odd game because it does not benefit much from a low TDP. That did not stop me from trying, but you need the TDP as high as possible to maintain a stable framerate.

I eventually ended up with a 30 FPS framerate cap without any TDP limit, a 30/90 Hz refresh rate, and a Low settings preset. You lose some visual clarity with the lower graphics settings, and I do not recommend messing with the resolution scaling. At 30 FPS and with lower graphics, the power draw is decently lowered, and I saw it hover between 9 and 10 watts, even during heavy on-on-on combat. This grants over 5 hours of battery life, a significant boost if you have a Steam Deck OLED.

Accessibility

Empires of the Undergrowth is available in English, German, Simplified Chinese, Spanish - Spain, Russian, French, Czech, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Italian, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, Portuguese - Brazil, and Spanish - Latin America.

It has a nice selection of accessibility features. You can turn on arachnophobia mode, display subtitles, show creature and resource information on the map, change the user interface scale, and freely change key bindings. You can toggle almost everything on the in-game interface. It lacks colorblind support, as far as I can tell, which is the only real downside. The text is tiny by default, but the user interface scaling can mitigate most of this.

Conclusion

Empires of the Undergrowth is an impressive base builder with a lot of things going for it. Slug Disc Studios has worked incredibly hard on the game during its long development cycle, and that passion shows in every corner. It has enough content to last a lifetime, and its performance on the Steam Deck surprised me in all the right ways. The game frequently goes on sale, but even at its full $30 price point, you are getting a lot of meat in that sandwich.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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