Ant Buster

By: Derek Yu

On: June 7th, 2007

They’ve innovated the tower defense genre considerably in this one by giving you opponents that learn to avoid your towers. Am I being sarcastic? Honestly, even I don’t know any more. Also, CAEK.

(Also, remember that you can click an ant to have all nearby towers target it.)

Posted in Browser Games, Casual, Strategy

Alan

You need a “Tower Defense Games” category already.
Fenner

Best TD game I’ve played. but then again I haven’t really played many.
Albert Lai

Meh. There are non-pathed Tower Sefense games, they’re just hard to make without built-in pathing algorithms. <_<
Aubrey

Tower Defense games are becoming the new flooded clone space? Lucky I like them!

This one was okay, but actually the random shuffling takes away a bit of the strategy for me. Perhaps the costs could be balanced toward something more compelling? I think that’s why I like immortal defense so much. Its levels are short enough that the difficulty can ramp up faster, and so a match doesn’t have to drag on forever.

(Got to level 64 first go, for the record. Dunno if that’s good.)
haowan

Yeah, played this a little while back – first TD game I ever played and it was fun. I like the way the ants learn to get out of the way.

Armor Games delivers yet again.
http://keturn.net/ keturn

What they seemed to me to learn, for the majority of the game, was to kind of wander around the field randomly. Then eventually — sometime after level 50 — some of them start to figure out that if they walk straight through my defenses, rather than bumbling around on the periphery forever, then there’s not enough firepower in the lawn to finish them before they get the cake in the hole.

Not being able to browse the tech tree without actually buying stuff was also annoying. Was that tower under quick-quick-heavy, or heavy-quick-spread?
Radix

I’ve got a feeling they pathfind using a pheromone map (like real ants, which is a pretty basic way of doing it) and because of this any surviving after a couple of seconds reinforce a path that is only going to get them killed, and the developer has compensated by adding a large amount of random movement.

Later on the bugs have so much HP that they can wander around for a long period of time no matter how well your defences are set, which makes the pathfinding worthless, but by then the map is a big muddled mess so they meander all over the place.

Still I enjoyed this for an hour or so. Definitely one of the better defence games I’ve played, but it’s horribly broken after about level 50. Ant HP begins rising too quickly to keep up with using the small amount of cash they give (given the exponential cost of new turrets), and all the weapons besides one are geared towards lower levels, and even the good one stops being effective before long.
negative zero

it’s pretty good, but it needs more balancing on the later levels. they also shouldn’t drag the game on like that since most people won’t bother trying again after reaching the higher levels.
Radix

I don’t know, I think that’s sort of the entire appeal of defence games. You might only play once or twice, but it keeps your attention for a long time even though there’s no payoff. Like an extended play scratchcard.