Combatants

Ahhh, this is one of the big ones, and a perfect game to usher us into the End Times. Often times when people play this game on a stream or something, conversations happen about the quality. What’s your favorite game? Your least favorite? There’s a lot of answers for favorite, but for least favorite, there’s usually only three. This one is the most common of those. Combatants is almost universally considered the worst game in the entire pack. And there’s GOOD reason to assume it’s bad on purpose. Let’s talk about it.

It is 1989, the final year, and while up until this point, Tao Nemuru has been funding the games as producer and not much else, this time he’s taking a more direct approach. Mr. Nemuru had a vision for a game, and he wanted it realized, and using his little army of game devs, his little army of ants, he had it created.

Combatants

Combatants is a top down strategy war simulation game with some RTS elements. You play as the blue ants, who are fighting back against the red ant menace. Red ants are more dangerous, stronger, more numerous. So the odds are not with you. AT ALL. But you have to fight back! You control a little soldier ant, and you can issue commands to nearby ants. You can tell them to stay, follow, or follow their instincts (let the AI take over). You can also order the queen to make workers or soldiers. Soldiers can shoot bullets, but take 2x the food. The AI will always go and collect food, unless it sees an enemy ant, then it will go and attack that ant. When there’s no more food they’ll just beeline straight for the enemy queen to kill it. Once all enemy ants are down, that’s level done, onto the next level.

There’s a few problems. Well #1, the game is slow as shit. It’s awkward, and all the ants move in a weird stilty way. This is bad, but also good, as I’ll explain later. #2 problem: The AI is dumb as shit, and the game is weighted in a way to take advantage of that, against you. Look at that level up there. The blocks are aligned in such a way that often, your workers, if they’re set to going by themselves, will just get stuck on the rocks and not get to the food, because the AI is fucking dumb as shit. And then there’s problem #3: The game is weighted against you in every other possible way. Again, look at the image. Notice the rocks block you, but not the enemy. Notice the enemy has more food on their side. Notice they start with more units. And if that’s not enough, a red ant is literally 2x as strong as a blue ant. For every red ant death, you need to sacrifice 2 blue ants. When an ant meets another, they will scrum like it’s For the Frog the Bell Tolls, and then come out of it weakened or dead.

This game is intentionally unfair. It is built in a way to be frustratingly unfair. There are hard games in this pack, sure, but none weighted this heavily against you. But the problem is, it has to be. Because the AI is so fucking stupid, that if it WEREN’T weighted against you, you’d win instantly, cause you’re not the AI.

Combatants

If you try and play this game as intended, it is an exercise in frustration. You don’t want to play this game how it wants you to play it. Instead, you need to make your own rules, your own strategies. You need to cheese the fuck out of it.

There are a few cheese strategies that work. You can set up soldiers behind your queen and use her as a meat shield, dragging enemy workers who are holding food to her, where the soldiers hiding in her folds can then snipe them, and boom, free food for more soldiers. You can cheese enemy soldiers, because their AI is terrible, and once they start shooting at something in their range, as long as it stays in their range, they will never turn. You can dodge a shot to the side, then just walk around them and shoot them in the ass, they won’t stop you. You can get enough soldiers to make a Murder Ball and have them clump up and follow you, creating a machine gun of ant murder. And of course there’s the spiders.

I did not find this game very fun, EXCEPT for the spider. The most fun I had in this game was domesticating these things for Ant Murder. You can go to a spider, and it’ll slowly (very VERY slowly, cause everything in this game is slow as fuck) follow you. You can then lead it to the enemy encampment and let it go to town, devouring every enemy spider in its wake. It can eventually be killed, but it can do a LOT of damage as you go off to work on other projects, like other enemy queens, cause very often this game has 2 or 3 enemy queens to your 1.

Is Combatants intentionally bad? I don’t think so. I do know it was very smartly created, they didn’t accidentally make it this way. If the AI was good and it moves fast it’d be impossible to play. So they made it like this, cause it’s the easiest way to handle it. Combatants is problably the worst game in the collection based on quality, but it is certainly not my least favorite. But I’m scoring based on actual quality, so sadly…

3/10

Also work noting, the credits do something weird here. No one is credited by their actual job. Nemuru is the head, Spinzer is the thorax, everyone else is the body. Y’know, the people who actually did the work. Hmm.

Combatants

Tao Nemuru loves his bugs :)