Microtopia Review

Microtopia is an ant colony simulator and management game. You’re tasked with building up your ant colony from simply a queen and a few small sentry ants to growing into a multitude of large, well-automated colonies.

I don’t frequent the management/automation genre, but based on my experience, its core loop is typical of the genre. Your main goal is to grow and reproduce; in doing so, you can build even larger supply chains, unlocking new technologies to grow ever bigger, further and faster. There’s an inherent satisfaction to the loop here: the growth is incredibly tangible, and you can scale up pretty quickly early on with the right decision-making. All of this consists of creating a series of paths and attaching your ants to them. The ants will follow and work with any logic built into the paths or any additional logic gates you may add.

It starts simple… but maybe a touch too simple. You’re incredibly limited by what paths and logic gates you have early on, and you won’t be in any positions to unlock more for quite some time. This isn’t outright negative: the progression is nice, and being able to make incredibly efficient or specific routes — such as paths exclusively for old ants who may be close to death — works well for min-maxing later in the game. There are some basic trails and logic gates that I thought shouldn’t be locked behind the tech tree, as it can make the early game more tedious than necessary. These trails and gates are within incredibly early parts of the tech tree, but in my time with the game, a lot of tedium had already been reached that could have been avoided if they were unlocked as part of the tutorial rather than primary progression.

The tech tree itself is your main point of progression: you’ll unlock inventor ants which can be fed and, once full, can be popped for inventor points. These can be invested in the, quite frankly, gargantuan tech tree, unlocking new trails, logic gates, buildings, and ant types. There’s a lot of good value here, thanks to the method of obtaining inventor points. If you can manage to supply and feed a multitude of inventor ants, you’ll be able to progress and grow faster, which helps tie player progression to skill, speeding up as you improve and learn more. As you progress, you’ll find new islands with new resources, along with new terrain requiring different ants to traverse. These colonies are run independently of each other, so it’s nice being able to set up a fully automated colony and then begin growing another with a more hands-on approach. During my time with Microtopia, I didn’t run into too many issues beyond ants occasionally getting stuck, requiring some fiddling, or one instance of one of my sentry ants becoming permanently stuck in a location, so it’s nice that despite the complexity, it works well.

If there’s one thing I can compliment about Microtopia, though, it’s the fantastic presentation. Both the game’s visuals, music, and sound design make for a serene and genuinely wonderful feeling. The ambience is incredibly calm and somewhat otherworldly, which works well for pioneering a strange new world of ants. My only real complaint is that some parts of the UI feel like placeholders, the Queen Ant level gauge looks like a default Unreal Engine asset and doesn’t feel particularly fitting, while a lot of the other UI elements lack any particularly interesting art direction and don’t fit quite as well with the rest of the games artistic choices.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Microtopia despite some tedium here and there. It’s a charming little game, and for fans of base-building and automation titles, this could be something to give a try.