The date is August 31, 2021. Ants now rule world. Your mission (should you accept this assignment) is to wipe them out and regain control of the world. Now these are not your ordinary every day ants. They make FIRE ants look like cuddly little tribbles.

The ants are actually aliens and come in a variety of shapes, sizes, colors, and with a variety of death dealing weapons. The weapons range from Laser Rifles to Grenades, Rockets, Fire Bombs and a few others which you will just have to experience. You will find yourself battling such things as flyers, green flyers, juggers, robotic weapons and others. All of which are very willing and capable of killing you DEAD.

The Ant defenses are formidable against any sort of mass attack. That was tried and was unsuccessful. The one chink in their armor is that they made no allowances for defending against an individual trained and equipped to wipe them out.(translated that means someone who is arrogant and stupid enough to try). This is where you come in. Your name is Nick Vrenna. You are the 6 Million dollar man. Your assignment is to eliminate all the alien ants and their robotic assistants and return control of the world to all those politicians we know and love so well.

You begin the game with one puny weapon and can work your way up to as many as 8, but you have to do it the old fashioned way. You have to earn them and the ammo for each. Like most other games, you first find it, then run over it and it is yours. Since I tend to be somewhat trigger happy my ammo supply was usually low. The game is very straight-forward and intuitive as far as movements, keystrokes and mouse control. In the early levels "on screen" prompts appear at the appropriate time explaining how to activate transporters, climb, save, etc. Saving is somewhat unique (to me anyway) but easy and I liked it.

The game is a 2D platform so you can only move left/right, up or down. This can become frustrating if you are used to playing the 3D games. I say that because I was always looking for ways to dodge missiles etc and was unable to do so. Another trait that I found to be somewhat frustrating is that you are of course limited to seeing only as far as the edge of your screen. When bullets, missiles etc start coming at you from off screen you don't have much choice but to take the hits.

In some small way this game reminds me of some of the old Sierra games. You are always moving down a tunnel or using an elevator or climbing ladders to another tunnel. The graphics though are very good and the starting menu gives you an opportunity to adjust the lighting levels independently from your monitor. This was a definite plus from my point of view because I really dislike dark games where you have to crank up the intensity and contrast on your monitor. There are 4 difficulty levels: 1 (wimp mode) through 4 (abusive mode). Wimp mode is challenging but manageable. Abusive mode is just that. Very abusive to the ego. And if that is not tough enough, Crack Dot Com has included an edit mode and tutorial that allows you to be as abusive to yourself as you wish. With the editor you can create the adversaries and additional levels to meet whatever level of self abuse amuses you. At least that is what I found on the CD-ROM version upon which I based this review. This feature should strike a chord with all those budding game programmers out there.

Publisher: Crack Dot Com