- - - Quick Comments - - -
Pros: Original Gameplay, Small
Cons: Key Response Problems, Boring (for some)
Rating: 5 / 10
- - - Full Review - - -
The concept of Ant Run is simple. To summarize, your goal is to guide the ant, represented by a single pixel, through the playing field made up of tiles. Each tile has a path through it, either a straight line, a 90-degree turn, or a cross. However, the paths won't necessarily connect between tiles, so you have to rotate tiles to make sure they do. When the ant passes through a tile, the tile is removed. It's enough to keep you interested for awhile, although it could use some sort of a starting difficulty option, possibly by speeding up the game, as it's very easy to have a huge path of 20+ tiles setup correctly when the game starts, just waiting for the ant to pass through them. It'll get harder later, but you may have lost interest by then. Who wants to go through a 10 minutes of boredom before getting to something interesting when you could offer the option to skip it?
Although the game scores points with this simple gameplay (at least more interesting than your classes might be), the implementation is rather poor. Key response was downright awful, as it only reacts to around every other keypress, although sometimes it might miss three or four keypresses in a row. Sometimes a single key press will do the action twice in a row. I had assumed that it was something with my calculator, but my friends also had the same issue, even with Silver Editions. There's nothing more annoying than a game that you lost simply because it didn't respond to the keypress -- and this has happened to me quite a few times.
Overall, gameplay isn't captivating (at least in my opinion, some in my school have found it fun), but for less than a kilobyte of size I'll leave it on my calculator, just in case if I've already played through every other game that day during class. Still, the problems with key response and lack of difficulty options can make the game very frustrating from time to time -- enough to convince you to go to a different game. Once these are fixed, I'd recommend it to almost anyone. If they aren't fixed, however, I'd only say download this game if your trying to find a game that's original to pass your time.
