Most people know the development house Image & Form from its SteamWorld series. While the initial title, SteamWorld Tower Defense, did well enough, it was SteamWorld Dig that brought them renown from critics and fans alike. In the developer's early days, however, it create a mobile game called Anthill, and due to the control scheme, it was never ported to PC or console — until now on the Nintendo Switch.

This is one of the few games on the system that is meant to be played in handheld mode only. Placing the game on the dock for use on a TV will bring up a message that you need to undock it before you can progress. Furthermore, the game only uses the touch-screen, so buttons and analog sticks are useless unless you want to take screenshots or quit to another game. This is understandable given the title's mobile roots, but it would have been nice to use the pointer controls for the right Joy-Con because of the nature of the platform.

There is no story, but the overall goal to each stage is to protect your anthill through wave after wave of enemies until time runs out. You start with worker ants, whose only job is to harvest small grubs or bug corpses to transform them into food to create even more ants. Worker ants cannot defend themselves and often run away from approaching enemies. Your other three types defend the worker ants and kill enemies so their corpses can be harvested to continue the production cycle. Soldier ants are melee attackers that go after a bug until one of them dies. Bomber ants are airborne and can bomb targeted areas, while Spitter ants essentially act as artillery by shooting enemies from a distance.

The simple process utilizes the touch-screen. From the anthill, you drag out a line to the destination point, and you do so in any pattern you want. From there, you select which ants are going to follow this trail. It works differently for bomber ants, as you have to select them first and then tap the spot they should bomb, remembering that each ant can only deploy one bomb before they need to return to base and recharge. If you want to spend the food to add more of that ant type to your army, you tap the respective icon, and the game knows how many to send out, so you don't need to worry about provisioning which ants to which areas. To delete a line, you hold on it for a bit and hit the X button that appears. At the end of each level, you're given stars based on whether you survived and how many points you gained, and those stars are used to upgrade each ant type to give them more attack power, health or strength, to name a few.

That's pretty much all there is to Anthill. Some stages add extra collectibles, like gems that give you a load of points. A few stages throw in boss fights for good measure, but the objective is to survive all of the waves and until time runs out. The game sports six stages, each with a set of levels hovering around the high single digits. Some of the stages are considered tough, but given the simple game mechanics, this won't tax you too much. If you play the game in one long session, you'll likely beat it in one go, but there is an infinite mode to see how long you can survive before your colony is doomed.

Anthill is a fun experience, but without any real additions in this version, most players would've been fine with the mobile entry. Even with the game's two final stages locked away as DLC in the iOS/Android versions, it still comes in at half the price of the Switch entry. The only reason for getting the game on the Switch is that you don't have to worry about a future OS update essentially locking you out of the game, a phenomenon we've seen with old mobile games that didn't get updated to be compatible with the new OS and became inaccessible even though the player had it locked to their account.

For better or worse, the presentation matches the iOS/Android build perfectly. There are good details in the bugs and the environments, which is great since you'll notice that there's not much variety in the locales. The game does a great job of handling so many insects at one time, so slowdown is never an issue. Sound-wise, Anthill sports a revised soundtrack that is quite good, but unless you've played the mobile version before, you'll never notice the difference.

It's not exactly the top of its field, but Anthill is an engaging experience for short bursts. The simple nature of the game and the streamlined strategic elements make this a great pick-up-and-play title for strategy and tower defense fans, and there's a good deal of content to keep you busy for some time. You'll wish it supported docked play, and multiplayer modes would've been nice, but Anthill remains a title that's worth checking out.

Score: 7.0/10