Empires of the Undergrowth
Worth it · Strategy · 2024
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $29.99, a BANGER if it drops to $17.99.
- Length
- 15.9h
- Value
- $1.89/hr
- Reviews
- 94% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce GT 440 (1 GB) / AMD Radeon HD 6750 (1 GB), 5 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
Command swarms of warriors at an unprecedented scale of warfare in this blend of RTS and base-building. Lead ant colonies against the many fearsome threats of the insect world, while building intricate nests, developing pheromone-based tactics, and evolving to meet growing dangers.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $8.99, set in December 2025. Its cuts run 35 percent off as a rule. There have been 43 in the 9 years tracked, about 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 5 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks. Past sales have already crossed the $17.99 BANGER line 37 times.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 2 percent on value. It is pricier than 97 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 98 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic ($39.99, scores 85) beats it on value, while it beats Norland ($29.99, scores 53).
Steam's global achievement data says about 3 percent of players ever finish it. On a 15.9-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. 22 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written June 2024 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 61 percent of the 526 reviews written there were positive, against 94 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 15.9 hours. Doing everything runs 52, 3.3 times as long.
The drop-off
66% start to 3% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 15.9-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
399 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Summary: stopped playing (3h) / not sure if continuing in the future Empires of the Undergrowth is a seemingly very authentic Horde-RTS game about ants with similarities to something like Dungeon Keeper, where you are building your hive that lets you spawn your ants to overcome the challenges. I stopped my playthrough because i got reminded why i have been playing RTS games in the past (building, exploration and...
honestly a very good base builder with a fresh take. really enjoy sending groups of ants and watching the colony grab food, take down frogs, and swarm another ant colony. just really good for a bit of fun, and if you can catch it on sale all the better. the developer has gone great lengths to lend it a great replayability factor. just finished the first playthrough and it leaves you wanting to go back and try things...
It's a very fun game, educational, challenging at times, and with the most recent incursion of mods, it'll be even more replayable, I highly recommend this game. Don't ask why I have 800 hours
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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Empires of the Undergrowth scores 76/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/463530/empires-of-the-undergrowthThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 17, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.