The UFO 50 Diaries: Bug Hunter

Entomophobes you'd better sit this one out

The first inkling that Bug Hunter is more than what it seems comes from its impressively frugal title crawl. A basic brief of the setting and stakes for your humble ant annihilator adventures, it uses a little bit of in-universe liability-waiving satire to let on that there’s more to this strategy game than meets the eye.

This is a simple but brilliant bit of ludonarrative harmony. Don’t skip the intros to these games, folks!

And it is this that begins my time with Bug Hunter proper. A brilliantly clever bit of tactical wizardry that constantly found new ways to stun me and a series of increasingly joyful aha moments laced together by its morish core loop.

At first it seems almost deceptively simple. You move across the grid, collecting energy cubes that give you access to new abilities and attacking your foes with said abilities until you run out of actions, at which point you then wait for the next turn to roll around and begin again. A new batch of invertibrates spawn in at this point to put a collective spanner in the cogs of your oh so cleverly put together plans.

You can’t always take out every bug each turn, and the longer they survive the more they evolve, eventually transforming into an egg that, if left to hatch, will immediately end the game. I’ve been caught out by this dozens of time, worrying too much about my body count and not enough about crowd control (sounds a bit like my time at uni, eh? *wink wink*).

There are at least four things on this particular screen that are incredibly annoying to have to deal with

In order not to die, you need to factor in the hidden rules of the game. Taking into account the volatile nature of energy cubes, the fact that you can push your opponent around the board to a limited degree, and that leaping down from a raised elevation allows you to squash even those with a hardened carapace in a single move

Take down enough entomological enemies and they begin to retreat, moving you on to the next ‘job’ where an all new selection of fresh hells await you. In the few hours I’ve played I’ve managed to complete the first job only twice, but in a very peculiar way, this experience really reminded me of Spelunky.

To obtain Bug Hunter’s cherry you need to complete three jobs in a row, something that I’m not even sure I have the werewithal to stomach, but in spite of this I’ve already seen signs of progress in how I approach the early and mid stages of the game. Completing that first job has become a new version of reaching Olmec.

Just one hatched egg is enough to ruin your day, and the game has an almost Chess-like quality in that often you can realize you’ve lost many moves before you have

I look at the board with a keener, smarter eye now, but beyond this I’m just embracing how much fun the individual rounds are to engage with, each one a personal procedurally generated anthill for me to explore and unearth.

A cursory glance at the game’s stats page reveals that I’ve seen only half of the abilities available, and I find myself ever enamoured by the idea of obtaining that luscious cherry for my collection, so it’s clear as day that there is much, much more to Bug Hunter that I have yet to experience.

I think this might be as good as Into the Breach. I think it might be better than XCOM.