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Dear oh dear. You have to worry about Maxis. With each new release it becomes harder and harder to avoid the fact that they're shaping up to be the archetypal one-hit wonders.

Consider: Sim City was one of the true originals, an immensely playable, undoubtedly original project of the type that only comes along every few years - a game that seems so obviously right that you're amazed nobody had done anything like it before. Even now it's still riding high in the Amiga Power All-Time Top 100 - dodgy programming notwithstanding - goodness knows how many years later, and that's almost purely on the strength of the basic concept. With it, Maxis had well and truly arrived.

After it came Sim Earth, an even more ambitious project - imagine, control the entire history of the planet in one game! - which sounded brilliant, looked great, and proved (even on the fast PCs it was meant for) to be a real pig to play. The game was just too large, with too much going on, for anybody to get a reasonable grasp on - and a lot of people persevered, none of whom (to our knowledge) ultimately found it a rewarding experience. Perhaps needless to say, it's caused untold problems in conversion to the Amiga, and when (or, indeed, if) we'll see it at all is a moot point.

And now we've got Sim Ant. Hmm. We'd hoped for quite a bit from this. "It's much more playable," people seemed to be saying, "there's much more of a game in there." Well, perhaps. What they hadn't mentioned was how sloppily put together it all is. Not only are the icons used some of the most indistinct, crappiest little things we've seen in ages (intuitive? Get outta here!), making play very hard to get into, but there's a terrible two second (sometimes longer!) delay between you clicking anywhere on screen and something actually happening. Time and again we clicked twice on an icon (or clicked a second time elsewhere), thinking our first attempt hadn't registered somehow, when all of a sudden the display would go mad, the program finally getting around to responding to our first command. Very annoying. Worse still, our boxed, finished copy seemed to lock up more than once. Faith in the game was almost immediately undermined.

The other thing nobody told us was how unfocussed it all is. Oh sure, they've put a 'quick' mode in, which turns the game into a fairly simple ant-based strategy thing, but still the oodles of options, potted snippets of ant history and myriad different viewpoints available give the impression of lots of parts rather than a cohesive whole.

If Sim Ant is meant to be a sort of modern executive toy - to be called up for a few idle minutes on your work PC, mucked about with for a bit, and then forgotten - it might be reasonably entertaining. There are, after all, lots of different bits to look at. (Indeed, in the manual Maxis themselves call Sim Ant not a game, but a software toy. Toys, by definition, are much more flexible and open ended than games.)

For your average Amiga owner, however, used to sitting down and burying himself in a big game like this for many hours at a time, with a fixed purpose in mind, it offers a confused and frustrating experience.

There's another problem too. Unlike in Sim City, where there really wasn't an end to the game - it could go on forever - this does have finite borders, effectively limiting the thing's lastability. I've not managed this yet - truth be told, I just can't bring myself to persevere for that long - but people I know have apparently completed Full Game mode (the central section of the game, where you're asked to take over an entire house and back yard, killing off rival ant colonies and driving the human residents out) on the PC in about four hours. This doesn't seem to offer the endless gameplay possibilities you might have hoped for. Basically, if you get the impression that I didn't enjoy Sim Ant much, you're right.

Of course, it's perfectly possible I'm being completely unfair about all this. There are, indeed, people I know and whose judgement I generally trust who say either: "Yes, the game's OK, not brilliant, but OK" or, in some extreme cases, "Yes, it's an absolute cracker". You may find you agree with them and not me.

After all...

1. I don't find ants fascinating (as many people do). I find them intrinsically very boring and limited creatures. A game featuring them would have to go some distance to entertain me.
2. I find 'software toys' - lacking, as they do, fixed set purposes and regular gameplay rewards - all too often dull and unsatisfying. My attention span isn't all that long - I need to be teased and manipulated by a game, not given room to move around doing what I want (what I want will invariably be to switch the game off and go and watch telly instead).
3. I tend to get very frustrated by sloppy programming, particularly the sort that results in long loading breaks during gameplay or delays between you telling a program to do something and it actually responding and doing it.

All of which - you could say - makes it unlikely I'd go a bundle on the game in the first place. So fine, ignore what I say. If you love ants, like not just the idea of software toys (I think they're in theory a fabulous idea) but the practice too, and can put up with frustrating delays/sloppy programming, you may just love Sim Ant. You may even find you're hooked on it, as many people have become hooked on Sim City or Railroad Tycoon. But I'll promise you one thing - there aren't going to be all that many of you. There are just too many things wrong with Sim Ant - much of it in the execution, though the design's far from perfect either. As it is, it's an often mysterious, occasionally intriguing, constantly annoying and - ultimately - strangely unsatisfying way to spend your time.

When you first start the game you'll be presented with three playing modes to choose between. They are:

1. Quick Game
   The most arcadey way to play it, if you can imagine that. You control a black any colony, faced with natural hazards (getting crushed by human feet, getting eaten by spiders etc) while competing with a colony of red ants for control over a patch of back yard. Fairly simple strategy stuff with interesting ant bits thrown in.
2. Full Game
   Pretty much the same thing on a (much) larger scale. You have to take over the entire backyard and house, section by section, while facing tougher adversaries (especially humans and their insecticides).
3. Experimental Game
   This is probably the bit you'll play around with most - it puts you, as a God-like human, in a position where you can muck about with the ants, building mazes for them, adding food, putting rival ants together or whatever.

Uppers: Well, some people find ants very intriguing, or so I'm told. You can't deny the scope or ambition of the game, and the manual - packed as it is with ant information, ant history and (yes!) ant jokes - is a real treat.

Downers: The execution is sloppy, fiddly, annoying and sometimes a combination of all three. The point of it all is strangely elusive too. And you're really going to need a hard drive.

If you're really intrigued by the behaviour of ants, Sim Ant might well appeal (indeed, it'll be your dream come true). However, if you harbour any doubts at all about whether you'll enjoy it, you're more than likely not to. Whatever you do, don't expect a game as appealing as Sim City - it just ain't going to happen.