The Ant Bully review

The mean-spirited brat of a main character is shrunk to insect size and given a simplistic lesson in how ecosystems work by gathering pupae, bits of sugary breakfast cereal, crystals, parts of weapons, and so forth, beating up the opportunistic predators that threaten the colony and its food supply. Playing on such a diminutive scale allows for some inventive moments: glide through the air with a bit of vegetation, pilot a wasp, or call on your buddies to build a living bridge or ladder. As you learn the ways of the ant, you'll even take on some of their attributes, like great strength, wall-climbing, and telepathic teamwork.

Worse, though the developers take steps to make playing more intuitive for a younger audience: Walk off a ledge, and you're supposed to automatically jump. Hold down a trigger to lock on a target for your assaults. Unfortunately, these features, along with the spotty collision detection, are inconsistent at best, which gets more than a little annoying, and kills the sense of control that's critical to immersion. It's hard to imagine any kid having the patience to contend with sporadic control issues on top of micromanaging the camera for the sake of Dreamcast-era visuals. Oddly enough, the characters in the PC version can't jump as high as those in this console version, so you have that going for you.