PixlBit

For twelve years now, Team 17 has released countless iterations or the Worms franchise. Being a huge fan of Worms: Armageddon back in 1999, I was curious to see what Worms had done with over a decade of changes and countless iterations of the series. Upon playing the game, it was pretty disappointing to see that not only has the game changed very little in its long history of releases, but during gameplay I found the physics and weaponry to be slightly inferior to its classic '90s counterpart.

For those who have played Worms before, gameplay is the same tactical combat it's always been. Worms use gravity, wind, and terrain to send wacky items of destruction at each other, all while picking up randomly spawned pick-ups to help give them the extra edge to blow their opponents away. Favorites like the explosive sheep, banana bomb, and holy hand grenade all make an appearance in this iteration. The new weapons like the bunker buster and magnets are certainly a nice upgrade, but when the opening roster of items is still unchanged from over a decade ago, it does make one wonder what this series has been doing for all this time.

A particularly noticeable issue in the game that caught my eye was the sub-par visual presentation. Ugly and over sized menus throughout the title make one think that it was supposed to be played at extremely low resolution. The inventory menu alone takes up about 80% of the screen when activated, which can really throw you off when trying to quickly select your next weapon in a battle. The art is now vectorized and looks oversimplified and boring. This is especially true when compared to the game's cell animated predecessors. The few worm animations present are something of an eyesore as well, with the quality being comparable to that of your average Flash cartoon. While not detracting from the gameplay, these amateurish visuals definitely diminished the perceived quality of the title.

AI in Worms is inconsistent to say the least, and constantly switches between ingenious and downright horrible when set at normal difficulty. Enemies will throw grenades that literally come to rest on your head, and then in the same game stick their bazooka into the ground and blow themselves to kingdom come. It really gives off the impression that it's completely unpolished and makes you wonder if the developers even tried to smooth out these issues at all.

Something that really struck a nerve with me while playing were the bugs. For starters, the game had no sound at its release date. Days later, a patch was released that fixed the problem, but required a complete update of DirectX just to fix the issue. After that, normal play tended to crash the game regularly, making multiplayer matches difficult to complete given the issues. Floating grenades and inconsistent AI also join the bug list, making for a game that really seemed to need a few more weeks of polish time to fix these blatant problems.

Features are pretty beefy for those who like customization. The game offers tons of voices, terrains, and hats to those who really like to tweak the experience to their liking. Level editing and team creation all come standard, as does custom image importing to make pretty much whatever level you can think of. There is also a bit of a progression system with the player earning coins for single player elements that they can spend on unlocking gameplay elements like weapons, levels, and tools. Also, some new game scenarios have been added to single and multiplayer like rope race and shopper. These are nice additions for things that players used to have to make custom modes for in the past. All together it's nothing the franchise hasn't really had before but is still welcome in this latest release.

All together, the game is still a Worms title and functions exactly as such. It does exactly what Worms 2 did in the '90s, with a few changes to bullet points on weapons and customization. For what it's worth, newcomers will certainly get something out of the game, but for those who have played any prior versions, you can be assured that there's nothing to see here.