Tank Wars. Scorched Earth. Bang Bang. Dome Wars. Worms descends from classic party games firmly rooted in multiplayer versus play. The slow-paced, enjoyable game mechanic is turn-based, 2D ballistic artillery which you can manually aim at each other’s worms. In a standard single or multiplayer game, each side starts with four worms, and wins by inflicting sufficient damage to each opposing worm without losing all of its own worms.
In addition to the standard, wind-affected Bazooka ballistic weapon, you have access to 19 other weapons and auxiliary items, ranging from grenades to fire punches, to airstrikes and teleporters. These items are used by hitting B and making your selection - you then guide your worm into place using the left stick, aim using the crosshairs, and hit A to fire. If you’ve played previous incarnations of Worms games, you will see that a surprising number of classic items are missing – the Holy Hand Grenade and Old Woman come immediately to mind. Worms Armageddon had 65 items, for example. That’s more than three times as many as Worms XBLA! As you drill down into the weapons that were included, though, the included items are sufficient for some good old fashioned Worms fun.
How does this new incarnation fare? The graphics are pleasingly bright and cartoony, thought not fancy – seemingly standard fare for the Xbox Live Arcade these days. You will wish that you could zoom further in – your worms are only about 25 pixels tall (and less wide) at maximum zoom on my standard definition TV.
Controlling the worms is painful in the beginning. Be aware, first and foremost, that the A button is not jump. I can’t think of a single game that I’ve played on the Xbox – or any console with a similar layout - that doesn’t have the A button control jumping when jumping is possible. Even the horribly-controlled Dead Rising jumps with A. You will shoot your worm in its proverbial foot over and over again before you adjust to X being jump and A being shoot. Your muscle-memory, built up from an early age starting with Super Mario Brothers, is wrong. The real problem, thus, is that you cannot change the controls, even though arbitrary control changes are supported by the XNA protocol that TEAM 17 used to program Worms XBLA with.
Because of the 50 MB limit, the “music” in the game received necessarily short shrift. There is one only one track – it plays when you first start the game, a kind of low bitrate battlefield mashup with some random chords, and continues through all menus and the games themselves. You’ll instantly want to turn it off and start up some ripped or streaming music. The worms’s repetitive remarks may be annoying to you, as well – they were to me. See the quote at the end of this review for more information on space limitations.
Singleplayer modes include Skirmish battles, where you can control the Scheme (snow, England, etc.), the included weapons, the number of teams, and which teams should play. For your own team of worms, you can select the voice effects, the gravestones, and the names. These teams can also be taken into Multiplayer, which is where the real fun of the game is. Singleplayer games are painfully slow – you are forced to sit and watch the enemy worms think on their turn, which takes anywhere from 10 to 20 seconds. There is no sense of story or continuation (other than a set of pleasantly shallow, disconnected Challenge scenarios) to the singleplayer games – you set up the (limited) sandbox of the game by perhaps asking it to redraw the map, and setting the options as above. You can record (by hand) a numerical encoding of the map, which can be used to later play the same map again in single or multiplayer mode, if you like.
