One certainly has to credit Team 17 for pursuing the "Worm's" franchise
for so many years; the result of that work is visible in many aspects
of the Worms: Open Warfare 2 experience.
For those unfamiliar with the franchise, Worms is a game of the
turn-based soft-strategy genre. Players square off against each other
with an army of tiny invertebrates, four to a team in this iteration.
Their main objective is to bombard, shoot, blast, or punch the opposing
team's worms into oblivion. To do this, each team has an arsenal of
various weapons at their disposal, ranging from the standard
all-purpose bazooka to such devastating devices as the banana bomb,
which bounces several times on the playing field before splitting into
a cluster of powerful explosives. After having executed an attack used
a tool, the player has a number of seconds to move his worm under
whatever cover he or she can find. Each worm has a certain level of
health, and once that health is depleted the worm will explode himself,
leaving behind a tiny crater and a gravestone to mark his passage.
Death can also come from a worm being rocketed (or more embarrassingly,
poked) into the great abyss that surrounds each level map.
The game is simple enough for the inexperienced to grasp the concept
fairly quickly, because the standard weapons behave predictably enough
and are just as capable as causing mayhem as some of the higher-tier
devices. The game rewards players who exercise a level of expertise and
strategy, however. A majority of the weapons require the player to
account for gravity, distance, and even the direction of the wind.
Truly talented players are able to use the bazooka in such a way that
the rocket fired will move with the wind to strike an opponent on the
far side of a wall. Some weapons can be used together--one can, for
example, use a ninja rope to swing across the map, drop a stick of
dynamite upon the heads of the opponent's worms, and swing back to
safety, all in the same turn. Team 17 has worked to ensure that
experimentation is well rewarded; simple brute force often is simply
not enough to defeat a player who knows how to utilize his selected the
weapons with skill.
Another point where Team 17 should be credited is the sheer number of
modes that a player can make use of. Multi-player alone consists of the
typical deathmatch in which up to four players can duel to the death,
Fortress Mode, in which two players are separated by a cabin and must
bombard each other from a distance, and Race... whose purpose is
obvious. Lacking other people to play, a gamer can also undertake
Campaign Mode, a large (if often very simple) series of missions that
take the player on a romp over various world and space settings. There
is also a nice practice course where one can test out all the weapons,
and a bunch of mini-games where the player uses the mike and the stylus
to get a worm to the exit in a variety of ways.
The Campaign Mode lacks any real richness... the typical mission is
just a pre-configured death match between the player and computer. The
strength of each worm, the weapons available to each, and the strategic
position of the teams, these all change from mission to mission, but
apart from a minor learning curve in the first few levels, there are
few events that end up being truly memorable. In a way, the campaign
mode is sticking to the games strengths, showing the player the variety
of ways that the game can be played in death match mode, but there's no
real story, no sense of achievement, and no real desire to repeat any
of the missions of this Campaign Mode.
Then of course there is the online function. With a team that can be
customized by accent, color, gravestone, name, and flag, players can
compete online against other people in either random or ranked matches.
The latter is enjoyable since every player has a rank on the leader
board. One can mark your progress on the leader boards as your team
wins and loses the various matches. Online combat is at once much
harder and much easier than combat versus the A.I.... human beings are
capable of making some dramatic plays that are beyond the creativity of
the computer, yet they make more mistakes too. This feature is really
the highlight of the game, and its easy to see that Team 17 wanted to
extend the lifespan of their project by including in it the same
features that made the PC worms games so popular in the first place.
The Map mode is also worth mentioning. Here the players can use the
stylus to a design versatile map of their own fancy, replete with
tunnels, chasms, walls and platforms, that they can draw, save, and use
during against the computer or in multi-card play. The map utility is
fairly complex: one can design where the players of each team land,
where various land mines and explosive tanks originate, all sorts of
deep material that will have the player working for hours. I personally
spent two hours producing my own fortress mode, with strategic tunnels
and bolt holes, and enjoyed tweaking it and playing against the
computer. Its obviously not *quite* as complex as the version that the
producers use to make the maps... one cannot decide what weapons will
physically appear on the course once the game starts, for example...
but its fairly close. With a Scheme designer that let's the player
determine each team's arsenal, change the retreat time, and several
other options, the number of possibilities for player vs. player combat
is very broad.
The largest setback to the game is the quality of the A.I. opponent.
There is a variable that determines how difficult each team will be to
play, but unfortunately all it seems to control is the precision of
each worm with his weapon and not the strategy with which it will use
them. A team on high difficulty will therefore be made up of crack
shots, especially with the bazooka, but will never be very versatile in
its weapon or utility selection. I've never seen a computer worm use a
ninja rope, or a jet pack, or burrow through a wall, or any number of a
list of things that are common practice with the computer player. It
will move, shoot with deadly accuracy, and then retreat, but all with
such predictability that it makes the challenge of the game a little
less fun.
All told, however, Worms: Open Warfare 2 is an excellent game, with
high standards in graphics, sound, game mechanics and replayability.
The Multi-player function is its highlight, and it gets even better
when all the gamers own a cartridge and can select the course and their
customized worms instead of a game on random settings. Worms is
thoroughly enjoyable, and even though it is best played with actual
people, single player functionality has enough variety and complexity
to make up for the mundane A.I.
I give it 4 out of 5 stars.
