Worms W.M.D

PS4 Cover

Since the release of Clan Wars, fortunes had changed for Team 17. The company had managed to move away from total reliance on Worms games to keep themselves afloat, and had reworked themselves into a respectable publisher of independent games. Despite this, an institution of gaming like Worms wasn’t going to disappear that quickly. Eventually, given the near total flop that was Worms Rumble. But before seemingly perishing onto the strange and volatile battlefield that is ‘games as a service’, the series had one more entry.

After the multitude of new features Revolution introduced and Clan Wars tweaked, WMD throws all that out in favor of a ‘back to basics’ approach. Starting from the base Armageddon begun with, there’s no more physics objects, no more classes to select from, and no more British celebrities to try to give you a reason to fire up a Worms game without your friends involved. Even the graphics are appropriately retro, going back to the vector-based 2D graphics of older entries. Although unclear if it was meant to be at the time, it feels appropriate for what feels like one last return to times past before moving into something strange and new.

That’s not to say WMD is a complete retread. Aside from the usual assortment of new weapons and utilities, you’ll find a new new things populating the battlefield. Maps can now have buildings that worms can enter from their sides. A worm inside a building can’t be seen by the enemy team, although they can certainly see that worm entering it. They also provide light cover, at least for a hit or two – as part of the landscape, they can be blown apart just like everything else, quickly exposing the worms hiding within.

Much more nuanced are the vehicles you’ll often find scattered across the map, of which you’ll encounter several varieties. Helicopters allow for free flight across the map, with a somewhat unwieldy machine gun letting you rain lead upon anything below you. The mech lets you move faster and jump higher, with a powerful slam attack at its disposal. The drillboat digs easily through dirt, making it perfect for the darksiders amongst us. Among a few others, including the car from Rocket League, there’s also mounted emplacements, offering powerful weaponry at the cost of mobility.

All the vehicles have various advantages in common – obviously, they’ll improve your worm’s mobility in their own unique ways. More than that, any damage a worm takes inside a vehicle will be somewhat reduced, and they won’t suffer any knockback from even the strongest weapons. They’re far from invincible, however – if a vehicle takes too much damage, it’ll explode, dealing extra damage to the worm inside. On top of that, there’s nothing stopping an enemy worm from moving up to a manned vehicle and hijacking it for themselves when it’s no longer the driver’s turn. Overall, they make for a fun twist in the usual Worms mechanic, one that feels appropriately advantageous while never being entirely insurmountable.

Finally, a plague of modern gaming finally emerges in the venerable series in the form of crafting. Each team has a supply of four different ingredients, which can be increased either by collecting weapon crates or by dismantling the weapons already in their inventory. By spending enough ingredients, you can either purchase a weapon you don’t have, or purchase a variant on every weapon in your inventory. The downside is that you can only craft one weapon at a time, and it won’t actually appear in your inventory until your next turn. Interestingly, however, you can choose to craft a weapon outside of your turn, in which case it’ll be ready the next time you take control.

Imagine being a new player and having to select just one of these.

It’s the crafting that’s really the biggest double edged sword when it comes to the game, as it suddenly unlocks a wealth of new options that may overwhelm even a veteran Worms player. Aside from experimentation, there’s no way to tell what a new weapon actually does without venturing onto the internet. Explaining to a new player what the Ninja Rope is one thing – trying to tell them the difference between the Ninja Rope Pro and the Newbie Rope is something else entirely. Even if you have figured out the difference in your next weapon, the fact that you often have so many options available for crafting can feel a little harrowing. Still, If you can’t get around that, the feature can be disabled entirely – provided your friends are all right with a custom game style.

As part of the game’s overall callback to Armageddon, so too did Team 17 claim the physics would match that game. It’s not quite exact – veteran Worms players claim things don’t bounce in the same way, and it generally seems worms have a little more friction to them. It’s not the sort of thing you’re likely to notice unless you’ve put a ton of time into Armageddon. In fairness, if you were, you’d more than likely be playing that game instead. The physics, at the very least, are a lot better than games like Reloaded or Revolution, since you don’t have to worry about crates rolling away or some giant object preventing you from taking your shot.

There are further annoyances that have to be pointed out, some of which are more major than others. You can’t customize a game style nearly as much as you could in Armageddon, which given how much this game wants to be that previous title, feels rather disappointing. As you also have to expect from a modern Worms game, finding players in the wild is also a difficult task. This isn’t helped by an assortment of reviews that claim an assortment of issues actually connecting to multiplayer, an issue seemingly never fixed. Your best bet, as always, is to hope you have a few friends around who also have the game.

There’s a way to kill this worm with just your jetpack alone. Can you figure it out?

The single player mode has been also pared back to killing all the worms or finding the crate with a pre-set map and arsenal, just like what you’d find in previous games. There’s a couple of twists, at least – each mission has bonus sub-goals that’ll offer you bonus XP towards unlockable customization options. Every mission also has a hidden wanted poster, unlocking a puzzle-based bonus mission, with an ever-coveted extra hat to collect should you clear it. While you can visit the Steam Workshop to pick up new maps and new hats, you can’t do the same for voicepacks, unfortunately. Then again, perhaps given the state of the Internet, that may be for the best.

The overall style does it best to harken back to the classic games, with fully 2D graphics and a collection of more abstract map themes. The worms have also had a new design that makes them look appropriately unhinged, with an assortment of new animations with it. It looks good enough, albeit it runs an issue where worms can often blend into the backgrounds. If there’s any real visual issue, it’s the assortment of hats that basically serve as product placement for other games, such as Yooka-Laylee and Payday 2, all of which stand out rather hard. The music goes back to a softer, more atmospheric style, even featuring the return of the classic Wormsong.

Overall, as much as WMD wants to be Armageddon, it’s clearly not quite there, as evidenced by comparing the player base of the new games. Still, if you can find enough friends to fill a game with, there’s enough reason to check it out. The new ideas add a satisfying wrinkle to the usual gameplay, even if the game is definitely rather poor at explaining all its new options. Unfortunately, a ‘wrinkle’ is all it really is – there’s nothing really revolutionary from the game that first hit from 1995. With that in mind, if Armageddon isn’t an option for your first and only Worms game, for whatever reason, this is an admirable substitute.

The various versions each have exclusive customization options, as well as their own unique weapon. The Steam version gets the “Team Fortress 2 Sentry Gun”. The XBOX One version gets an assortment of Rare-themed customization items and the “Joanna Dark Attack”. This has the secret agent come down from a rope and fire an automatic pistol barrage at the point you designate – neat, but not really a weapon you’d ever absolutely need.

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