Greetings fellow Steemians!
Hey guys! After much ado I've gotten around to my first review of a game that will actually run on my crappy i3 laptop (to be fair it has been a true soldier, surviving more wine than a laptop can reasonably be expected to survive). I have finally gotten Minecraft to run but it's the Windows 10 version, and I'm still deciding whether it's a good thing... The Java version lags like fuck, to the point of being unplayable, but I really miss the mod support and customized world creation.
However, this review is not about Minecraft. I'm still exploring the W 10 version and will be presenting my findings in an upcoming post. This review is Worms. I fondly remember playing this gem on our Pentium I 75Mhz machine back when I was still in primary school. I distinctly remember saying to my brother that there's no way we'll ever fill up the 2GB hard drive that it came with. We never did. This was 20 years ago.
Now for the Worms!
In 25 years of gaming I have yet to experience greater joy in scoring a kill than lobbing a perfectly angled holy hand grenade onto an unsuspecting invertebrate. Super sheep kills are fun too... As are flamers... And Uzi's...
For anyone that has never experienced the joy of Worms, the objective is killing the other team, in glorious turn based and timed carnage.
The idea behind the game is straightforward: Your team of intrepid invertebrates must kill the opposing team(s) using whatever means necessary before they can kill you. At your disposal you have an arsenal of weird and wacky weapons that can be used in all sorts of creative ways. Want to bungee jump off a ledge and drop a stick of dynamite on your foe's head? You can. Homing missiles? Of course. Airstrikes? Yes, they're in there. Exploding sheep? Oh yes. Skunk bombs? You betcha!
There are four main game modes:
Quick game - this is what it says. You get a team of worms and you fight against a random strength AI team using standard weapons on a random map.
Deathmatch - You pick your team and they go up against increasingly tough squads of AI worms. The better you do, the higher your rank gets and the tougher the enemies are.
Training - This lets you practice things like grenade skills or rope swings and is probably a good idea if you haven't played Worms in a while. Things like bazooka rounds are affected by the wind so it is possible to shoot around corners with a bit of skill. You also have to pass increasingly tough training courses to be able to attempt missions.
Missions - Think of these as scenarios. Your crack team of worm commandos have to complete objectives within a certain time limit. Usually you have to play smart. It's not just the glorious violence free for all that a quick or deathmatch game is.
Here's my man Hawking getting hit with a shotgun in one of the early deathmatch games.
The terrain is destructible which adds to the tactical gameplay required to win. The barrels you see there can also be hit for a big explosion and napalm all over the place. There are also mines that blow up if a worm gets too close. The mines are on a timer though, so a worm on a ninja rope can rappel down, activate it, and then get out of the way quickly for a free explosion that might hit an enemy or clear away some terrain that might be in the way.
The ways to cause carnage are only limited by your imagination.
Oh - just be careful of friendly fire... Your comrades are just as vulnerable to a stray rocket as your foes!
The Worms experience is also quite customizable. You can change anything from the types of weapons that are available in a match, their strengths, to the turn timer, to the kinds of airdrops that happen.
You can obviously also customize your team, the names of the individual worms, your team flag and the language that they speak on the battlefield. Team 17 has really gone out of their way to have a huge selection of languages to choose from. There's even an Afrikaans pack. Hearing your worm say ,"Speelgoed" when a weapons crate drops, or, "O heng" when a shot goes wild is quite something.
My final verdict? Worms Armageddon is fun to play. I'm not going to get addicted to it like I did with Minecraft and Fallout, but it's a good way to kill a few minutes or hours if you're in the mood for some lighthearted senseless violence. The controls are simple, but it's possible to execute some complicated maneuvers to deliver death to your enemies. The graphics are what you'd expect from a game that's almost 20 years old, but they do the job.
I'd recommend you give it a try. If nothing you'll chuckle at the things your worms say while the rockets are flying around!
