Worms
for PC (DOS)

01.jpg
Wandrell:Popular Vote:
5.1/6
Company: Team 17
Year: 1995
Genre: Action
Theme: Cartoon & Comic / Misc. Fantasy / Multiplayer
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
Views: 18769
Review by Wandrell (2008-09-30)
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Now, this is quite a famous game and, unlike others, it’s popular with a reason. You get the lemmings, give them weapons (after changing the little suicidal rodents to worms) and you get an action game with plenty of explosions and collateral damage.

Entering into details, you choose a few teams of worms, a randomly generated island and then start taking turns for killing each other’s worms. Each turns lasts a bunch of seconds, but there is not much to do: walk, jump around and then get a weapon for blowing away some worms.

Grenades, rockets, uzis, airstrikes… there are even some silly ones like pushing or giving a punch that sends flying away your enemy. Oh, and also they leave their mark on the terrain, which just like in lemmings can be destroyed, opening ways for you to cross or for the enemy to fall, and with a bit of luck to get drown in the sea.

But the other team isn’t the only danger. There are a bunch of mines around, and there are those backstabbing weapon boxes that sometimes fall around, which can be bobby trapped. Anyway as most of the weapons, mainly the good ones, have little ammo and the special ones start empty there can be races for getting them.

Yes, it is a fun game and there are explosions, but also a few problems, first this is one of those games where the follow ups are better. The newer Worms Armageddon is the same but better, so if you can play it don’t worry much about the original one. And second, it’s a multiplayer game (if it was done today it would be a “party game” or “casual game” or whatever the marketing guys think is cool), so you need people for getting all the fun from it.

Comments (3) [Post comment]

AKK:

The game reminds me of my earliest childhood, I came from soccer practice, my brother laughed at me and said, Shorty is now WormsTime. Very cool Worms games, i play it now on ps3 with friends and even hold Privattournement with trophy.

greeting

Mr Creosote:

Since you only say 'there are a few problems' without naming them, let me start by adding what I consider the biggest fallacy of the game:

Playing against the computer and against humans is completely different. The computer players are simply too good at aiming their weapons. They basically never miss their target. Everyone who claims to have won an open confrontation with a computer player lies. However, the AI controlled players are unimaginative. So to beat them, you can dig yourself in and only leave those tunnels to deliver your own shots. The computer then tries aims as if there weren't lots and lots of earth above your head. At some point, it'll still get you this way (because, as mentioned in the review, the landscape is slowly blown up), but hopefully, it'll buy you enough time to get his worms first. None of this is really common versus human players. So there isn't really a way to practice on your own - it's like two different games.

A minor complaint I have is that there basically is just this 'league' mode in which you have to hand-pick the enemies yourself. This is a good mode to have (because it lets you play and continue to play with not everyone necessarily being there), but there should be some sort of league with automatically generated matches as well (as well as other modes).

However, Worms is undeniably a great, carefree game. In fact, when I think about it, it's actually the only really good game Team 17 ever made. Sure, they were always 'there', making games of all kinds, but none really ever got above the average. Some are close to unplayable (Project X - looking good, but no way to survive for longer than 10 seconds), most are just really, really average / 'somewhat ok' (why play Alien Breed when there is Chaos Engine?).

Re. your newspost... this is not an MS-DOS original by the way.

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