Worms: Revolution

Game Info

Worms Revolution is the latest installment of the long-running Worms series, started in 1995 with the original Worms (that looked completely different).  Since then, we’ve had sheep, old ladies, UFOs, lots of bazooka shots, and a 3D graphics engine.  So what makes Worms Revolution any different, and at all worth any money?

For those unfamiliar with the series, worms is an artillery-strategy game, where you position your little dudes and take shots at your enemy’s little dudes until everyone is dead.  The Worms games thrive on the goofy, though.  So in addition to bazookas, homing missiles, shotguns, and mortars, you’ll also toss an exploding old lady.  In the early stages, you’ll only have access to some of the craziness – and placement is the most important thing.  As the stages advance, you’ll gain access to more over-the-top weaponry like airstrikes or a giant concrete donkey, so positioning becomes less of an issue.  Add in windspeed that affects weapon trajectory, randomized weapon drops, and the ever-marching timer which results in sudden death, and now you’ve got a game that can swing wildly from one person being in the lead to having all their worms at the bottom of the ocean in one shot of a flamethrower.

That’s the very basic gist of it – in reality all of these little factors can be controlled to your heart’s desire, allowing customization from hats to object placement, and everything in between.  Want an all-sheep round, or baseball bats and banana bombs?  You can set that up.  Adding even more options are the game modes, like deathmatch, classic, and fort.  Classic is generally where it’s at, though, allowing the most options.  Fort splits the action into two halves of the map, meaning that without some creative ninja-roping or teleportation, you’ll be lobbing shots at each other until the map sinks.  Of course all these can be played online, where much of the fun comes in.  Worms has always been a multiplayer game at heart, and these options can really run wild when playing against other people.

Revolution adds a couple things as well, although in practice they’re not entirely worth it.  The big new feature is the class system, which introduces the Heavy, Scientist, and Scout into the mix.  It’s very TF2 in its homage – the scout moves fast but does less damage, the Scientist heals, and the Heavy hits hard and slow.  Getting these guys requires some play through the single-player stuff and gain coins to purchase each member, which is an arduous task of the single-player dreck.  It’s all puzzles and pre-set maps that stack the odds against the player, taking out much of the randomness and fun chaos of a classic match.  Thankfully, the new classes are not required to play any of the multiplayer matches, so you can just toss in with the basic worm (which is renamed Soldier class) and shoot UZIs at each other.

The old skirmish modes and the multiplayer matches are the heart of the game, and a wide variety of options allow everyone to play the way they want.  There’s couch and hotseat co-op and competitive matches, and all the matches and setups are available online as well.  Nothing’s better than blasting your friends across a map with a well-placed homing rocket, after all.

Team17 and Worms have dabbled in 3D graphics in the past, and thankfully that’s all changed with Worms: Revolution.  We’re back to the side-view 2D that makes everything easy to see and deal with.  Added is a layered 2.5D feature that has 3D background and foreground effects in front of and behind the map, to add an amount of depth to an otherwise flat game.  Although these effects miss more often then they hit, at least it’s visually stimulating.  And while foreground effects, such as bubbles or stars, will reduce the framerate for a few seconds, it’s pretty and the downgrade is forgivably brief.  Unfortunately though, to fit all the action on the screen, everything is pretty small.  It’s not as bad as we’ve seen before in $14.99 downloadable games, but the best bet is to play on a large HDTV and to sit good and close.

It’s just too bad the music in the game is so muted.  There are brief intro and outro bookend tunes, and some short menu music (that doesn’t restart, leaving you in silence), and that’s about it.  The customization options do add a number of accents for your worms, but it doesn’t change their voices at all.  This leads to a battlefield full of like-sounding worms  spouting odd phrases in weird accents, telling you to hurry your turn up, and then ending with some short drumming.  I always wind up playing my own music on my sound system, because there’s nothing going on for in-game music.

Worms: Revolution is the best entry in the Worms series for download-based versions of the game.  Now that might not be saying a ton, since the other one is the awful Worms 3D, but for the price and the lack of a disk, it’s a great game to get into the series with.  Its wide multiplayer options allow lots of customized fun, as well.  You could do far far worse with $15.