Armageddon outta here! (Worms Armageddon (PC))

Member Name: esthersmile

Product:	Worms Armageddon (PC)
Date:	18/12/03 (162 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Amazing playability, you just keep coming back!, Fun and humourous., Fully customisable

Disadvantages: Graphics are not exactly "state of the art", can get repetetive

(apologies to those that have already read this review, I had a few compalints about it being in the dreamcast section so I've moved it here.)

for those people who have never played any worms games, here's a quick guide to the basic workings of the game:

in the basic game (the one played the most often), each player (either human or computer) starts off with a number of small cartoon worms belonging to his/her team, arranged randomly on a two-dimensional landscape. using various weapons (e.g. grenades, bazookas and other more comical varieties) and utilities (ninja ropes, parachutes), the objective is to kill the other teams' worms. the worms start off with a number of energy points (usually 100, but this is customisable), and different weapons will take off a certain amount of these, depending on how well the shot is aimed. a worm dies when it gets to 0.

worms games in general:

there are few computer games around with such a strong mix of playability and lifespan. puzzle games that you can keep coming back to tend to get boring after a while, and ones which are actually fun to play always seem to be over too soon. worms games however have none of these drawbacks. their strength lies in the different ways in which you can play. socially, the game is great fun. you can name your own worms, so that you can identify with them, getting justifiably annoyed when someone kills them, and triumphantly shouting when your team is victorious! it makes a change from the nerdy lan-networked games such as unreal which separate people rather than bringing them together for multiplayer gaming.

alone, worms can be fun too, with earlier games offering battles versus varying skill levels of pc opponents, and single player missions offering something with a bit more strategy involved.

the graphics have always been cartoony, never complex, which can make the games look a little cutesy, but also means that they aren
9;t heavy on system resources.

Worms Armageddon:

So, if worms is such a simple concept, how can so many versions be justified? And what does this version have that the others don't?

Quite simply, in my opinion, Worms Armageddon is the pinnacle of the Worms concept. It extends the basic concept to become more challenging, and varied, without taking away the factors that made it so enjoyable in the first place.

Modes:

Multiplayer:

This is basically the same as all the other versions of worms. With a few features added. There are new weapons (the homing pigeon being my favourite), new options (e.g. the water level rising and worms becoming "sick" in sudden death mode and it does look a little slicker. You are still limited in the number of worms you can play with at once, but this can make things more challenging. The landscape editor is a lot easier to use than earlier versions too.

Mission mode:

This mode has various missions which you have to complete (duh!), with various goals. Goals range from collecting particular crates, to killing particular worms, and the missions go form fairly easy to very hard quite quickly. I couldn't do these missions without a walkthrough from the internet, but I'm sure that there are people out there who could. Anyway, they are a great deal of fun when you do do them, and completing them can unlock secret options like more ammo for certain weapons, or making the worms bleed when they are hurt (Yuk!)

Deathmatch:

This mode is where you face harder and harder matches against computer teams to improve your rank. It starts off very easy, with eight of your worms against eight low-skilled PC opponent worms, but the number of your worms goes down, while the number of opponents and their skill level goes up. At the moment I'm ranked Hero, but I can't seem to win the match with just 2 of my worms and 12 worms of the h
ighest skill level! Anyway, it?s great fun watching your rank go up, and winning against all the odds.

Training:

This single player mode starts off with what it calls "basic training" which is basically an introduction to the game. It shows you some of the cool things you can do with the various weapons and utilities you might not otherwise have found out, and is required to be completed before you can get access to all of the missions. It's fairly easy though.

Once basic training is completed, you can access the advanced training modes. These are; sheep racing, rifle range, artillery range, ninja rope training, and euthanasia.

Sheep racing is fun to start with, but it's really hard. Getting a gold medal will get you a new weapon to play with, but this will only come with lots of practice. The idea is to fly a sheep around the screen collecting crates to accumulate time on the clock. The ore time, the better the medal.

Rifle range, ninja rope training and artillery range are the same sort of idea, with gold medals getting you secret options.

Euthanasia though is great fun. The idea is to kill as many little old ladies as possible with the various weapons at your disposal. While it might sound a bit bad taste, it's very funny and quite easy. I really liked this training mode as it made me laugh. A lot.

Overall:

As I?ve said, in my opinion worms games are some of the best games to be created for the PC, and Worms: Armageddon is the best of the lot. The customisable aspects of the game lend it an individual edge (you should check out my ?Withnail and I? sound scheme!) and the fact that the multiplayer version is just on the one PC makes it very playable as a social game.

The only drawbacks I can think of are potentially the online multiplayer mode, which may have been superceded by other versions (e.g. worms world party, which I haven?t played), and the fact
that the graphics, being 2d aren?t what many modern gamers might expect. However, I just don?t see how worms 3d can be as much fun. For me, the cartoony Worms is the classic favourite, and they couldn?t really improve on it if they tried. And they have.

All hail the concrete donkey!

Summary: