No, not the substandard snakes that crawl in and out of a person's anal cavity for air every night – I of course refer to the Team 17 classic, "Worms" (the Xbox Live Arcade title to be exact, which just so happens to be called "Worms").
The title recently came down to 400 Microsoft Space Dollar Pounds – which given the current economic climate equates to two cows and a sheep. The reduction in the title's price could potentially reflect the quality of the game, but who am I to argue with a bargain?
It didn't start well.
I launched the game from the lovely new Xbox 360 dashboard (yey) followed by a hammering of the A button in anticipation for the thousands of potential logo screens that seem to plague games these days – only to find a simple title screen "Worms" by "Team 17".
Okay, that's somewhat refreshing. As a side, it does seem every party who have molested a game or port in some way has to have their own 'screen' before a game loads up – this is a bad trend, please stop it.
I'm here to play the game with whatever hardware I have, I don't want to know if it's in HD – especially if I'm one of the poor souls from the stone age who still has a 14 inch CRT telebox that requires a little tap to switch on.
Here is a video of a girl firing a Desert Eagle:
Anyway… the title screen passed – onto the somewhat basic and slightly ugly menu. Simple, functional, but may as well be using Comic Sans. However the main problem is not the visuals – it's the sound. What is that fucking sound? I'm scared, there's a menacing and foreboding.
The soundtrack from Nosferatu?
The sound of an air raid?
No, it's the main menu 'theme'.
What happened to the music from the days of old? Perhaps I've missed the boat on the last few incarnations, but surely this would be a good time to stroke the nostalgia and perhaps reel in the Amiga fans who likely pissed away hours – no, days of their lives naming all of their little worm teams and members when they should have been out talking to girls (or at chess club).
I present to you, the faultless Worms theme song:
So I've not mentioned the game yet. Well it's your standard Worms format… just severely more limited than with previous incarnations. Weapon customisation is gone – that's no tweaking of which weapons players start with, when they can be used, which weapons will become available, how many they can have, etc.
We're talking bare bones, 22 weapons in all and nothing to unlock – many of which are simply advanced versions of other weapons (see the cluster bomb/banana bomb comparisons). This is something I noticed right off the bat after starting a quick single player game (once I'd created the 'Noonan Empire' team, of course).
Firstly the fun music has been replaced with a characterless military dirge, then the staple of the franchise (it's wacky weapons) have been castrated.
That said, the weapons that are there seem pretty balanced against each other and most fan favourites are in place, but the the absent weapons from the franchise (hello holy grenade) leave a gaping hole that isn't filled up by advancements in gameplay, because there are none.
The series hasn't advanced beyond Worms 2, and it didn't have to – but this doesn't excuse the lack of content in the XBLA version.
This feels lazy and soulless.
Offline there's enough to keep you interested whilst your porn downloads.
There's the 'training' mode, which is little more than text prompts overlaying simple gameplay instructions that must be executed to progress (which doesn't really help new players in any way, shape or form) and the single player 'challenges', which are matches against AI where the odds are stacked against you as the multiple teams are allied and happen to share you as a common enemy (which gets difficult as quick as it gets boring).
Online is clearly where this game excels and unfortunately I've been slaughtered on every occasion. The limited weapon selection does make for some tense moments during 4-player matches, but the fun and often hilarious experience of its forefathers has been lost in SERIOUS FUCKING BUSINESS tournament style play.
No thanks.
It's not all bad though, I'm probably going to have 200/200 gamerscore out of it by the end of the week and it was a good time waster between bouts of cleaning lychee off my walls. Swings and roundabouts, eh?
I'm going to go to bed to dream of the good old days, back when Worms had awesome music and I could unleash grannies upon my enemies.
–Originally posted on Randomly Accessed Memoirs
Note: Since this review, Team 17 have released a sequel, "Worms 2: Armageddon", which is actually really good and worth every penny of your Microsoft Space Dollar Pounds. Buy it.
…although it still doesn't have the original theme tune.