Worms: Open Warfare 2

One certainly has to credit Team 17 for pursuing the "Worm's" franchise for so many years; the result of that work is visible in many aspects of the Worms: Open Warfare 2 experience.

For those unfamiliar with the franchise, Worms is a game of the turn-based soft-strategy genre. Players square off against each other with an army of tiny invertebrates, four to a team in this iteration. Their main objective is to bombard, shoot, blast, or punch the opposing team's worms into oblivion. To do this, each team has an arsenal of various weapons at their disposal, ranging from the standard all-purpose bazooka to such devastating devices as the banana bomb, which bounces several times on the playing field before splitting into a cluster of powerful explosives. After having executed an attack used a tool, the player has a number of seconds to move his worm under whatever cover he or she can find. Each worm has a certain level of health, and once that health is depleted the worm will explode himself, leaving behind a tiny crater and a gravestone to mark his passage. Death can also come from a worm being rocketed (or more embarrassingly, poked) into the great abyss that surrounds each level map.

The game is simple enough for the inexperienced to grasp the concept fairly quickly, because the standard weapons behave predictably enough and are just as capable as causing mayhem as some of the higher-tier devices. The game rewards players who exercise a level of expertise and strategy, however. A majority of the weapons require the player to account for gravity, distance, and even the direction of the wind. Truly talented players are able to use the bazooka in such a way that the rocket fired will move with the wind to strike an opponent on the far side of a wall. Some weapons can be used together--one can, for example, use a ninja rope to swing across the map, drop a stick of dynamite upon the heads of the opponent's worms, and swing back to safety, all in the same turn. Team 17 has worked to ensure that experimentation is well rewarded; simple brute force often is simply not enough to defeat a player who knows how to utilize his selected the weapons with skill.

Another point where Team 17 should be credited is the sheer number of modes that a player can make use of. Multi-player alone consists of the typical deathmatch in which up to four players can duel to the death, Fortress Mode, in which two players are separated by a cabin and must bombard each other from a distance, and Race... whose purpose is obvious. Lacking other people to play, a gamer can also undertake Campaign Mode, a large (if often very simple) series of missions that take the player on a romp over various world and space settings. There is also a nice practice course where one can test out all the weapons, and a bunch of mini-games where the player uses the mike and the stylus to get a worm to the exit in a variety of ways.

The Campaign Mode lacks any real richness... the typical mission is just a pre-configured death match between the player and computer. The strength of each worm, the weapons available to each, and the strategic position of the teams, these all change from mission to mission, but apart from a minor learning curve in the first few levels, there are few events that end up being truly memorable. In a way, the campaign mode is sticking to the games strengths, showing the player the variety of ways that the game can be played in death match mode, but there's no real story, no sense of achievement, and no real desire to repeat any of the missions of this Campaign Mode.

Then of course there is the online function. With a team that can be customized by accent, color, gravestone, name, and flag, players can compete online against other people in either random or ranked matches. The latter is enjoyable since every player has a rank on the leader board. One can mark your progress on the leader boards as your team wins and loses the various matches. Online combat is at once much harder and much easier than combat versus the A.I.... human beings are capable of making some dramatic plays that are beyond the creativity of the computer, yet they make more mistakes too. This feature is really the highlight of the game, and its easy to see that Team 17 wanted to extend the lifespan of their project by including in it the same features that made the PC worms games so popular in the first place.

The Map mode is also worth mentioning. Here the players can use the stylus to a design versatile map of their own fancy, replete with tunnels, chasms, walls and platforms, that they can draw, save, and use during against the computer or in multi-card play. The map utility is fairly complex: one can design where the players of each team land, where various land mines and explosive tanks originate, all sorts of deep material that will have the player working for hours. I personally spent two hours producing my own fortress mode, with strategic tunnels and bolt holes, and enjoyed tweaking it and playing against the computer. Its obviously not *quite* as complex as the version that the producers use to make the maps... one cannot decide what weapons will physically appear on the course once the game starts, for example... but its fairly close. With a Scheme designer that let's the player determine each team's arsenal, change the retreat time, and several other options, the number of possibilities for player vs. player combat is very broad.

The largest setback to the game is the quality of the A.I. opponent. There is a variable that determines how difficult each team will be to play, but unfortunately all it seems to control is the precision of each worm with his weapon and not the strategy with which it will use them. A team on high difficulty will therefore be made up of crack shots, especially with the bazooka, but will never be very versatile in its weapon or utility selection. I've never seen a computer worm use a ninja rope, or a jet pack, or burrow through a wall, or any number of a list of things that are common practice with the computer player. It will move, shoot with deadly accuracy, and then retreat, but all with such predictability that it makes the challenge of the game a little less fun.

All told, however, Worms: Open Warfare 2 is an excellent game, with high standards in graphics, sound, game mechanics and replayability. The Multi-player function is its highlight, and it gets even better when all the gamers own a cartridge and can select the course and their customized worms instead of a game on random settings. Worms is thoroughly enjoyable, and even though it is best played with actual people, single player functionality has enough variety and complexity to make up for the mundane A.I.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars.