Game Review: Worms (Xbox Live Arcade)
Overview:Xbox Live Arcade has really been coming into its own in the past month or so, with great releases such as Alien Hominid HD, TMNT and Worms. If you are unfamiliar or otherwise uninitiated, Worms is a turn-based strategy combat game in the same vein as Scorched Earth. Players take control of a team of Worms each with a certain number of hit points on a 2d landscape. Then you take turns whittling away your opponent's hit points with an array of wacky weapons that each serve a different purpose. You can shoot worms in the face with a shotgun, or you can fire punch them into the abyss. The possibilities are endless, and the Xbox Live version is a fun distraction.
Shininess: As far as shiny goes, Worms for XBLA is just like any other Worms game. Nothing too amazing, the graphics amount to not much more than a Flash game, but the animations tend to be funny and charming. The music is non-existant (just a loop of some dramatic sounding stuff.) so prep your music library.
Funness: Worms is by far one of the most fun strategy games out there. Unfortunately, the pace feels incredibly slow at times, while you wait for the other players to take their turn. It's even worse in the short single player mode, where you aren't even waiting for an actual human, it's just a computer who feels like wasting your time while he thinks. Each worm in the single player challenges tends to take 10-20 seconds to even think about their next turn, which is pretty mind-numbing. It's actually tolerable in multiplayer, because watching other people play is all part of building future strategies.
The single player game features 20 challenges of varying difficulty. It didn't take long to get through and helped me hone some of my strategies, but for the most part I could have done without them, or with different modes. The multiplayer is where it's at, it's the whole reason you get the game. It's insane amounts of fun to play with others, seeing them mess up a perfect ninja rope swing, or accidentally blow themselves up with a sheep. The Live worms community seems to be a bit more cordial than most, as well. Full English sentences abound! Just watch out for the ranked matches, as players can tend to get a bit more hardcore. I even played with someone who seemed like they thought they were playing a Halo match. Not fun.
Worthiness: The features and weapons array is a bit lacking compared to PC and previous console versions of Worms, but for 800 points I think it's worth it. Worms is also the first Live Arcade game I have completed all the achievements for, as they tended to be fairly easy to get. If you don't have any Xbox Live friends (sad!) or you don't have any real-life friends (even sadder!) then don't download this. As a matter of fact, if you meet both those criteria, don't download anything. Just throw your Xbox through the nearest window. If you DO have friends, check out the demo and see if the pace is for you. Like I said, it's slower than most games this generation, but once you get into it there's really nothing better than a game of Worms.
Score: 5/5 Buy it!
What say you?!