Worms: A Space Oddity Hands-On

Currently scheduled for release in March, Worms: A Space Oddity marks something of a departure for Team 17's long-running turn-based strategy series. For starters, the worms' seemingly never-ending conflict has now consumed the galaxy and taken on a distinctly sci-fi feel with futuristic weapons and battlegrounds on planets that have different gravity and friction properties. Worms: A Space Oddity also makes full use of the Wii's gesture-based controls and, in a move that you'll probably either love or hate depending on your familiarity with the series, the game's arsenal is much smaller (10 weapons plus a handful of gadgets) but much easier to use effectively than those in previous games.

Worms: A Space Oddity has been developed with newcomers to the series in mind, so while basic grenades and bazookas are still in the arsenal (albeit with fancy new sci-fi names), they're now much easier to use effectively, in spite of the gesture-based controls. The reason for this is simply that, providing you don't exceed the time limit for your turn, you can take as many practice shots as you like before committing. Furthermore, taking a practice shot paints a dotted line across the screen to show your projectile's trajectory and, if you're happy with it, you can lock it in place so that your "for real" shot does the same thing. The challenge in Worms: A Space Oddity, then, will come from knowing which weapons to use when rather than from having a good head for angles, wind factors, and the like.

As is often the case in Wii games, some of the gesture-based controls appear to make more sense than others. For example, to throw a grenade (or timed frag) you have to set the angle of the throw using the D pad and then determine the strength of the throw by holding the Wii Remote at an angle somewhere between zero and 90 degrees and flicking it down, remembering to release the B button at some point if you want to actually let go of the explosive. The same control is used for the bazooka (impact frag), and while it works just fine, perhaps just holding the B button to determine the strength of a shot would work just as well.

You might think that the practice shots afforded by this new control setup would make luxury weapons such as the homing missile (now known as a "guided frag") obsolete, and in many situations you'd be right. But there are still going to be enemies that can't be hit with standard weapons, and you'll find that the guided frag is more useful than ever when you need a missile that will avoid obstacles en route to its intended target. That's because in Worms: A Space Oddity you're given direct control of your guided frags, which you can move around the screen and perform tricks with simply by pointing the Wii Remote where you'd like it to go. You'll have only a very limited number of these potentially overpowered weapons at your disposal, of course, but they have the potential to consign popular worm-hiding strategies to history nevertheless. Incidentally, the same controls used for the guided frag will be used for the jetpack.

Other weapons that we got to try out during our all-too-brief Worms: A Space Oddity demo included atom packs, which are mines that can be detonated manually, and the new air strike equivalent. Rather than carpet-bombing a small area around your target, the new air strike takes the form of a UFO that hovers over your target and fires a number of green lasers down at it that's determined by how quickly you shake the Wii Remote. Weapons that we didn't get to see on this occasion include the blaster (shotgun) and the ever-present exploding sheep, whose bounces you'll purportedly be able to control in some way.

Like all Worms games, A Space Oddity will almost certainly be best enjoyed with friends, which is why it's especially disappointing that the previously announced online support hasn't actually made it into the game. Up to four players can do battle on a single console, though, and since the action is turn-based you'll only need a single Wii Remote to pass around.

In addition to the regular versus battles, which can be played with any combination of AI- and player-controlled enemies, Worms: A Space Oddity boasts a mission-based single-player mode that's quite unlike anything that has appeared in the series previously. The story mode will see you traveling between six different planets and completing missions on them that, while still requiring plenty of weapon use, task you with completing objectives a little more imaginative than simply killing the enemy before they kill you. In one of the early missions that we attempted, for example, we needed to retrieve an item that was hidden away in an underground cave. Without any digging tools in our inventory (don't worry--they're still in the game, along with girders, teleporters, and such), our only way in was to use weapons that, as we learned the hard way, the item we had been sent to retrieve was not immune to.

Playing through each of the six planets will unlock a minigame that you need to beat before you can progress to the next one. We haven't had an opportunity to check any of these out for ourselves just yet, unfortunately, but we're told that they include Space Invaders and 1942 clones as well as a whack-a-mole variant and a boat race. All of the minigames will support multiple players once you've unlocked them.

Worms: A Space Oddity is currently scheduled for release in North America on March 10 and in Europe and Australia on March 27 and 28, respectively. We look forward to bringing you more information on the game once we've had a chance to spend some quality time with it.