Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Highly addictive"

For the uninitiated, Worms is a turn based combat game that set itself apart from the pack in the mid '90s by injecting some lighthearted humor and giving players a range of imaginative weapons. The game cycles through turns, allotting players a short period of time to reposition their worm, select a weapon, and then fire it upon their enemies. Whichever worm team is left standing at the end is the winner. It's simple, but the presentation around the best of the Worms games is what has made all the difference. Weapon lists, level editors, online play, and exhaustive means to customize your game turned the simple combat into a classic.

Most of what made the previous Worms games great has found its way into Team 17s latest entry into the series. The funny little sound bytes are there, though their selection isn't as varied as one might hope. The nice weapons are in, but the best ones are missing. There is four player online or offline play, but the net code seems a bit buggy with dropped games a regular occurrence. We hope you're seeing the pattern being laid out here.

Thankfully, the gameplay is still as solid as ever. Planning out attacks to link explosions together that tear apart the land never stops being enjoyable, especially with the fun animations and sound samples that accompany them. The gameplay is slow and deliberate, a style that some may find a bore, but it's a formula that works in a way that is instantly endearing.

There's a single player game included that contains a tutorial, 20 challenges that get increasingly…challenging, and an option for some regular skirmishes. Going through it can provide a decent amount of fun, but playing against the CPU often feels unfair and well too slow to stay interesting for very long.