Worms Armageddon

Pros • Terrific multiplayer, even in single-computer, “hotseat” mode • Almost every aspect of gameplay tweakable • Every last square inch of the terrain can be annihilated---like, to the point where there’s nothing left to stand on • Bright, distinctive cartoon-like graphics	Cons • None whatsoever, unless you’re the type to piss and moan about losing sleep, your job, your girlfriends, etc.
Bottom Line This vicious, colorful and goofy strategy/action title combines rock-solid gameplay, great sound, cartoonish graphics, pointless violence and some of the nastiest multiplayer action available in 1999 Worm blink big, adorable eyes. Worm slink up to segmented friend under the fluttering, surreal Starry Night skies. Worm put minigun to other worm’s midsection and BRACKABRACKABRACKA, other worm flies away and messily dies. Player grin big. Repeat as necessary. Heh.

“Don’t futz with the formula”---a dictum so simple a worm could understand it...so simple, it seems, that a game producter could understand it, and thank the Great Good Annelid: Worms Armageddon takes the sleeper-hit-of-the-year gameplay from Worms 2, adds a few new weapons and features and----this is the great bit----doesn’t screw anything up. It may look cute, cartoony and kiddiefied, but don’t be fooled, bwana-----Worms Armageddon is pure, distilled joyous evil in bright Mardi Gras colors, a polychromatic wad of Willy Wonka silliness concealing a crystalline core of Jacob’s-Ladder, methamphetamine psychosis. Cute as hell, though. What else? Only one of the most original, addictive and downright funny strategy games available, not to mention an unforgettable multiplayer experience. One to six players control teams of big-eyed, animated worms out to destroy each other for no terribly apparent reason, with extreme prejudice, and by any means necessary. Guns, grenades, axes, combustibles, napalm, nukes....they got everything here but a shaker of salt, babycakes. Or is that slugs? Nomatternobig: We got enough sealed family-sized cans of whoop-ass here to ride out a thermonuclear war. Think you got a can-opener, tough guy or gal?

Combining real-time and turn-based schemes, WA allows each player a set amount of time (usually a minute) to move his/her worms one by one in rotation, select a weapon, and open fire; . The little guys use a plethora of hand-held weapons---pistols, Uzis, shotguns, bazookas----as well as more drastic military measures such as air strikes and gas attacks, all the while shouting out battle-cries like “victory!” and “Sir, yes sir!” in their tiny, piping voices---indeed, each worm-team can be customized with one of 50 unique “voice sets”; your worms can bark orders like boot-camp Army grunts, or rattle off barely-understandable Scottish witticisms, or drop cool one-liners like a Bond-esque international worm of mystery. The core attack system here is a very advanced version of an ancient computer game called Artillery, wherein players attacked by lobbing arcing, ballistic artillery shells; both angle of launch and wind direciton must be accounted for, except here the possible consequences are legion---a badly-aimed grenade can bounce back to land right in front of you; napalm attacks can drift in the wind onto friendly soldiers; an unseen land-mind can send your own worm’s carcass crashing into still more explosives, setting off a chain reaction; and each increasingly-bizarre attack (a rain of flaming sheep, for just one example) gouges and pits the landscape, slowly reducing the entire battlefield to cratered ruins.

A ‘hotseat’ multiplay option means multiple gamers can play while seated at the same computer, and this newest incarnation of the Worms universe also offers training excercises, mission-based battles (with specific objectives rather than random killing), and customization features for almost every aspect of the game. The Newtonian nature of the game---grenades roll and bounce in unpredectible ways, explosions send land-mines skittering and clinking to land where they will---truly brings out the vindictive side of a gamer: It’s cool to blow a worm to Kingdom Come with a stick of dynamite, but it’s even more of an insult to simply poke him boink in the eye and send him staggering backward off a cliff to his watery doom (worms can’t swim). It may look goofy---and it is---but Worms Armageddon is a gaming masterpiece.

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