If you’ve ever wasted more than an hour of your life firing away at comic annelida with your friends, then you’ve played a game in the Worms series. Up until now the series has been in 2D, with the side-scrolling type view. In these games you pit teams of cartoon worms against each other in several environments in which you destroy each other in a turn-based manner with varying weapons that range from bazooka to banana bomb and super sheep. The primary challenge of the games has always been how to dominate the terrain and use it to your advantage instead of being a victim of it.
Another major draw of the series has been the low system specifications they required. The minimum system needed for Worms World Party (The latest 2D standard Worms game) was 100Mhz processor, 32Mb RAM, and 2Mb Video RAM; a 200Mhz processor was recommended.
Being a big fan of the 2D games, I was afraid that the experience when playing Worms 3D would be less strategy and more random luck. However the excitement of having 3D-rendered characters and maps along with new options and sound packs quickly drew away any negative conjectures I had.
In the newest addition to the Worms franchise, developer Team 17 and publisher SEGA Europe teamed up to bring the popular series into the third dimension. If you visit the game’s website (http://www.worms3d.com/) you’ll immediately see their slogan, “The best things in life are three,” and truth be told, they’re right.
Installation was simple enough and I ran into no troubles. Soon I was loading up a battle on a randomly generated map against a CPU opponent. Looking around the 3D map at both your own team and the opposing forces, you quickly notice the major differences in gameplay from the originals.
The most obvious change would be in the camera system. The side-scrolling camera has been replaced by three different cameras. The first is the general worm view, where you see the worm that is active from a 3rd person perspective not far from the worm. The second is a “global view” where the camera is high above the worms and you can pivot to look around the map.
When using an active worm, you can choose the last view which changes the camera so it is that of a first person shooter. With this camera you see from the viewpoint of your worm, and you can use your mouse to aim your weapon with a crosshair.
When starting out, the camera system might seem a bit cumbersome, but it is easy to get used to. There are however two main flaws with it. The default camera is third person so when you’ve finished dishing out damage to your opponent, the camera follows your worm if you try to retreat, and doesn’t let you see what is happening to your opponent. This is mostly aggravating during a multiplayer game, as all players see what the active player sees, you never get to see if your worm died from falling off the cliff, or because of the stick of dynamite that was placed next to it. As well, when using weapons like the “air-strike and “homing pigeon,” it is often hard to select your target, especially if they’re behind a large object or in a covered area. This is a change from the gameplay of the original games because in them you could always see every worm on the map.
The mobility of each worm is controlled both through the keyboard and the direction of the camera, much like a first person shooter. You aim the camera at your destination and hold down forward. The problem with this comes when you are navigating around terrain that has many different altitudes in a very small area. The camera will often get stuck against a wall or behind an object, and it can be tricky to use the other directional keys to navigate around the different sections without falling off.
Once you’ve mastered the camera and the mobility of your worm, you still have to be good at destroying the other team. The weapons in Worms 3D are mostly the same as the previous games. The only real difference comes in the way they behave. Almost all of the weapons that have to be “launched”—bazooka, banana bomb, grenades, mortar, etc.—feel underpowered both when firing and in the damage that they do. Once again, this is a change from the original games, but one that is quickly dealt with. The third dimension plays a major role on the probability of hitting your target, due to the fact that the wind also blows in three directions.
Worms 3D is as much a single player game as it is a multiplayer game. The game ships with an extensive single player campaign based around random scenarios, which range from rescuing your captain from pirates to defending against an alien attack. This seemingly endless amount of levels is also accompanied by missions surrounding the weapons and tools in the game that test your proficiency with things like the parachute and the jetpack, as well as most of the other weapons. If you don’t like any of these choices you’re always free to challenge the bots in the game to increasingly harder matches.
The multiplayer feature is as strong in this game as it is in the others. You can challenge any combination of human players and computer players either on the same computer, across your local network, the Internet, or a mix of all three. The 3D environment does make jet packing up to your friend’s last worm and hitting them off the ledge with a baseball bat even more fun and rewarding then it was before, especially if your friend is sitting next to you for you to laugh at.
The third dimension adds an infinite number of possibilities to the game while still retaining the similar feel of the Worms franchise. Even the few gameplay details, apart from the extra dimension, that were changed, are easy to adapt to. The game does lack the tunnel systems that were always present in previous games, but it makes up for it in the infinite other ways that the terrain is formed. Team 17 has once again produced a seemingly simple game that is, above anything else, fun. Beware however, after the fifth time of hearing you say “(Something goes here)” you’re friends might start questioning your friendship.
