IMDb RATING
8.1/10
1.4K
YOUR RATING
Teams of worms armed to the teeth with the most advanced weaponry (including banana bombs and exploding sheep) battle in a crazy tournament.Teams of worms armed to the teeth with the most advanced weaponry (including banana bombs and exploding sheep) battle in a crazy tournament.Teams of worms armed to the teeth with the most advanced weaponry (including banana bombs and exploding sheep) battle in a crazy tournament.
Storyline
Did you know
- ConnectionsFeatured in Troldspejlet: Episode #20.12 (1999)
Featured review
95% -- the pinnacle of Team17 and artillery games
PROS
CONS
CONCLUSION: Thanks to the cartoony charms of worms at comically mischievous war using whatever inane weapons, real or seemingly conventional or just outright ludicrous, and lacking common sense and to its huge customizability, Worms Armageddon stands as the best Worms game and continues to be the most successful artillery game, as well as being one of the greatest games out there.
- If you are new to artillery games, they are turn-based multiplayer games that involve each player controlling a unit and using strategy and firing on the opponent's units. In Worms Armageddon, the units are the titular worms, and the whole scenario is absolutely hilarious. It is a cartoon war similar wherein every worm is irritable and with voices distortedly pitched about two octaves higher than the typical human voice-similar to an irritated parrot talking and an actual mouse trying to speak-and me judging them by their actions, they believe that the first and foremost solution to every conflict is war and vengeance. Indeed, as the lyrics indicate, the worms "live to fight", and they "fight until the end." The war itself in this game is not at all traditional. Instead, the worms use a vast variety of arsenel of 65 weapons or tools (up from Worms 2's 48), with weapon classes consisting of missiles and mortars; grenades and the destructive banana bomb and Monty Python and the Holy hand grenade; rifles, machine guns, and archers' bows; martial arts and suicidal methods; explosives and hazards; aero-strikes; construction tools and the baseball bat (as if the worms were already weightless); athletic devices; animals and people with their own function, such as a skunk for poisoning worms and poisoning the poisoned (poisoning them further) to cost them some health per turn, a mole for digging, Super Sheep as an animal superhero, and the inexplicably extremely explosive old woman; weapons of mass destruction such as the armageddon, Indian nuclear testing for poisoning all worms in the battlefield, the concrete donkey falling from the sky, the scale of justice for equalizing all the worms' health, and freezing the player's worms to keep them undamaged; pyro-weapons; utility weapons for making mobilization easier such as enabling low gravity for the rest of the turn; and others. Aside from that, depending on the defined game rules, there are hazards randomly scattered on the landscape, in two types: as oil drums and land mines. Also depending on the rules, there may be a weapons crate, a utilities crate, or a health crate deployed randomly after a turn, and the player can either collect them to his or her advantage or destroy them to deprive the opposing team of resources or damage them further. The utility crates give the player utilities or add a twist to the battlefield as by amplifying all the destruction properties of weapons or hazards (e.g. explosion radius, damage). Evidently are numerous references to pop culture (Star Wars, the story of Noah and the Ark and global warming when a game reaches "sudden death" mode and the water rises, the English monarchy), as well as terrible puns, that add further humor to the game.
- As you may have realized, the concept is absolutely non-sensical, but the gameplay is a combination of that and nuclear fun. Like Worms 2, it has cute cartoon graphics, intuitive physics/mechanics, the ability to set our own game rules, and everything that made the predecessor good (except for cutscenes), as well as the main and traditional goal: kill all the opposing worms by reducing their health to 0 or sinking them in the hazardous water and survive in the end. Unlike Worms 2, Worms Armageddon improved team selection by allowing a particular number of works on a certain team before each match, as well as adding a health handicap or benefit to the teams. It also makes use of a higher sound definition, and the audio sounds just as good and cartoony as their old counterparts. Since the updates, graphics are superior over its predecessors, utilizing the 8-bit palette that is then converted via a software renderer to display them as 32-bit graphics, and also since the updates, maps in the game can be normal-sized (classic) or-let me spell it out for you-H-U-G-E, huge as Godzilla, with maximum map dimensions being nearly 800 times the original limits! With an expanded arsenel, the game allows for an even wider range of tactical strategies. Be creative in setting traps, interacting with the environment and its contents and physics, and causing massive damage; send your foes flying off-screen; or treasonously sacrifice your own worms to prevent the other team's victory. The physics are so intuitive that the player finds launching wind-affected bazookas based on gravity, launch power corresponding to the gauge sound of increasing power, and the strength of wind understandable. The user-interface is also more organized and minimal while informative enough; the power gauge meter lies between the worm's weapon and the reticle, which makes more sense than the gauge at the bottom of the screen, and the reticle itself makes aiming easy, as the even perpendicular lines rotate directly adjacent to various angles. Skipping a flying object such as a missile or a worm is also tactical. The fun is mastering the physics, and if you do find yourself bored of the traditional multiplayer aspect, you can always refer to other game modes. Deathmatch is one example, where the player starts as an absolute with eight worms defeating three opponents. It starts incredibly easy, but as the player progresses, it constantly becomes more difficult with fewer friendly worms and even more enemy worms. Another example is training mode, excellent for novices who are learning the basics of the game, and for professionals looking to hone their skills. It introduces the most used weapons, explains their functionality, and other important aspects, and other training levels include shotgun ranges and courses for the ninja rope (one of the greatest weapons of the game) and Super Sheep. They all involve destroying traditional targets or old women or picking up crates within a turn time. The next game mode is missions, similar to those of Worms 2 with the objective being to kill worms or collect a crate and with scripted sequences, but this game utilizes custom maps. The last is quick play, much like a demonstration of the game.
- Obvious is that the game's biggest strength is customization. We create our own teams with all sorts of wacky user-defined names, as well as our own custom flags, custom speeches, and custom gravestones, the sprites that appear after a worm has health at 0 and subsequently explodes, as well as custom fanfares played after every round upon victory. Customize your CPU teams to either be feckless amateurs or sharpshooting snipers. Define your own game rules in almost anyway by choosing which weapons to be armed with at start and defining the power, the delay of each weapon (the number of turns to wait to use them), and the likeliness of them being in a crate; by adding additional hazards to the landscape or increasing the frequency of crate deployments; and many others. Paint and play on, or just randomly generate, your landscape with a wider range of themes to choose from. Unlike Worms 2, players can import almost anything unusual they can think of (like the White House) and play on them, the only transparency being pure black, and it is easy.
- For a game so popular, it has received updates that make this choice for any artillery game even more desirable, and it still receives periodic updates. Since those updates, the 18-worms-per-battlefield limit has been lifted so that each of the maximum of 6 teams could have up to 8 worms for a total of 48. Replays are saved for every game played (even those that are quit or incomplete), more tools for gameplay rules such as fine-tuning and adding up to 255 hazards. And as a surprise bonus for everyone, the game has since been updated with the WormKit to allow custom modules (mods) to the game.
CONS
- Sadly, despite the huge content and customization, the game could have done more to be more innovative or at the very least solve some of the issues that Worms 2 had when diverging from the original Worms. For example, I would have liked elements such as customizing the background and water for custom levels to return, as well as a less-panoramic background and layers of water (i.e. front layers moving faster than back layers as one scrolls the camera), just like the original game. However, Worms Armageddon certainly makes its predecessor look merely like a demonstration, and with the updates, this one defeats the other by a landslide. It may not even matter anymore once version 4.0 is released.
CONCLUSION: Thanks to the cartoony charms of worms at comically mischievous war using whatever inane weapons, real or seemingly conventional or just outright ludicrous, and lacking common sense and to its huge customizability, Worms Armageddon stands as the best Worms game and continues to be the most successful artillery game, as well as being one of the greatest games out there.
helpful•11
- FreeMediaKids
- Jun 21, 2018
Details
- Color
- Aspect ratio
- 4:3(original ratio)
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