Welcome to Wormology 101. You can skip this if you’re already familiar with the Worms franchise and phenomenon. Go on, hop on to the next paragraph. We’ll catch up with you. Have they gone? Good. Right then, Worms is probably the most fun a small group of people and twenty invertebrates can have. It has been around for over a decade and shows no signs of ever going away. The basic premise is simple. Small armies of worms face off in a 2D environment. Turns are taken, and when it is your go, one of your worms will have a chance to take a shot at an opponent. In its time limit, your little wriggly soldier can move or jump into an advantageous position, and then select one of dozens of weapons to fire. From grenades to bazookas, banana bombs to rabid sheep, there’s a massive arsenal that can blow holes in your enemy, your terrain or, if you’re unlucky, yourself. A simple, addictive exercise in strategic destruction that must be on its fiftieth sequel by now. Just to bring you completely up-to-date, the first version of this game for the PSP and DS was called Worms: Open Warfare. Now then, let’s rejoin the rest of the class.
To say that Worms: Open Warfare was disappointing would be unfair. As a game of Worms, it performed perfectly well. Unfortunately, it was released in 2005, ten years after Worms had already been perfected on the Amiga. Porting an ancient title over to the latest and greatest handheld is a lame thing to do. Yes, it added a nice touchscreen menu and a few graphical ‘improvements’, but really it added nothing to the gameplay of the first Worms title, despite the fact that the franchise had been improved a dozen times since on a hundred other formats. Not to mention that you can pick up a Worms bundle on the PC for £4.99 nowadays, which offers the same game and more for £20 less than the DS was asking.
Luckily, when it came to producing another Worms game for the DS, Team 17 and Two Tribes listened to the hordes of aggravated Worms fans. While they could have disowned the ‘Open Warfare’ moniker and begun again with a fresh new name (‘Worms: Dirt Soldiers’ would be my choice, because it’s DS and all that), they decided to add a sequel to the series, and cram it full of what the punters demanded. Well, you could call it a sequel. I would rather use the term ‘correction’. Worms: Open Warfare 2 aims to give us such a vast improvement, such a wealth of new options, game modes, unlockables and extras that the shockwave it leaves on our collection will wipe its predecessor off our shelves and, in true Men In Black style, erase its very memory from our brains.
Oddly enough, the two best aspects from the first game have been removed from the second. The biggest noticeable difference is the change in control method – Open Warfare had a menu on the bottom screen and the main playing field on the top, and Open Warfare 2 swaps this out for a bigger playing area with a menu that can be brought on the screen with the touch of a button. This can take some getting used to and is not as instantly accessible as before, but still functions perfectly well. The most annoying alteration is the lack of a decent Single Card Download play. Only two players can face off against each other now, when it used to be possible to play with up to four with just one card. That was the only real strength of the first game. Still, there is a Hot Seat mode, which means you can play with your friends by passing your DS console around, but this is awkward and, if you're as protective as myself, potentially fatal to clumsy friends.
Luckily, these are minor points when you compare them to how much Two Tribes have added to the game. There’s a whole smorgasbord of new game modes. First of all, try a massively expanded single player game – an entire campaign (with a storyline and movies and everything) serves as the meat of it all. Your team will fight their way through dozens of customised levels, each one presenting a different kind of scenario to wage war against. Add to that a seperate Challenge mode that sets you a series of puzzles based on manipulating your weapons, items and surroundings to deal with tricky situations (a cool twist on the game's format which ends massive longevity to the game), plus a DS exclusive Laboratories mode (more blowing into the microphone and other DS oddities, but a lot more fun in a similar nature to the Challenges), and you've got more than a few hours of new Worm goodness. Mmm... worms.
Everybody knows that Worms will always be a multiplayer game at heart, and this is more than addressed here. Online play is now a main feature. It was a crime that this was left out before, really. There are new modes to try out too. Your armies can defend their bases in Forts Mode, race each other to the finish line in Race Mode, or just blast each over to bits. As if all these new modes weren’t enough, there is a comprehensive Level Editor (and yes, levels can be sent across to your friend’s DS), a Team Editor and more medals and points to collect than you can shake a worm’s severed corpse at. Graphics have been enhanced and a generous pile of new weapons and items dolloped onto the plate.
The control system has been altered, but it’s hard to tell if that means it’s been improved. I personally prefer the control method of the old game (menu on bottom, action on top) but I understand that this isn’t for everyone’s liking. Unlike the first game, this will keep you going for longer than one evening, which is literally how long it took to complete. The multiplayer mode, when you have just the one copy of the game, is disappointing but all your friends should have copies of this bad boy anyway, so it’s a small issue. This is a definitive version of a classic game, which should sit on top of your party game pile along with Twister, Charades, Pac-Man Vs. and the Saturn’s Bomberman. Everybody needs Worms in their life, and Team 17 have finally managed to put together the finest version yet. But isn't it time to quit?
