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W.M.D's return of the series to 2D is GORGEOUS--but maybe TOO gorgeous: big white flashes from all explosions make the action hard to watch--as does the zooming and the shockingly bad 2D camera--and the landscapes are SO detailed and lushly colored that I started feeling eyestrain just trying to pick out the little worms amid all the loveliness.
W.M.D's vehicles, turrets, and forts feel a bit unbalancing sometimes, but do offer new vistas of tactical options; I especially had fun--off camera--with a little VS CPU fort match once, storming the opposing team's pirate ship. The crafting of super weapons and so forth probably offers new tactical stuff too, but I haven't got it quite figured out really, and it feels stressful to have to manage--even during the opponent's turn--on top of the rest of the game.
W.M.D (and Battlegrounds, probably, I dunno) has a longish Campaign series of pre-set matches to play in single-player, but for actual random landscape matches, all you've got in single play is manually configured VS CPU team matches; and while you can choose from five rank insignia for the AI teams (I tried this later), it doesn't really seem to make them smarter. The worst thing in single play, though, is that the AI worms just take a really dang long time to take their turns! And they aren't exactly geniuses all the time, when they finally do make their move. It's like Team 17 wanted to simulate a human player's dithering and dawdling. Really makes the game feel slow, esp in contrast to Worms Armageddon, where the AI may be even slightly less bright, but at least goes about its annelid violence briskly.
The landscape generation in W.M.D IS really good though, with nicely tactical islands and caves cropping up all the time.
Still, I think I'll stick with the insta-loading, much faster and easier to watch Worms Armageddon, which also has far more extensive and I think better-tuned single-player random match play options--at least until I find myself needing more tactical options; but they weren't exactly hurting for those, even back in 1999! |
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Campaign is rife with cultural stereotypes, and the occasional animated interludes blare way too loudly, like they're ignoring the game's volume setting. But the mission themselves are actually pretty fun; there are detailed tasks to accomplish OTHER than killing the enemy worms, but those are optional, thankfully. I don't know if I'm missing unlocking even more stuff by not doing them, but if so, I'm willing to make that sacrifice.
The tiny DM set-up seems promising; the landscape generation in the game is great, and the AI can't waste AS much time if you limit the round duration and turn off the "hot seat" swap time (why does the CPU use that, anyway? : P). And you can even set your scheme to turn off replays, yay!
Something about the game--besides the white flashes from explosions, I think--is still bothering my eyes; maybe it's trying to read the smallish, low-contrast health numbers above the worms' heads, I dunno. Wish they had made the game perfectly playable without zoom at 1080p, like Worms Armageddon is. |
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| | | You can use YouTube's chapter navigation to jump to: a) Worms W.M.D on PS4 hanging the two times I crafted a high explosive and threw it in the 14th Campaign mission, "Fur the Win," b) the two times a close-range shotgun shot went harmlessly through a worm's head, c) the four times I died off the same dang cliff, and d) the time I rebounded a banana bomb off a waist-high ledge:
I tried it again briefly today and couldn't seem to reproduce the hang throwing crafted explosives in that mission, so...dunno. : P
Pretty sure the banana bomb boomeranging on me was because I was right up against a tiny little slope--and the bottom of the banana just caught it right at the start of the throw?
If you frame-by-frame the shotgun shots you can see they go directly through the worm's head--without hitting them. I guess they really ARE empty-headed! I had to aim at the lower body to register a hit.
There was also that stupid pixel getting in the way of jumping nearly every time I tried to traverse to the right side of the upper area. 'p'
I keep forgetting which button is the jump button, and I've forgotten how the mech's glide works. : P
(I said in an earlier episode, probably on Worms Battlegrounds, that having Jump on Square rather than X, like the previous Worms games did it, was all wrong and not how platformers did it, but I don't actually play platformers so what do I know? And if you think about it, Super Mario Bros. basically had Jump on Square so you could hold X (if these were NES pad equivalents) with the base of your thumb to run. But I kept getting the buttons mixed up in those earlier Worms games, too! (In W.M.D it defaults to Square = Fire and X = Jump, but you can switch them back to the reverse, "Classic" arrangement if you want.)) |
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| | | The Campaign scenarios were getting kind of interesting, like the lone team worm in the middle of the mountain dropping airstrikes and bunker busters in Mount-A-Strike, or having to run a gauntlet of British bobbies and automated defense turrets (but is it just me, or is fighting automated defense turrets one of the lamest things in gaming? : PPP) to get to a special win point in Enemy at the Crates.
But after a three-hour session my eyeballs were killing me and a medium-strength headache was threatening. I think most of the landscape types are just too darn bright--and the explosion flashes aren't helping, of course; couple that with all kinds of transparent overlays, minute detail, fancy color wash-out gradients over everything, tiny, middle-color fonts, and it's kind of an eyestrain nightmare.
Think I'll try sticking to VS CPU on China maps and see how my eyeballs deal with that--it's the only not-bright-ish landscape type, and seems okay on quick testing... |
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| | | | Actually nuts to that, it's still killing my eyes. : PP |
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