Wow, it’s hard to believe that the Worms’s series is almost two decades old now which is an incredibly depressing thought when I think of how many iterations of this game I have played since that very first title back in 1995 on the Amiga. For fans of that very first game they’ll be happy to know very little has changed in the next-gen debut of the Worms series. However, anyone hoping that the series has taken some huge new step may be disappointed to learn that Worms Battlegrounds feels much like any other Worms title over the last two decades, specifically the 2013 PC exclusive title Worms: Clan Wars, of which this feels like a console port.
The concept for Worms Battlegrounds is the same tried and tested method we’ve all come to love from the series for, eliminate enemy worms with the arsenal of weapons at your disposal and as with some of the modern Worms titles, we are given a story mode to battle through. 25 unique levels require you to navigate each stage and using only the tools at your disposal along the way to do so. It will test your skills and will require a lot more strategy on the player’s part than they may usually be used to in the standard Worms vs. Worms’s gameplay all while being narrated by Katherine Parkinson (Jen from the IT Crowd).
As expected, the story mode has a silly plot requiring the player to retrieve the stone carrot before an evil worm called Lord Crowley-Mesmer uses it to brainwash all of the worms in the world. New to the story modes are checkpoints where you can restart if you get killed or stupidly jump off a cliff into the water below, and traps and contraptions that activate using buttons. It’s a fairly long story mode for a Worms’s title and should take you a few hours to complete.
Once you’ve finished the story there’s an additional singleplayer mode called Worms Ops. This is a kind of challenge mode, allowing players to hone their skills with certain weapons and having to kill the enemy team with very limited resources in the fastest time possible. It’s short, sweet but fairly enjoyable and can help you learn how to use certain weapons you may not usually choose in the standard game.
The AI is a much improved aspect of the game this time round. The CPU controlled worms actually feel more like actual players than ever before and will make human-like errors. With previous games they can be incredibly accurate, for example throwing a grenade with utmost precision when being able to wedge it between your worm and a hill. But at other times they can be just as stupid as their human counterparts, blowing themselves, by accidentally overshooting and hitting their team mates or just lacking any accuracy what-so-ever. It’s an addition to the game I’ve wanted for years as the CPU’s were usually far too accurate even on the easier setting.
Now that we’ve dealt with Worms Battlegrounds singleplayer, let’s get down to the Worms’s series bread and butter, the multiplayer. When all said and done, the Worms’s series has always been about its fantastic multiplayer and that is just as true here. First up you’ve got your standard versus mode, take on a team of CPU worms or your friends via local-play on your console. Now on to the online modes, which give you very little in terms of variety and options. Start a Quick Match or Ranked Match to move up the leaderboard, or a Player match where you can choose your own set of rules, but winning and losing doesn’t affect the leaderboard.
Pretty standard stuff so far. Then we come on the Battlegrounds mode, a new mode to the Worms’s series. This is basically a clan mode. Choose a clan name, emblem and invite friends to join your clan and you can face other clans to find out who is the best team. These 4 modes make up the online aspect of the game and it’s lacking any real depth. The only really differences in these modes are the names that each carry, as they all result in the same factor. They all end up as a team of Worms versus another team of Worms. This is great, but why there needs to be 4 modes of the same thing I’m not quite sure.
Multiplayer is a fantastic, frantic aspect of Worms Battlegrounds and I’ve had no issues at all with the online modes. Nobody has rage quit on me and I’ve had no lag. You can set different rules from the length of time players have to act, to how many crate drops you get, to how many worms each team has to the base weapons everybody starts with. You’re also treated to a handy and easy to use map editor to make your own fun maps to take on other Worms players. Engaging in online Worms’s warfare with other players is unlike any other game I have experienced. You’ll be trying to use your own strengths to give yourself an edge over your opponent who will be doing the same thing.
Maybe you’re terrific at placing grenade across the map, but maybe they’re brilliant at using the wind to their advantage and curving bazooka shots around a cliff face to hit you. Or maybe you’re both terrible and end up killing most of your own team leaving it as 1 vs. 1 and you’re just hoping they make a mistake before you do. If you’ve played Worms online before, then you’ll be right at home here.
Though there are a few issues I have with Worms Battlegrounds. First, and most important to me, is the weapons User Interface. It’s great that they have separated weapons and tools in the menu, so you clearly know which area has what you’re look for, but the icon that highlights what item you have selected is hard to see and disguises itself in the menu background. It can take a few seconds of flicking the analogue stick around to see where the icon is. I’m not sure why they didn’t just choose a contrasting colour to make it more obvious for what you had highlighted. It’s a bad design choice in my opinion and I’m unsure of how it made it through to the console release.
There are also a few bugs in the game. Rare occurrences, but bugs all the same. Occasionally my weapons menu wouldn’t pop up meaning I had to restart the game. Sometimes in the story it would refuse to progress after I’d done the task required. Enemies would sometimes not complete their move in the story meaning again that I’d have to reset my progress. These are small bugs, but happen enough to cause me to get annoyed.
All in all, Worms Battlegrounds is an enjoyable but rather unspectacular addition to the series. For the few welcome additions it does provide there just aren’t enough of them to make this feel like a brand new Worms’s title. But 19 years in and Worms is still a fun game overall, if it is a series that appeals to you then you owe it to yourself to pick it up. If you’re a fan of the series, but wanting a new Worms game with some kind of evolution to its formula then I’m afraid you’ll have to keep waiting.
Worms Battlegrounds is out now for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 via digital download or as a retail release.