Worms: ReloadedFollow

I purchased Worms: Reloaded on Steam yesterday and beat the single player campaign today. I'm rather disappointed, and upon reviewing Team 17's product record I'm even further disappointed.

Worms Reloaded is in every way inferior to Worms: Armageddon, the game Team 17 produced in 1999. There are fewer weapons, fewer worms (max of four), more limited options, fewer levels in the campaign, a horrible menu system. A lot of this might be due to Worms Reloaded being based on an Xbox Live arcade version that itself was based on Worms 2--one of the oldest Worms' games. This combines the limitations of the solid but limited worms 2 with control schemes setup for consoles. The game is still traditional Worms fun, but there are better worms games and this certainly didn't revive the series.

Perhaps another aspect of being based off a console version is that the majority of the campaign is ridiculously easy. The first 24 of 30 levels I was able to play through without a single loss or restart. The "reach the teleporter" levels were overly generous with time, and I sometimes only needed a quarter of the allotment to reach the goal. Worms: Armageddon had a far more difficult and challenging campaign; it was Nintendo hard.

However on level 25 the difficulty suddenly sky rockets. Perfect aim and timing has been typical of AI worms in all the games, but beginning at level 25 you're suddenly up against bots that outnumber you 4:1, have perfect aim and timing, and with often extremely disadvantageous terrain. Worms: Armageddon was ridiculous hard, but the fights were somewhat fair. In the last six levels of Reloaded there are battles that can only be one by abusing the AI.

Here is a scene from Mission 25, and is an example of how ridiculous and unfair the last few levels can be. A little explanation, you play two 150 hp worms at the bottom in a cavern against 8 50 hp worms. You go first with your worm on the right. Assuming you attack the blue worm right in front of you and retreat back to the left side, the following clip will always happen. Immediately after you a blue worm at the very top goes. Providing you do not provide him a better target or assault him directly, he will provide to drop a grenade straight down which happens to bounce sideways to the left and be caught in a little notch directly against your second worm. You cannot defend against this other than directly going for him at the start. A girder cannot stop it, as there happens to be TWO spots he can drop the terrain against to make it go flying sideways and catch up against you.

I did find it hilarious to go into some of the last few levels and just stare at the screen for a minute thinking "What the fudge do you expect me to do?"

Edited, Oct 5th 2010 1:48am by Allegory

I have one of the worms games for DS. I haven't played it a lot lately but I know some of the missions I'm getting to are pretty hard. Like my four 100 health worms against their four 200 health worms. Where my worms are strategically places right on the edge of the map where 2 can easily be blown into the water by the rockets before I even get to move him.

I'm sure they are a lot more fun to play against people. Such as some of those 2D tank games.