Since 1996, Team 17 has been bringing us one Worms game after another, proving once again that you really can milk a good idea to death. The various 2d versions were solid games; simplistic yet engrossing gameplay, a nice blend of humor and cruelty that harkened back to the golden days of cartoons, and tons of destructive weapons to choose from. Each new version brought only incremental changes to the successful formula of the first game, but the recent jump in 2003 from 2d to 3d has been a flawed translation at best.
Worms 4: Mayhem is the latest 3d offering in the turn-based strategy series. In addition to the classic multiplayer team vs. team play, the single player campaign features objective based missions and several levels in five themed zones- Jurassic, Arabian, Construction, Wild West, and Camelot. So is Worms 4 as addictive as its two dimensional predecessors? Let's find out:
Something was lost along the way when Worms added a dimension. The cute little 2d cartoon worms now look like they would be right at home in a Veggie Tales movie. Every texture in the game makes everything look like it is made out of shiny plastic, and the lighting is so diffuse that everything looks flat, making distances very hard to judge. Honestly, this game would probably look better if it was cell-shaded as it would hearken back to the charm of the original games.
The environment is very blocky and barely textured. True to its roots, Worms 4 has destructible environments. Unfortunately, it looks like Team 17 faked it as bits of real estate seem to come off in predetermined chunks. Also, there is no discernible way to tell non-destructible areas from the destructible ones.
All in all, the graphics are trying real hard to be cute, but they really come off as flat and boring.
A standby in the series, the helium induced one-liners that the worms spit out on occasion can get rather repetitive. Sure, there are 40 different voice themes to choose from for your characters, but each theme has only a handful of phrases, and you will hear them several times during the course of one game. Curiously enough, they seem to have forgotten how to speak english during the cutscenes of the single player game, instead sounding like a cross between Beaker from the Muppets and a fly buzz, with subtitles providing the 'translation'.
Pretty much every sound effect has been carried over since the first game; grenades provide that familiar hollow clank as they bounce around, explosions have the same loud boom, and worms still fall in the water with that same 'ker-plunk!'. The music is light and cheery, but mostly forgettable.
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