You’d expect that after the damage the 3D games have done to Worms’ reputation that the developer would set about providing the best 2D Worms experience possible, but they’ve really failed to take advantage of the Nintendo DS’s strengths when producing Worms: Open Warfare. But neglect for the advantages provided by the DS’s touch screen and online play functions are really just the beginning. It seems like the developer felt like they only needed to have the game look and play a bit like Worms, because it’s nowhere near as cohesive or finely tuned as its PC predecessors.
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Looking for treasure
For those who’ve never played the series before, Worms (at its most basic level) pits teams of worms against each other, gives them a big arsenal of weapons, and places them on fully destructible terrain. From there, players must use their wits to outplay their opponents, taking advantage of external factors like changes in the wind, the rise of the tide, weapon and item drops, and tunnelling. The game is best played with a group of friends – the game has been designed to be very accessible, and it’s quite easy to get people who don’t play many videogames to join in.
Worms: Open Warfare has a considerably lean weapons menu when compared to Worms Armageddon, with only 20 weapons available for use in the slaughter. The most annoying thing here is that the weapons are very difficult to use effectively due to malfunctioning stylus control and physics which really don’t reflect the quality seen in earlier Worms titles. The camera zooms in a little too closely, and navigation of the game’s rather large maps feels quite clunky – this hampers gameplay far more than one would expect.
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Maybe it's the version of the game that has a soul?
Players are expected to balance their use of both stylus controls and traditional controls, which results in a convoluted mess – especially when you take into consideration that you have to fiddle with these controls while adhering to the game’s time system (which seemed generous in previous Worms games). It can be tough to detect where your worm actually is on the map thanks to the crappy map controls, and the subtle nuances in external factors like the wind seem to have been lost in the conversion, making the game really difficult to play. Worms: Open Warfare never quite feels like it is playing right – the worms are constantly getting stuck on bits of scenery you’d expect to get over with ease, the weapons don’t work the way they should and the worms just don’t move the way you expect them to.
The game has a fairly limited array of modes, with the usual neglected single player challenge mode, the random battle and the more customisable battle. The AI opponents are for more talented than you’ll ever be, which is a right old pain in the butt. Perhaps more disappointing is the fact that the Worms: Open Warfare’s multiplayer options are so scant. Basic support is offered for up to 4 players, but you’ll find that you can only use your customised teams if everyone has a copy of the cart, which really goes against the easy accessibility of the franchise.
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Not too easy to see what's going on here
Perhaps even more disappointing is the rather lacking presentation of Worms: Open Warfare. There are far too many graphical glitches to mention – backgrounds flicker in and out, the character sprites are blurry, chunky and a bit pixelated. The worms here have absolutely none of the charm that the franchise is famous for. Even worse is the fact that the game fails to maintain a smooth frame rate throughout the experience – it’s not like Worms is a taxing game to run, but it shows that the developer really just wanted to rush the game to market as quickly as possible. Fortunately, the character voices and soundtrack are intact, but it doesn’t really make much of a difference.
Ultimately, Worms: Open Warfare feels really undercooked. Everybody knows that there’s potential for a good Worms game on the DS – you’ve got the Wi-Fi online play, stylus allowing for mouse-like precision and all of that jazz, but Open Warfare doesn’t exactly make good use of any of these features. Regardless of that, the biggest insult is that the title can’t even hold up against its ageing predecessors – it really feels like the product was slapped together and shipped out as cheaply as possible.
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