The Worms series has been around for twenty-one years and chances are you’ve played at least one of them. It’s amazing how Team 17 has managed to keep the series alive year after year, I mean, the Worms series is older than I am and people get bored of me after a couple of hours so just how has Worms survived for so long?
Over time, the Worms games have kinda just been there. They come out every year or two to very little fanfare—apart from when it turned 3D and everyone got confused and angry for a bit—and then a few people play them until the next one comes out to the same degree, maybe you’ll even get a Worms game free with Playstation Plus or Games with Gold and then you and your friends play it for a bit until you move onto something you genuinely enjoy.
For the most part, Worms W.M.D is just another Worms game. It features the same customization, same teams and voices that you’ve come to know and love/despise, most of the same weapons and pretty much the same turn-based combat. From the start, Worms W.M.D rests in the familiar zone of every other game in the series with the same fiddly, awkward grappling hook that you can never quite use right.
W.M.D does, however, shake things up more than you would think. To make the game pace a bit faster than your typical Worms game, W.M.D adds vehicles into the mix along with crafting. Vehicles can drop randomly during the match, or are on the map when the match starts, and they are powerful machines that strike fear into your annelid foes.
Out of the two additions, vehicles are the most rounded. While vehicles can do enormous amounts of damage—such as the helicopter that’s able to fly across the map, mowing down worms and blowing up barrels with its chaingun—nine times out of ten both teams will have a fair amount of access to them to keep teams balanced. Crafting, however, is where the balance ends. Like when previous games would drop randomly generated crates of weapons that you would have to collect, this time, those crates are very rare and instead you find crates full of materials to make the weapons that you want.
During turns, you can open your weapon grid, move over to the crafting section and dismantle or create whatever weapon you can, provided you have the resources for it. Whilst crafting isn’t a feature I feel comfortable having in a Worms game—as I feel some of the best moments in Worms comes from the luck-of-the-draw—it does allow Team 17 to introduce variations on the weapons we know.
My favorite weapon, the concrete donkey, can now be crafting as either its original form or the angry concrete donkey which glows hot red and acts differently from the base weapon. Some projectiles have cluster variant, the training version of the shotgun has a laser sight, every weapon has variations for you to craft and kill with.
Graphically, Worms W.M.D is the best so far with gorgeous backgrounds that look just like a painting and extremely vibrant effects for all of the weapons. It’s still a simplistic looking game, however, with the new vehicles keeping the childlike design of the games weapons and characters. This translates down to the unlockable customization options that you can get which includes new tombstones for your deceased wormy brethren, new victory dances and more.
You can unlock these items by playing through the campaign, challenge mode or even multiplayer although the authentic Worms experience only really occurs when you’re playing local—or online—multiplayer with a group of friends, the same as Worms has always been. Playing Worms with randoms online is nowhere near as interesting or funny as when you play it with friends as the humor has always come from your friends horribly messing up by, say, trying to use a grappling hook but flying off into the water and drowning. Worms’ sadistic humor fails to shine through when you don’t know the person on the other end and it ends up just feeling bland and stale compared to those rare times you’ll play with friends.
Summary
Worms W.M.D is just another Worms game. While this addition includes vehicles and crafting elements, Worms W.M.D is near identical to the same twenty-one-year-old formula that Team 17 have been chugging out since the 90s. I was expecting more changes but they’re on the right track.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.