Worms Armageddon

"Nice idea, but lacks something...."

Don't get me wrong, this game is great. Me and my buddies would stay up all night and play this addictive kill fest of critters. The weapons and powerups are exceptional and vary extremely, and the levels give you hours and hours of playable terrain to envelope others in terror and destruction. Ninja ropes and kamikaze worms add a sense of humor to the fun. Also watching the stupid CPU worms obliterate themselves and their own teammates is most of the times hilarious to watch.

Weapons such as the Super sheep, banana bomb, and the well known (from Monty Python and the Holy Grail), severely damaging Holy Grenade add to the the excitement of the battle.

This game also encourages mathematical thinking, by involving blast radius, velocity, and timing. Military tactics are brought out also in the use of taking turns, deploying soldiers, and conserving ammo and worms, as well as health. Strategy is stressed in the single player missions as well as in the multiplayer death match battles. Arranging worms and using certain weapons and other various items at specific times builds thought processing and tactical formations.

The graphics are average, especially for the Play Station, and the options and game choices are numerous to the point of infinite gaming freedom.

But it seems this great game is lacking something necessary to make it an acme of PS battle games. This something is STORYLINE. Although the single player missions are fun and later on challenging, not to mention there are many of them, they still are missing the basic fundamentals of a good story.

A game as fun and exciting as this one needs an encouraging storyline to propel it forward. It should be modeled after a historic war or battle, such as world war 1 or 2 or the great Punic Wars of Carthage and Rome. I could almost completely imagine the game shaped after one of these great wars, maybe even the Peloponnesian Wars of ancient Greece. Battles like Marathon and the prominent Thermopylae can be formed in any well informed video gamers mind.

Overall, I deducted two points from the game's score because of lack of storyline. I would quickly and easily become bored with the single player missions after just a few attempts. Now I usually only play the multiplayer death match mode when my friends come over, if we even play Worms Armageddon at all, now with all the new first person shooter games and other exciting types springing into stores across the world.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 10/28/03