WORMS: Battlegrounds Review
First off, if you're a dedicated Worms fanatic - and yes, those people exist in droves - then it's worth knowing that Worms: Battlegrounds is actually a souped-up port of the PC outing Worms: Clan Wars from 2013. That was a fine proposition by all accounts, and Battlegrounds on PS4 is unquestionably a fun game. The problem is that the Worms formula has remained (essentially) unchanged for so long that unless the blueprint has REALLY grabbed you in the past, you're unlikely to find anything in it to engage you for longer than a couple of hours, at best. However, if you're a newcomer, this is definitely a good place to start.
There's a 'Story Mode' for the first time in series history, which constitutes a fairly efficient way of getting accustomed to the game's main systems, but precious little else. Worms is still what it always has been - a platformer embellished with turn-based strategy - and the campaign adds nothing. It's just an unceremoniously daft series of monologues delivered by the IT Crowd's Katherine Parkinson, in which she plays a "crypt robber" by the name of Tara and… you can almost certainly second-guess at least twenty lame punchlines. There's a megalomaniacal villain who's out to get you - although what exactly he wants with a bunch of Slimfast slugs is anyone's guess - and in all it's just window dressing that will only go down well with very patient pre-teens.
Battlegrounds has the biggest spread of weapons ever seen in a Worms game - sixty five in total - and ten of them are brand new… unless you played Clan Wars last year, obviously. In truth these new additions are a bit of a mixed bag, but a couple of them - such as the Winged Monkey which can be sent to deploy different physics objects to trap enemies - are fresh and genuinely interesting. There's also now a teleportation device, which allows you to move around the world quickly and with a minimum of fuss… and it's a system that doesn't unbalance the flow of multiplayer matches one jot. However if you've spent the last few years mastering the Ninja Rope, you may shed a tear or two.
What this new Worms game offers is precisely what its predecessors did: a gentle, glacially-paced Sunday afternoon blast of gaming, that is still as engaging and amusing as it has ever been. There's still no fast forward button when you're playing alone - so patience is a virtue, yet again - and this is simply an old-fashioned game in all departments. The worms' new one-liners are funny more often than not (sample: "Set sail for epic fail") and having them blast from your controller is a very nice touch. The online suite is as sturdy as can be on PS4, and the deadpan slapstick animations that you occasionally see (whenever you screw up very badly) quite simply will never get old.
The Worms series has managed to maintain a solid bill of health for almost twenty busy years, but how well it performs on the new generation of consoles will be interesting to observe. It has recently seen such wide success on mobile platforms - where older players and non-gamers alike have been bitten by the bug… or worm rather - that it already has an aura similar to that of something like Bejewelled: mechanically it's near-faultless, but it's also as unambitious as can be, and DEEPLY uncool. But you can't argue with quality, and Worms: Battlegrounds delivers that facet in an admirably high capacity. Just don't expect fireworks.
7/10
Review By Chet Roivas
