Is that worm in your pocket?
The more careful readers might have noticed that I mentioned destructible scenery just now, a feature which has always been a key part of Worms gameplay. This is in full effect in Worms 4: Mayhem with everything being destroyable, and I mean everything. All of the games take place on islands, so the option so blowing worms off the island is there if you can do it, as water means instant death, but more importantly, with the deformable terrain, the water will fill up the holes you blow making handy little death traps for unsuspecting worms.
But don’t go making fancy plans to blow out all the ground floor walls of a building and watch it collapse on the poor worm within, the landscape doesn’t work that way. If you’ve played the older, side on 2D versions of worms, you’ll know that blasting a tunnel through the landscape didn’t mean that everything fell down on top of you and the same is true here. I’m left wondering if this is a good thing or a bad thing as I’m sure being able to collapse a building or a rock formation on enemy worms would have added a nice tactical edge. Maybe next time, eh?
Dedicated Worms fans will remember that the core gameplay focused on multiplayer action and the same is true here. Team 17 have made a concession to the Billy-no-mates of this world with a 25 mission single player campaign with a storyline thrown in. Using loads of cut-scenes, which involves lots of reading, the single player missions are almost like one long tutorial. They’re a fun diversion but still nothing compared to the multiplayer sections.
True to form, the multiplayer is where the most fun is at and Worms 4: Mayhem has that by the bucketload. As you’d expect from Worms, pretty much everything is customisable, from the number of rounds to how long they last through to the landscape you’ll play on and the weapons you’ll use. Now you can be forgiven for thinking that you’d need more than one controller for multiplayer on the same screen but this isn’t the case. This is turn based combat, after all, so why would you need more than one controller? This makes Worms 4: Mayhem a cracking game to take to a mate’s house as you know he’ll have that one controller you need and after a few sly shandies the fun can commence!
