Worms Armageddon (1999 Video Game) User Reviews

The best game i ever played that i cant fully enjoy.

[sebastianali123 · 7/10 · 1 February 2024]

Most people know the phrase: "If you dont like the game its fine, but you have to admit it is good". I honestly never agree with that in the past, because in most cases if you dont like the game, you dont see whats so great about it. You dont see why everyone is praising it. Its a hard place to be, and no one wants anyone to ruin their "party". Criticism shouldnt be excluded for any game.... except CTR.

However Worms Armageddon teach me a hard lesson... you can still admit a game is good even if i cant like it. However, whats strange about this game is that... literally every single one love it! And say it is very accessible! And say is the only good game in the series! No no and no. Even if i admit a game is good but i dont like it, is not just for my tastes. My tastes are so varied that unless we are talking about sports games, it would rarely affect my vision about it. Its about flaws, so i would do my job like always.

Worms is a series i played a ton as younger, though only played specific games in the series because of how they kick my butt. Is an strange relationship, because i saw the games, you see them, they are really really fun and creative, and Worms Armageddon has one if not the best core gameplay in the entire series alongside the best multiplayer (i have to admit, pretty impressive for 1999 standards), the best quick match customization, one of the best team customizations and so on. This game hits the mark in some many areas and is also packed with content How i cant like it? Well, lets start with the "horror".

First of all, the game is very far from being accessible. Most of the content is locked and you have to do training courses, missions or challenges. Seems pretty straightforward right? No, because this are some of the most unfair missions i seen in a while. Getting gold, even on the first missions is very hard, with times that barely are enough or require finicky precision. I know you dont have to get gold in any of these to continue playing it. But the game expects you to do it, otherwise you wouldnt unlock anything from the quick matches or multiplayer. Plus starting in mission 6 or so, difficulty gets ridiculous in the campaign, especially the one where you have to shoot arrows to the Eiffeel Tower to do a platform. It wouldnt be so bad if they werent mines in the entire place! And when i reach the top of the tower, the entire place gets nuked with missiles and thats it. Give me a break! Even when you know what to do (i had to watch many walkthroughs) is still hard. While Worms Armageddon feature surprisingly good controls, the jumping in specific situations like this can be very frustrating. And the AI is only hard artificially, doing shots a player would never be able to do, with 100% accuracy from far away. I think it doesnt help either that many of the mechanics like using arrows to make a platform or using the ninja rope as a weapon for example, are hidden from the player. And dont get me wrong, this would actually be a good thing, if the game didnt demand it. Thats why i praised a lot the mechanics from CTR because they were the culmination of perfect accessibility in videogames; they were optional for the most part. Both new players and expert ones can fully enjoy the game because of that, complemented with a hidden dynamic difficulty that was strangely absent in the remake.

Some may say they focused all of the attention in the multiplayer, which is true, is incredible what they had done, but this is 1999. Not everyone had a good Internet connection in that era and not everyone had friends to play. Also, a good multiplayer would never excuse a bad, or in this case, a subpar singleplayer.

It is really funny because the PS1 version, despite all of the criticism it recieves this days for lacking content and so on (which is unfair especially considering its based on the original launch version and not the updated one from 2020), it fixes some of this issues. AI is not more 100% precise, times are way more forgiving to get gold (like a minute of difference more or less), you can manually load in any time which can save you from repeating the same deathmatch or campaign mission over and over again and some missions give the player more powerful weapons (although it was for a limitation). Yes, it is worse in terms of multiplayer and there is no fire, but... it is more fair singleplayer wise. If your goal Team 17 was to make a hard game, it needs to have a difficult curve, it needs to explain the hard to pull off mechanics. As younger i even struggled to do the first mission when i could entirely complete both 4 Mayhem and Arnageddon 2. Many of the later Worms games like Armageddon 2 would had all of the good from Armagedon 1 and focus its attention on the singleplayer plus better graphics. So why Armageddon 2 isnt considered the best in the series? Or World Party? Its a question only the die hard Worms fans know. But im not a die hard fan of this series. Im an average player who expects to be treated like the rest. And Worms Armageddon is very far from being accessible. I even think is even less accessible than the first Worms game since that game just gets straight to the point. It was also more fun imo.

Despite every negative thing i said, i still maintain Worms Armageddon has excellent qualities: Its multiplayer is fantastic, all of the team, map and scheme creation are very ahead of its time and there is a lot of stuff to play around, but without the good level design of the main campaign or the appropiate training to teach a new player about all of these hidden mechanics and the devs expecting you to be 100% perfect or just "get good", it doesnt quite reach the heights it could reach. For those reasons alone, i can admit that yes, Worms Armageddon is the best game i ever played... that i would never be able to enjoy. Not matter how much i try.

95% -- the pinnacle of Team17 and artillery games

[FreeMediaKids · 9/10 · 22 June 2018]

PROS

• If you are new to artillery games, they are turn-based multiplayer games that involve each player controlling a unit and using strategy and firing on the opponent's units. In Worms Armageddon, the units are the titular worms, and the whole scenario is absolutely hilarious. It is a cartoon war similar wherein every worm is irritable and with voices distortedly pitched about two octaves higher than the typical human voice-similar to an irritated parrot talking and an actual mouse trying to speak-and me judging them by their actions, they believe that the first and foremost solution to every conflict is war and vengeance. Indeed, as the lyrics indicate, the worms "live to fight", and they "fight until the end." The war itself in this game is not at all traditional. Instead, the worms use a vast variety of arsenel of 65 weapons or tools (up from Worms 2's 48), with weapon classes consisting of missiles and mortars; grenades and the destructive banana bomb and Monty Python and the Holy hand grenade; rifles, machine guns, and archers' bows; martial arts and suicidal methods; explosives and hazards; aero-strikes; construction tools and the baseball bat (as if the worms were already weightless); athletic devices; animals and people with their own function, such as a skunk for poisoning worms and poisoning the poisoned (poisoning them further) to cost them some health per turn, a mole for digging, Super Sheep as an animal superhero, and the inexplicably extremely explosive old woman; weapons of mass destruction such as the armageddon, Indian nuclear testing for poisoning all worms in the battlefield, the concrete donkey falling from the sky, the scale of justice for equalizing all the worms' health, and freezing the player's worms to keep them undamaged; pyro-weapons; utility weapons for making mobilization easier such as enabling low gravity for the rest of the turn; and others. Aside from that, depending on the defined game rules, there are hazards randomly scattered on the landscape, in two types: as oil drums and land mines. Also depending on the rules, there may be a weapons crate, a utilities crate, or a health crate deployed randomly after a turn, and the player can either collect them to his or her advantage or destroy them to deprive the opposing team of resources or damage them further. The utility crates give the player utilities or add a twist to the battlefield as by amplifying all the destruction properties of weapons or hazards (e.g. explosion radius, damage). Evidently are numerous references to pop culture (Star Wars, the story of Noah and the Ark and global warming when a game reaches "sudden death" mode and the water rises, the English monarchy), as well as terrible puns, that add further humor to the game.
• As you may have realized, the concept is absolutely non-sensical, but the gameplay is a combination of that and nuclear fun. Like Worms 2, it has cute cartoon graphics, intuitive physics/mechanics, the ability to set our own game rules, and everything that made the predecessor good (except for cutscenes), as well as the main and traditional goal: kill all the opposing worms by reducing their health to 0 or sinking them in the hazardous water and survive in the end. Unlike Worms 2, Worms Armageddon improved team selection by allowing a particular number of works on a certain team before each match, as well as adding a health handicap or benefit to the teams. It also makes use of a higher sound definition, and the audio sounds just as good and cartoony as their old counterparts. Since the updates, graphics are superior over its predecessors, utilizing the 8-bit palette that is then converted via a software renderer to display them as 32-bit graphics, and also since the updates, maps in the game can be normal-sized (classic) or-let me spell it out for you-H-U-G-E, huge as Godzilla, with maximum map dimensions being nearly 800 times the original limits! With an expanded arsenel, the game allows for an even wider range of tactical strategies. Be creative in setting traps, interacting with the environment and its contents and physics, and causing massive damage; send your foes flying off-screen; or treasonously sacrifice your own worms to prevent the other team's victory. The physics are so intuitive that the player finds launching wind-affected bazookas based on gravity, launch power corresponding to the gauge sound of increasing power, and the strength of wind understandable. The user-interface is also more organized and minimal while informative enough; the power gauge meter lies between the worm's weapon and the reticle, which makes more sense than the gauge at the bottom of the screen, and the reticle itself makes aiming easy, as the even perpendicular lines rotate directly adjacent to various angles. Skipping a flying object such as a missile or a worm is also tactical. The fun is mastering the physics, and if you do find yourself bored of the traditional multiplayer aspect, you can always refer to other game modes. Deathmatch is one example, where the player starts as an absolute with eight worms defeating three opponents. It starts incredibly easy, but as the player progresses, it constantly becomes more difficult with fewer friendly worms and even more enemy worms. Another example is training mode, excellent for novices who are learning the basics of the game, and for professionals looking to hone their skills. It introduces the most used weapons, explains their functionality, and other important aspects, and other training levels include shotgun ranges and courses for the ninja rope (one of the greatest weapons of the game) and Super Sheep. They all involve destroying traditional targets or old women or picking up crates within a turn time. The next game mode is missions, similar to those of Worms 2 with the objective being to kill worms or collect a crate and with scripted sequences, but this game utilizes custom maps. The last is quick play, much like a demonstration of the game.
• Obvious is that the game's biggest strength is customization. We create our own teams with all sorts of wacky user-defined names, as well as our own custom flags, custom speeches, and custom gravestones, the sprites that appear after a worm has health at 0 and subsequently explodes, as well as custom fanfares played after every round upon victory. Customize your CPU teams to either be feckless amateurs or sharpshooting snipers. Define your own game rules in almost anyway by choosing which weapons to be armed with at start and defining the power, the delay of each weapon (the number of turns to wait to use them), and the likeliness of them being in a crate; by adding additional hazards to the landscape or increasing the frequency of crate deployments; and many others. Paint and play on, or just randomly generate, your landscape with a wider range of themes to choose from. Unlike Worms 2, players can import almost anything unusual they can think of (like the White House) and play on them, the only transparency being pure black, and it is easy.
• For a game so popular, it has received updates that make this choice for any artillery game even more desirable, and it still receives periodic updates. Since those updates, the 18-worms-per-battlefield limit has been lifted so that each of the maximum of 6 teams could have up to 8 worms for a total of 48. Replays are saved for every game played (even those that are quit or incomplete), more tools for gameplay rules such as fine-tuning and adding up to 255 hazards. And as a surprise bonus for everyone, the game has since been updated with the WormKit to allow custom modules (mods) to the game.

CONS

• Sadly, despite the huge content and customization, the game could have done more to be more innovative or at the very least solve some of the issues that Worms 2 had when diverging from the original Worms. For example, I would have liked elements such as customizing the background and water for custom levels to return, as well as a less-panoramic background and layers of water (i.e. front layers moving faster than back layers as one scrolls the camera), just like the original game. However, Worms Armageddon certainly makes its predecessor look merely like a demonstration, and with the updates, this one defeats the other by a landslide. It may not even matter anymore once version 4.0 is released.

CONCLUSION: Thanks to the cartoony charms of worms at comically mischievous war using whatever inane weapons, real or seemingly conventional or just outright ludicrous, and lacking common sense and to its huge customizability, Worms Armageddon stands as the best Worms game and continues to be the most successful artillery game, as well as being one of the greatest games out there.

Essential Gaming

[Retinend · 10/10 · 5 January 2008]

I gave up gaming midway through 2006 with the PS2, I sold it along with the majority of my games (15 or so) to a friend for £80 or so. It was an expensive and shallow hobby, and I didn't miss it. However, out of nostalgia, I recently bought an old PSOne cheaply from a market stall (£8) and re-bought, what I think was the best game on the console (or any other!); 'Worms: Armageddon' ,which has since I last played it become a rare item. The game has almost endless replay value, with multiplayer in particular, with dozens of themed maps and a random land generator. Funny, charming and instant enough for brand new players, and intricate enough to spend forever on perfecting tactics and accuracy. The perfect worms game. While the move to 3D was an interesting development, and was a very fun game, undoubtedly; there's nothing that can challenge the satisfaction of landing a holy hand grenade right on top of your opponent's head, with nothing they can do to stop it, or burrowing deep underground and unleashing the eponymous 'armageddon', (the most destructive weapon in the game), or prodding the enemy into the briny depths, or dropping a stick of dynamite into their midst and so on and so on... The most perfect multiplayer game ever.