This month, my editor at Pixelkin asked if I wanted to look for a game to review instead of being assigned one by her. Drunk with power, I searched through the recent PlayStation 4 releases until I found what I thought was a winner: Song of the Deep. It’s the story of a girl’s quest to find her father, and it looked beautiful. I presented it to my husband and my kids.
Them: No.
Me: What? It looks terrific!
Them: No. We want this one.
Me: …Worms?
Them: WORMS!
Me: Fine. Let’s go blow up some worms.
Worms W.M.D is pretty straightforward — you’re worms, and you’re trying to get rid of the other team of worms by shooting various weapons at them. It has single player and multiplayer options or you can play against people online. It’s set up in a very orderly way, and as someone who is deeply anal retentive, I appreciate that. You alternate turns with your opponent and have a set amount of time to make your move before it switches over to the other player. All of that cuts down on a lot of arguments, and that always get an A+ from me. But after doing a few training rounds and learning how to aim and fire, I worried that, even for a tech idiot like me, this game might be a little…well…boring.
Worms tries to make what is fairly simple gameplay a little more interesting through its characters, which are, in case you missed it, worms. You get to choose which kind of worm team you want, which determines what your worms look and sound like. For the first round, my son picked Team Gav (I still have no clue what that means), and I picked Team Tasty because yum. My son put us in the “Orient” background and away we went.
Both teams of worms had British accents, which I was not expecting because I always assumed most worms were from France. They squeak as they inch along and say things like, “Watch this,” and “Do something!” I heard that second one a lot because my son gave us access to all the weapons available, which show up looking like thumbnail images of colorful Rorschach tests in a box on the side of your screen. He kept yelling at me to launch a Concrete Donkey, and instead I picked what turned out to be a sheep that, if you throw it in time, turns into a bomb that destroys your enemies. Spoiler alert: I did not throw it in time. I also got to test out the Holy Hand Grenade, which played the start of the Hallelujah chorus before exploding. As a Monty Python fan, I enjoyed that a whole lot.
We then tried the “Frontier” background which, to my surprise and immense joy, had a Bob Ross theme. The worms said things like, “There are no mistakes, only happy accidents,” “Let’s start by loading a one-inch brush with Cerulean Blue,” and “Don’t let it get you down.” I felt supported by my worms, which was important because I learned that I have no skill in worm warfare. In this round I did all of the following: used my machine gun to blow up my own helicopter, tried to fly the helicopter only to fire a bomb when I was barely off the ground, and landed under one of my own sheep bombs. I think I got a bad bunch of worms.
Between Carpet Bombs that are bombs in the form of actual carpets falling from the sky, and an old lady that you can send across enemy lines to destroy them with her farts, there are some cute and funny little aspects to this game. It is right up my kids’ (who are 8-years-old) alley. For me, however, I feel like it would get old pretty quickly. But you know what probably wouldn’t get old? A young girl exploring the ocean in search of her missing father.
Just saying.
