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Worms: Open Warfare (DS) - Withered on the Sidewalk

June 30, 2006 By Glenn Turner

Worms: Open Warfare (DS) 2

Worms: Open Warfare for the DS is a mess. One would think that UK developers Team 17 could take their accessible and humorously pleasing turn-based strategy game and easily translate it to an entertainingly portable game. Afterall, the multiplayer nature of the game lends itself quite well to Nintendo's WiFi network, and a little imagination could draw up some new weapons or technique to take advantage of the touch-screen. Hell, even a straight port of Worms 2 would have found comfort in my arms. Sadly none of the above resulted, causing Worms: Open Warfare to be a botched affair, an ugly, paired down, slow-witted cousin of the Worms' family.

The Worms games work on a simple premise, one not unlike that of the old shareware game Scorched Earth: two or more teams of anthropomorphic worms duke it out for domination over a small swath of land using a variety of weapons, some unremarkable (shotgun, grenade) and some hilarious (sheep, banana 'bomb'). As worms are traditionally slow moving folks, the war turns into a turn-based battle of angles and strategy, and you're forced to take into consideration the ever-shifting landscape and winds in order to make the most of your turn. The last team standing wins.

The titular worms, who used to be cleanly drawn and animated, are now indistinct blobs of pink and white and, thanks to buggy terrain, often find themselves stuck between invisible objects. Multiplayer is limited to local-only - no online multiplayer - which leaves me no choice but to butt heads against the brain-dead computer. Unfortunately, during these matches you can actually see the AI chugging away, robbing the graphics engine of precious computational cycles, causing the foreground rain, sleet and/or snow to stutter and jerk. Such inelegant behavior could be overlooked if it allowed the computer to occasionally show a glimmer of insight or strategy but instead, each AI turn is another 30-60 seconds spent reflecting on how unlikely it is that the computer will actually hit you. A smarter opponent would be capable of executing a backwards jump across an obstacle, inch over to you, place a dynamite stick on top of one of your worms' head and wiggle away. Instead, the AI stays stationary and fires off a lone bazooka shot, which frequently only causes injury to itself, or its teammates.

Worms: Open Warfare (DS) 2

In fact, it's tempting to say that Open Warfare would be more fun to play if they scraped the AI all together and just had the opposing team stand still. Since the computer rarely moves, the game feels like a sandbox shooting gallery anyway, at least until the illusion is disrupted when the AI shoots itself in the foot. And if the computer's turns were eliminated, you wouldn't have to wait while it strenuously mulled over whether to misfire a shotgun blast, or commit suicide by walking off the edge of a cliff.

Despite the atrocious artificial intelligence, I'm flabbergasted to say that I encountered moments of amusement in the game. Sure, I have yet to lose a single game against my soulless opponent, even though I've endured many cheap physics-based deaths, and the environmental bugs routinely render my team unable to move or fire. However, I still find fun in executing an especially well-angled grenade lob, one which knocks out two worms and drops a mine in front of a third. I can even cackle at the computer as it sets itself up for destruction for the umpteenth time. It's not a fulfilling amount of enjoyment, not enough to make up for the time lost playing it, but the occasional laughs are genuine.

Worms: Open Warfare is not a good game. It's not even an adequate version of its namesake. It's homely, dumb, and fails to take advantage of anything the DS has to offer - even the touch-screen is poorly utilized, relegated to awkwardly controlling the camera and weapon selection. Regardless, it's still a Worms game, and aiming quirky weapons while your worms trade colorful cockney-accented quips is still suitably amusing for five or ten minutes at a time. If only Team 17 could have ironed out the bugs and bestowed the AI some smarts, then perhaps Worms: Open Warfare would have come close to capturing the fun of the prior games, and maybe we would have a game that you'd laugh with, instead of at.

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