Picked this up and played it last night for about 6 hours with a full party, pretty much what the first release should have been. It is excellent, but there are some small issues that I am still somewhat confused about.
It seems as though the Host only gets half a dozen opportunities to regenerate the game terrain before it automagically locks you into whatever was generated in the last pass, even though you in no way confirmed the current selection. This can be frustrating in general, but especially so for people who are not used to the icon based menu system - I hosted for about 2 hours and then we had some connection problems and had to change host, and he was having troubles picking the correct map type, so we’d have to restart the party rather than endure 10 minutes of Crazy Crates on a vertical level…
Next up is the way in which the lobbies are created, which has not been improved from the first game. Once you’re in a lobby the gametype is set in stone and cannot be changed without kicking everyone out and restarting a new lobby with a different gametype, then sending your party invites again.
There’s also a curious lack of specific or “forced” terrain for the more unique gametypes of Fort & Rope Racing. I load up these gametypes and am presented with the options to generate terrain like before, except it is not in the Fort or Rope Racing format so I’m not entirely sure how I’m supposed to play these modes at the moment. Maybe I need to unlock the terrain sets for them by playing through campaign? That’s my best guess currently, as I only have 500 wormbucks and am only through a dozen of the challenges, having purchased nothing.
All in all the SP content seems to be a lot more generous than the first offering, with at least twice as many challenges and the new unlock system based on the worm bucks received in victory. This is a net positive, but it is also confusing if it limits the multiplayer options right out of the bag. I’ll need to dig around later and see what is going on there.
Now, onto the good! The rope is back to its classic feel, for whatever reason I could never get myself past the center of rotation on the attachment point in the first XBLA release. It’s a lot easier to pull the crazy rope tricks you are used to from Worms 2 like climbing up hills and doing the jungle swings, and the bullwhip firing sound is awesome.
The shotgun has also been improved with the addition of the line of sight marching ants, which really helps line up the long shots across your screen when zoomed out fully. All in all every weapon has a much better appearance, sound and feedback than the first XBLA iteration. There is also rumble in the controller when these events occur, which I don’t recall being the case when I was playing Worms last week with the same crew.
The 3D backgrounds from the first release have been retooled and given a much better treatment this go around, making them appear much more suitable and relevant to the foreground theme rather than looking like an out of place animation loop that just happens to be in the background.
The pyrotechnic glow effects and the smoke sprites really add a lot of pleasant visual noise to the battlefield, the fire barrels and petrol bombs have also made a pleasant return so you’ll be sure to see a lot more of both during any given match.
Damage radius on explosions has also been increased, and worms seem to be extra slippery and bouncy, but all in all these slight mechanical tweaks only make the game more of an awesome experience IMO. It’s already tactical and cat-ass enough when you are playing with good people, I can certainly live with the damage radius being larger than the actual hole in the terrain this go around.
