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WormsBlast

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Worms Blast

Worms Blast is Team 17's attempt at a puzzle crossover for the Worms family of games. It's a sort of cross between Worms and Snood (if you can fathom that), where you shoot paint bazooka shells, as well as a small selection of other weapons, some for obliterating the bubbles above you, others for trashing your opponent.

There are various modes of the play, the standard being, of course, puzzle mode. You wander around a world map, each path you take presenting you with a different challenge before you may pass. This I feel is the weakest part of the game. The puzzles themselves are mindless and rely more on perfect aim than any real puzzle solving skills. The controls are also very sticky and cumbersome, making for many inaccurate shots and frustration. The force with which you fire only has about 7 different levels, rather than Worms' rather more detailed range, meaning that you have to move the character rather than aim slightly differently or fire harder or softer. Maving thru the world map via completed paths is also unneccessarily slow and tedious, so you start frustratingly impossible levels with an already established amount of annoyance. My keyboard has suffered due to this.

The second mode of play is Tournament mode, the most pointless mode in my opinion. It is merely a rehash of levels in the puzzle mode, only timed and with a high-score table to aim at. Just as frustrating as the level was originally, perhaps moreso as there is no end.

The third (and only real) mode of play is the versus mode, either player-vs-player or player-vs-chip. Again, there is only one worthwhile play style, the Deathmatch. It's pretty cool, with the divider between the two players opening occasionally to allow you to mess with your opponent. You can also pick up crates with weapons or utilities in them, some cool like the Cthulhu attack (it's awesome, and virtually impossible to avoid if combined with a mine attack), and some completely pointless like the pitch black weather attack (blacks out the entire screen on both sides except for the scores and the characters' eyes). Player-vs-chip is really easy, and shouldn't be much of a challenge. Player-vs-player seems to favour the more experience player heavily and highlights skill difference quite drastically, so I can only really see this being worthwhile with two people of almost exactly equal skill.

In terms of technical issues, the game seems to suffer from a keyboard problem. Sometimes a direction key gets 'stuck', and you end up aiming all the way up or down, or the fire button won't stay down, and you end up shooting yourself. Graphics wise, it is very cartoony and pretty shiny, but occasionally all the static objects (like background etc) disappear and you need to quit to get them back (unfortunately the entire world map, paths and all, disappears)

Not a game I would recommend, but it is small and can be amusing for a short while if you have another person handy.

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