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WormsThreeDeeYou are on the archive wiki. The new wiki is here. Worms3D?Update, 15 Jan 2004: I should be getting the full game sometime soon, so I will rewrite this review to include the full game A 10-minute 2 player demo of the upcoming Worms3D? is now out. I downloaded it and gave it a spin to see how the cute gun-maniacs translate into the 3rd dimension. First off, it is a very pretty but much smaller landscape that you play on. The water especially is very nicely done, as is the destructible landscape. The lanscape is constructed in layers rather than smooth-edged, and hence some of the slopes are stepped. This can cause problems, as often if you walk into a step, it changes your facing and has caused me to walk into a landmine I was carfeully skirting on one or two occasions. There are 3 different view modes - 1st person, 3rd person and overview. The default is 3rd person, showing the active worm and his surroundings and making for easy navigation. 1st person is used for firing weapons, especially straight-line weapons like the shotgun. Overview is for seeing where all the worms are placed on the map, and for calling in airstrikes. On to the weapons. The ones that are available in the demo are: Bazooka, Mortar, Shotgun, Fire Punch, Dynamite, Airstrike, Sheep, Grenade, Holy Hand Grenade and Jetpack. The bazooka is pretty difficult to get used to, and it is very easy to have it blown totally off-course by a crosswind, and judging distance is none too easy either. I'm sure as you get more practised, it will come, but currently the bazooka is the weapon that I have the least accuracy with. The shotgun is a weapon you have to use in 1st person view mode, and the reticule wobbles, making it fairly tricky to get a good shot in. Also, you usually either do the full 25 points of damage or miss entirely, very rarely do you get a partial hit. The airstrike control is very innovative and cool. You switch to overview mode and position the reticule over the area you want bombed. Since the overview mode is centred around the active worm, it makes it easier to airstrike things that are nearby, and objects in the way such as trees or building can easily be erroneously targetted by the plane, limiting the massive game-ending power the strikes had in 2D. The grenades are exceedingly easy to use in 1st person view, although it is irritating when you bounce one off a worm's head, since it bounces a pretty long way. The Holy Handgrenade is pretty disappointing, as the effect is almost identical to all the other explosions in the game. I felt they could have improved on it somehow, although you do get a cool halo and divine light while you are holding one :) The Jetpack is fairly difficult to steer and doesn't go all that fast, making it easy to waste your fuel and your turn without getting anything useful done. Fire Punch, Dynamite and Sheep are all fairly straightforward staples, and don't change much in the transition from 2D to 3D, either thru being close-range or thru being fairly linear weapons. Landmines are a lot less restrictive than in 2D worms. You can walk fairly close to them without setting them off, and can hence walk around with a minimum of hassle. No engineering tools were included in the demo, and I doubt that there will be very many in the final release either, purely due to practical considerations. The jackhammer will be unaffected I suspect, but the blowtorch will cause all sorts of control problems, and the girder will have severely limited usefulness when all you have to do is shoot around it. There is some difficulty in rotating the 3rd person camera behind a worm when it is standing near a wall. The camera basically sits on top of the object looking down, forcing you into 1st person. This isn't really a problem, but it would have been nice if they had worked around it in some way. There are also a few clipping problems, but hopefully those will be dealt with before the final release. All in all, a game that plays very differently from the 2D version, but it looks as if it will be as much fun, if not quite as cute, as the original. Back to SynKronosReviews |