Oh, see, look here... now I'm the one in charge of the room conditions! Now all of wormanity will suffer under the iron heel of my... legless wonders... ... ...but at least it'll happen on my terms! That I don't fully understand yet, but will be choosing the rules as though I knew exactly what I was doing! Tremble in...confusion! Most importantly, we finally get to check out the Map Generator in proper detail. The options are pretty typical for the series, although the randomization is pretty much hit-and-miss as ever and could require several rerolls to get one you like based on the fairly generalized criteria. You can also tweak the general concentration of land mines, explosive drums, and physics objects without messing up the landscape... although they seem to draw from the same general pool of available complexity and, frankly, room on the landscape for things. It just wouldn't do if you had worms who couldn't move at all because they're fenced in by land mines and have the path forward blocked by an awkwardly large object that can't be burrowed through or easily roped around. It's worth noting that changing the environment theme, asking the generator to go for a different general type of stage, or toggling the dynamic water will make the game recalculate the map, as noted by the loading time in between and update in the preview window. (You can also manually ask for a reroll if you want to keep the settings the same but don't like the look of the lay of the land.) As for rules, you might've noticed the "Shopper" preset chosen this time around. This is actually a pretty old and semi-standard notion that's been kicked around from the older days of Worms, although it's not been set so literally in its original intention. In general, there are many "Shopper" variations, but the common ground between them is that you get almost no starting weapons and must rely on reinforcement crates to arm yourself and neutralize your opponents. Most commonly, this will carry the implication of heavy Ninja Rope usage to traverse the landscape, but there may be other stipulations involved (like reaching or passing a certain point on the map before carrying on with your turn), many of which are more informal agreements between players to make things more interesting rather than actual game-governed rules. This game does something I've not actually seen prior (although this doesn't mean it didn't just happen in some of the many installments while I wasn't playing)... one of the types of crates that can drop makes this mode all the more literal: you can collect coins, which can then be redeemed for any of the armaments in the game's arsenal at varying price points. Now, I'm not so sure about how well the values chosen actually work out, but personally I like the notion of a setup that has a slower start and builds up to something more intense later on... although I don't know that this is ultimately the best way to go about it. Then again, I think the development team and I have different notions on what's desirable in a Worms game, because I only found out fairly recently that booby trapped crates are no longer a thing because that random chance of shaking things up was apparently deemed "unfair"... so, y'know. I'm all for giving players uneven and random access to weapons of mass destruction (even if greed can't be unevenly punished by cruel twists of fate at the same time), but the real WMD in my mind has always been the Ninja Rope itself... if you're even slightly skilled with its operation, having an unlimited supply will basically guarantee your best shot visited upon whichever enemy worm you might choose. (The consequences of where you end up and placing yourself in positions where this isn't easy to turn into an instant kill are a bit more "meta" than that, but the point still stands either way.) As a result, my primary beef here is that people will be getting tons of weapons just standing around anyway... do they really need to be able to rope over to theoretically any number of them they so choose (with, again, no punishment in place for greed) and THEN also allow the boon of deploying it where and when you might choose. The only truly limiting factor is time, which means you'd better get practicing on that rope action! ...in theory anyway. One of the more compelling aspects to Ninja Rope action is the fact that they also allow you to deploy a wide variety of weaponry while still attached to the rope... but the controls are always awkward at first. (Doubly so because the controls feel a bit odd playing on a console versus the PC version... AND they changed the jump mechanics a bit, so who knows what else might be at stake here?!) Essentially, you can't use the normal fire button, since that controls the rope... I think in most or all cases, the new key involved is the jump button, but this goes against so much muscle memory that it's not even funny, so early attempts at pulling this off might be disastrous.

• published: 25 Aug 2014
• views: 3