From 1997 to 2001, my online life revolved heavily around Worms; specifically, Worms 2, Worms: Armageddon and Worms World Party. The first forum I joined was a Worms 2 forum, run by someone whose name you might recognize. My most enduring online friend — every time I try to use the term “oldest”, he chooses to be insulted by the other interpretation — came directly from these quarters as well. When I saw that a new 2D Worms game was about to come out for the iPhone, it felt as if stars were aligning once again. I mention this not because it’s much more interesting than the game itself, but because I’m heavily tinted by nostalgia.
That said, Worms for iPhone is probably the best re-imagination of an existing game to the iPhone that I’ve seen. I was highly sceptical of the controls from the beginning, but Team17 managed to work out a brilliant scheme which combines direct manipulation with gesture areas and actual buttons in a way that seldom gets confusing and almost never conflicts. I won’t say that you’ll be able to rope across half the stage the way you used to be able to do (or not), but it is surprisingly tenable to even use the thing.
The Jetpack, for example, displays on-canvas controls for “up and left” and “up and right”, which effectively elides “up” and avoids a gaggle of potential issues. The Homing Missile/Airstrike crosshairs can be panned around in a precision mode once they’ve been initially set, and the normal aiming crosshairs are visually distinct and can be set by dragging out from the actual crosshair arc, such that you can see the angle and “aim” for enemies.
The matches themselves can get a bit slow, and voices and sound effects occasionally skip a beat. That’s something I’m willing to tolerate for an initial release. The game itself loads relatively sprightly. The game logo, company logo and legal talk are combined on a single startup card — imagine that. Panning across the landscape is slow, and sometimes you pan halfway across the landscape to set your Homing Missile target, the camera re-centers on your worm at your tap and the crosshair ends up in the same on-screen location, but miles away from where you intended. Intuition tells me that I should be able to zoom in just a bit closer, because the worms look scaled down slightly at the highest zoom, but that’s as close as you can go.
The single player challenges progress at a good clip, and the practise mode (in which all weapons are available) is welcome. The Concrete Donkey in the room is of course the lack of peer-to-peer multiplayer. “Hot seat” is a sound principle, but huddling around a screen that’s being passed around with the controller itself always ruined the experience. Team17 assures everyone that it’ll be in the upcoming release, as it’s using 3.0 software features.
In the end, Worms for iPhone is a solid effort, a stunning first iPhone performance that’s a real testament to the Team17 development team and a good Worms adaptation. There are definitely kinks, but they are sufferable for the time being, and they don’t collectively do much to shadow the great game within.
Four stars out of five.