![]() ![]() When eventually you do take control you're not free from the waiting by any means, but, worse, you're also hamstrung by things like the awkward camera, the obstinate control system in general, the keyboard-controlled base-building system which wants to cycle every possible location for your proposed extensions before settling on the one you actually wanted, and quirks like worms getting stuck on battlements, and worms jumping in the wrong direction (why on earth have backflip as the default double-jump action?), amongst numerous other niggling flaws. The final tutorial mission, which is your first proper battle against a team of AI-controlled worms, took us 45 minutes to successfully complete - and that was on our fifth attempt.īeyond that, there are all sorts of little hold-ups to grit your teeth through waiting for your weapon to turn round because it always seems to be pointing the wrong way, waiting for your enemy to move at all (they'll happily do laps round towers, or sit there for ten seconds contemplating whether or not to collect the crate sitting literally a handful of pixels in front of them, rather than getting on with it), waiting for the turns to switch over, waiting for your worm to idle glacially between two points, waiting for animations for virtually everything to end, waiting for scores to tot up, waiting for crates to land, waiting for buildings severed from the stronghold to collapse, waiting for the single-player mission briefings to stop wise-cracking and actually say what they want you to do. The addition of base-building means that you can win either by destroying your enemy's stronghold or by killing all his worms, but either approach takes hours - and that's not too much of an exaggeration. Here we just hammer it to help pass the time. ![]() It used to be that we'd sit there hammering the mouse button to try and speed things up because we eagerly wanted to get on with smashing the bejesus out of each other. Naptimeīy far the most frustrating thing about Forts though is the pace. The game actually seems to be designed to discourage you from moving around the map. Things like the springy double-jump may help you cover significant distances, but your journeys these days are generally only round trips from the top of a decent building to a weapons crate and back. It's rife with other issues unlocking new weapons which can only be fired from atop certain buildings is a clever idea, but building bases is monotonous, and making good use of the weapons at your disposal is so difficult to do. This alone feels like a grave mistake, but it's far from Forts' worst crime. Which immediately sacrifices the much-loved possibility of blowing the ground out from under each other, or seeing a wayward rocket carve a makeshift stairway out of a cliff, which conveys a tumbling barrel of napalm onto the unlucky troopers below. Presumably in order for the base-building to work, Forts has been stripped of the series' trademark destructible landscapes, so that only the worms and buildings can be shot to pieces. Forts picks up from there, and introduces base-building ideas now you start with a central fort and build outwards every turn, opening up advanced weaponry and other options as you take over the "victory locations" dotted around the map, in addition to trying to pulverise your adversary with bishop-launching cannons and explosive fridge-freezers full of equally explosive frozen ferrets.īut it's lost far more than it's gained. Worms 3D just gave it another dimension many would say to its detriment. Siege hereĬlassic Worms involved two opposing teams chucking explosive sheep, Holy Hand Grenades and other comedy projectiles at one another, and swinging around like Tarzan with the legendary ninja rope across tight, beautifully drawn and crucially destructible environments. Besieged by newfound complexity, Forts is more sloth than worm, taking far too long to get going and lacking the razor sharp wit and pace as well as the left-right-click-fire simplicity of its progenitor once it does. Unfortunately, in the case of Worms Forts: Under Siege, the series' undoubted pedigree merely serves to underline just how far the worm has turned away from the origins of its simple brilliance. ![]() Over the past decade, the Yorkshiremen behind the world's most anarchical turn-based strategy game have bolstered the unassuming annelid's credentials to such an extent that gamers arguably get more of a rise out of them than the average invertebrophile - and that's an achievement not to be squashed idly underfoot. Nobody has done more for the reputation of the humble worm than Team 17. ![]()
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