I wouldn’t call this a review as such, reviews for the most part have to summarise the positives and negatives and display an opinion based on the game as a whole.

What I intend to do here is tell you “there are definite reasons as to why I won’t be purchasing this piece of software for personal consumption”.

This time, it’s Worms 2 Armageddon over Xbox LIVE Arcade!

Nostalgia is the reason I decided to queue up the demo for W2:A, and it’s possibly the biggest factor as to why I won’t be going anywhere near the final product.

The last Armageddon was released 10 years ago during the formative stages that would later set me up to be the terrible misanthrope I am now. It probably started my appreciation for absurdist humour and showed me that Monty python references are a huge deal in popular culture. I was a big fan.

However, traits that I once saw as cute are annoying in this iteration. The worm’s voices are overly high pitched and their catchphrases repeat over and over. It’s not even the catchphrases we remember; “Incoming!” had a certain charm to it, it was understated and displayed a childlike misunderstanding of the violence the creature was about to cause. It’s replaced by the worms reciting advertising slogans of the products they’re about to use. Team 17 have either forgotten, or never realised what made the speech so charming. I wouldn’t put either past the people behind Box Office Bust.

Previous ideas don’t hold up under today’s scrutiny. I’m fine with the idea of turn based games, but worms is significantly slower than most, you perform your turn, the action occurs, then the game takes a moment after everything is already done to process what just happened. I see no reason as to why a tally of this couldn’t have occurred on the fly. It’s a minor gripe but it seems like entirely wasted time. Time I could spend seeing to fly honies with a different worm, you know what I’m saying?

The “artillery” system of gameplay doesn’t work on consoles. Without mouse–support there’s a definate drop in controller fidelity. Aiming using a pad is laboured and having to scroll through a list of weapons icon by icon rather than just being able to hover over and click adds is overly frustrating.

This is 800 points better spent elsewhere, and if you’ve good memories of the last version, avoiding this will leave them untarnished.