Worms Reloaded

нє стреляй дай прікуріть

I originally bought this game [i]years upon years ago[/i], but I bounced off fairly quickly and ended up never giving the game a sincere shot. It took well over a decade for me to come back to Worms Reloaded. I'd decided to see what else this franchise has to offer beyond the games I've already played... and sadly, the game [b]loses its fight against its older sibling[/b] in Worms Armageddon. In a way, Team17 have put themselves in a corner with the Worms franchise because of how well-rounded Armageddon is as a title. While the 3D titles have it a bit easier in that they're trying to be their own things – to varying success, judging by how far removed Worms Forts: Under Siege is from the rest of the series and how it's been received – the 2D titles are all at an instant disadvantage. Each and every one of them has to contend with an older title from the same franchise which is already a very solid game in itself. It kind of reminds me of the mechanism behind the light bulb conspiracy (you know, where multiple companies conspired through planned obsolescence to maximize profit by ditching durable and long-lasting products in favour of repeatedly selling shoddier-quality products) – why buy a newer game when an older installment of the series already did everything so well? This is the existential crisis that befalls upon all 2D Worms games: they want to be Armageddon, but cannot [i]be[/i] Armageddon because Armageddon is already there. And in my opinion, Worms Reloaded completely dropped the ball and is [b]a direct downgrade to a game 11 years its senior[/b] in a multitude of aspects. The scope of shortcomings is almost impressive – believe me when I say I hate being negative about things, but with this game I genuinely don't see [i]any[/i] feature in particular as a sufficient reason to pick it over Armageddon. It's the interface, it's the graphics, it's the gameplay... it's a little bit of everything. Right off the bat when booting up the game, I am met by a main menu which amounts to a text box with a list of options. We are not afforded any images or any visual elements to guide our eyes. The game opts to depict every single menu as an identical-looking series of buttons. It may not sound like a particularly egregious offense, but this minimalism is something that makes navigation through menus an absolute chore. Curiously, the game is only subdued like that when it comes to menus – actual gameplay cherishes its visual noise dearly. Every screen in the game, from menus to gameplay, consists of a bouncy and dynamic background sharing visual intensity and colour scheme with the foreground of the playable area, which (beyond being distracting) at times made distinguishing between background elements and actual obstacles a pain in the backside. I must admit that I did not experience everything this game had to offer, having only stuck around to the end of the Campaign gamemode. It consists of 30 missions, with 5 more levels unlockable through the in-game currency store. The difficulty curve of the mode is all over the place, ranging from offering basic puzzles made to be finished within one turn to absolutely agonizing deathmatches, be it due to the amount of luck required or the map being a pain in the ass to traverse with the provided toolkit. Having finished the Campaign, I was not interested in engaging with anything else the game had to offer. The gameplay of the missions, particularly the more deathmatch-styled ones, gave me a taste of the underlying mechanics... and admittedly this one is very difficult to nail down in an explanation, but Reloaded somehow just [i]feels[/i] less intuitive than Armageddon. Every weapon feels like it lands [i]just[/i] short of expectations, with the arsenal providing some new options (and some seen in different installments; I was surprised to see the sentry gun as a mechanic in the game having seen it in Worms 4: Mayhem before – a 3D title!) but failing to make any one of them feel useful in particular. I am open to chalking this one up to a matter of taste though. Might just be me pulling unfair comparisons to Armageddon here. What isn't a matter of taste though is the downgrade of player freedom. Matches are very limited in scope and size – while Armageddon lets you arrange a fight between up to 6 teams, each consisting of up to 8 worms with a limit of 18 worms in total on the map (or 48 if we count post-release updates), Reloaded only allows up to 4 worms per team and up to 4 teams. This means that even if nominally you're fighting a single massive enemy force during a campaign mission, it has to be split between multiple teams sharing one colour. I can't find a decent rationalization for dropping the limit of worms present on the map so low when a game 11 years Reloaded's senior could handle that many plus two without issues. In a certain way, me being about 16 years late to reviewing this title is similar to Reloaded's own struggle with living up to the standards set by Armageddon. I do not think I am treading any new ground here - and [b]neither is Reloaded contributing anything new or improved to the Worms formula[/b]. And as much as I prefer finding hidden gems in my backlog and being positive about the games I play, this game has completely failed to capture my attention for longer than it took to finish at least its singleplayer campaign to see what it has to offer, and I'm left with no other option but to leave this negative review. Just buy Armageddon. Seriously.