Occasionally after I've played (or during my playing) I like to throw a post on the forums regarding the game as a whole. I have a couple of developer friends who tell me that the staff do indeed read the feedback on the forums and use it to enhance their current or future games, so it's time well spent. It should be more valid here since threads are moderator approved.

To begin with, I'd like to say that all information contained here is going to be my opinion, and yes you may or may not agree with it. That said, I like to try and be as neutral as possible in my approach. There are two reasons for this. Firstly a neutral point of view can capture both good and bad aspects reasonably and secondly the thread is less likely to degenerate from an informative player-opinion base into a mess of trolls and suck.

Let's begin.

Single Player -

I made sure this was the first thing I went through to both familiarize myself with the game/controls and to see if it met up with previous worms games. I then proceeded to finish all 35 maps within 36 hours. I came away from this a little disappointed.

Basically, the single player campaign consists of stacked battles, assault courses and puzzles. It should be noted that these only get to be worthwhile on the last 5 unlocked maps because in the rest of the campaign seems to suffer with what most games do these days. It was too easy. Because it was easy it was fast. Because of that, there's no lifespan.

'But wait, Whiterock,' you say. 'Surely the staple of the worms games has always been the multiplayer!' I'd agree with you, that's where the true fun comes in, but it's no real excuse to not have something extra you can do when you only have a few minutes or none of your mates want to play.

Worms has always reminded me, in a sense, of a combat lemmings. Some of the missions in previous games have been exactly that. You're given a certain amount of X to get to Y. It can be frustrating, it can be painful but it takes skill to pull off. You complete the mission, brag for a bit mentally and then... you take those newly earned grenade skills into multiplayer.

One of the 'puzzle' missions asked you to lay a mine by your feet. It was literally: look left, place mine, win. Why on -earth- would I need to learn that. I want no arguments that it was an easy level to introduce you to the concept because I feel that other people like myself are able to figure out what to do. (Especially with the block of text before each mission explaining it, or understanding the concept of a 'puzzle'.)

Assault course missions were few and far between, and I think the most trouble I had was the second jetpack one because I mid-judged the water at the bottom once. Then I beat it next try. I get the concept of 'Here is how to use the jetpack, go through this maze' but I don't understand the need for 'now do it again! oh here's a few turrets to make it interesting'. By now I have a sneaking suspicion that this single campaign is nothing but level padding. A few great ideas smothered in so much blandness hoping to appeal.

And last but not least, the normal 'beat these worms!' missions. This is essentially the whole basis of the Warzone mode, and to be expected really. A single player where you -didn't- have to kill enemy worms would have been bizarre. It could have been spiced though. I shall explain in a moment.

My overall view is that single player is a bit pointless. It achieves what it sets out to do in regards to introducing you to the game, getting you used to the weapons and giving you a feel for the experience. On the other hand it does all this without excitement or creativity.

If I take into account the difficulty is intentionally low for newer players, younger players or casual gamers I can see where they're going. What they might have missed is that the experienced fanbase may feel a bit left out and mistreated. These are the guys you want a great backbone for, providing initial support and hooking other guys in.

While it's easy to say that this section of the game is bad, it's not necessarily. Just boring. Here are a few examples of what I mean in regards to spicing things up:

- Single player campaign too easy? Why not have a second playthrough giving you less weapons or tougher enemies. Assault courses could have tighter times and the puzzles could be altered so you have to take a different approach or use different items.

- To offset the mixed up feel, there could have been three separate columns, one for each game type that offers slowly increasing difficulty and variance. You could play whichever you felt like at the time with no forced feelings of having to play the next unlocked level only.

- Level ratings, partly based on time, accuracy, skill and so forth, giving a level a full ‘complete’ feeling when you know you played really well.

It might not seem like much, but a single idea or mix of the above would have added difficulty, replay value and life-span. Gone would be the lightly-mixed variety and in its place you’d have an image of something which says ‘This is what we have, this is what you can do, go for it.’ And in you jump. I also mention this here because the next section is something that really makes me sigh.

The Shop

So now there’s a shop in Worms. Great. You can take cash you’ve earned from single player campaigns and spend it on hats, levels weapons and bits and pieces. It’s almost close to one of those ‘I’m buying a game that has a shop where I can buy parts of the game’ loops.

It’s utterly pointless, worthless and a complete waste of time.

I realised why there is a shop quite quickly, and it did make me grimace, but a few things first.

You can only get cash from single player campaign missions and some tutorials. Therefore getting the money to buy absolutely everything is not going to be difficult or time consuming. The total of everything in the shop is the exact total of what you earn, so you will not miss out on any items. It’s not possible to miss or lose out on buying something.

Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here, (as long as you do it with proof!) but I believe the shop to be a poor-hearted, lazy way of adding content. Items are put in a shop, items are given value, the total value is given from the campaign. That’s all it is. Easy to do, a nice concept, totally wasted and giving the whole game bad marks. Now for some whys.

Why is earning rewards not directly tied into the single player experience? Not only are you -rewarding- the player for a job well done, you’re also cutting out any unnecessary implementation. I’ll make it even simpler. You know on the last level where you use a drill, followed by armageddon? Why not have that unlock armageddon. You know how every 5-6 levels in one theme, it’d pop up with ‘This is the <insert> theme!’ Why not unlock the relevant theme for getting that far.

You know those new gravestones? Why not unlock those after every theme you beat?

Are you starting to see my point? Instead of directly being there and saying ‘Thanks for playing this level, here’s something you’ve unlocked’ it fobs you off with ‘Here’s some coins to spend in a shop for things that aren’t connected to me in any way.’ Which not only forces you to stop playing single player to go to the shop to spend it, (thus taking you away from gaming and not directly effecting it) it also highlights the lack of thought put into the construction and implementation of the idea as a whole.

What on Earth were they thinking?

Multiplayer

Okay, here goes. This is going to be a tricky subject but I’m sure it’ll be okay. Let’s start with the core aspects of worms multiplayer and divide those up so I can be accurate and hopefully not miss anything.

- Worms multiplayer is fun as hell.
- Various game modes.
- Different map types and layouts.

Okay. Worms multiplayer is fun. As far as I’m concerned it’s always going to be fun regardless. It’s why I pre-ordered the game. It just works. It’s an amazing concept. I can laugh at myself when a timed grenade hit’s a single pixel and ricochets back into my face just as I can laugh at the poor sod I hit by throwing a 5 second grenade over the entire map, sending him into a couple of mines and miles off the side of the screen.

Here’s the best part. When it works and is fun, I don’t feel the need to question anything because I’m having a great time! Can I fault worms for being fun? No! Can I fault things for preventing the fun? Oh yes. Here I go!

- Region locks

This is the internet. The internet is everyone from every walk of life, race, age and sex. Previously, in internet-less times we had these things called oceans and vast expanses of land to separate one another with only mail and telephone to join us.
We live in a world where I have over a hundred (easily, I’d probably push 200) known friends. And these are people I -know-. Of those, I’d say half play games. There are 60 people in my -9- steam group alone. (We all hang out and play games together). They are not all English.

Now sure, private matches can be set up with anyone, but that isn’t the point. If you’re not going with the flow and giving people other people to play with, how do you expect expansion in terms of players? If my friends are in a different time-zone and can’t play when I get home from work (because they are working) I look for lobbies and I’ve never seen more than 5 at any one time.

If this is because of net connection or distance issues, just have a flag of a person showing their country. There’s no stopping it in private games, why on Earth would you need to stop it normally.

- Difficult menus Who designed this? I’m jumping in straight away with ‘If I select my main team I want to play as when I start the game why the HELL aren’t they automatically selected for me on multiplayer? Sometimes I forget and end up playing as some weird team (whose rotation I don’t know) and it irks me severely.

A few people can step up here and say this is simply my fault for not paying attention. For that, you’re right. However what you’re also saying is that the game is designed to make things -harder- for me and you agree with that. Games like TF2 are pretty much ‘pick a character and go’ and it works. If the game made you select items for every single character before you even played them it would start to get on your nerves pretty fast.

If it’s not adding to the experience it’s taking it away, regardless of anything. If I have everything set up, it makes it much, much easier to play and so I’m going to spend more time playing than messing around with menus. It’s just common sense.

The menus are also really basic looking. Blues, borders and the giant worms font text. That’s all. Granted, you don’t need much in the way of a grand design here. What is there works alright, but perhaps it’s a little too big. Sure, the text scrolls my name but why can’t it just be a bit smaller. Or the layout format more concise and space conscious?

To Be Continued (Since I wrote more than 12000 characters!)

Stability

Now this is a big one. People who play multiplayer on this game expect to actually get some playing out of the game. I personally have had to Esc - Exit the game about a dozen times now and I’ve had similar reports from friends that play too. Examples include:

- The game freezing when the room host is selecting a terrain to play on.
- The game freezing on a shift between player’s turns, before the waiting for players message.
- Issues with the game crashing on more specific notes (See my drill bug thread)

And I’m sure there are more. Don’t get more wrong here, I’ve played about two dozen games so far, and it’s pretty fun and enjoyable, but I cannot help but feel there is a general lack of … effort, I suppose, in providing a stable platform to game on. As I was reading some of the threads in here, one poster commented that the game feels like an open beta. It really does, and not in a good sense, sadly.

Multiplayer is supposed to be one of the core fundamentals here. With that in mind you’d better believe you poured your heart and so into developing, coding and producing such work before releasing it. Or you become a laughing stock as you fall into the category of ‘Let’s release a quick worms game and the fans will lap it up. Oh, No, it doesn’t have to be good, just some of the basics and we’ll get some cash.’

Combined with what I’ve seen so far in regards to design, level padding and that damn shop, we’re getting dangerously close to that statement.

Various game modes

We’ve got your standard mix of beginner, standard and pro, good old Grenades and Bazookas, Crate drops, etc. They’re classics and it’s pretty hard to fault them, since they work really well. However it has been a few years. One or two new modes should have been implemented at least! There is a saying that if it’s not broke, don’t fix it, so I’m not going to be too judgemental of this. As long as they keep an open mind about it in future.

By the way, what’s with having the placement of worms changed from being able to click your worms on a place instead of giving them teleports and making you do it the long way around?

Map Types and Layouts

The landscape in worms is pretty much one of the quirky elements. It’s still customizable to an extent, allowing you to choose the background, terrain, type of map as well as the amount of mines and other nasty little things that can make your win-streak fail. The option to save and load maps you really enjoyed is also present, and a few other things that allow you to create your own maps too.

Though I don’t use it much, I kind of like this. If you have the time, it lets you play around and create some good, challenging maps that can suit any tailored game to your hearts desire.

Overall, multiplayer is fun. It’s what you’d come to expect from any worms game, and although there are tweaks (rope physics and so on) its still not bad. But once again I feel we’ve fallen into the same expectations of the above areas, except this time we (the players) are supposed to make it good. Could it be that the fun of playing with another human is supposed to make us overlook the rough edges of random crashing and game freezing? Would we really have so much enjoyment of the game we’d overlook the lack of polishing on those somewhat annoying edges?

Unless I get a accurate and detailed response, I doubt the answer will ever be up there.

Bits and pieces

There are some things that are also added on to the game which don’t really fit under any other heading, so I’ll group them all under this one and we’ll see how that goes.

- Leaderboards

These keep track of certain things like kills, bodycount scores and the total number of matches won under each mode. It’s… not all that great. Three quarters of the boards can be boiled down to ‘If you play a lot, you can rise up and get to the top.’ As I write this, some guy is sitting at the number one spot with about 185 wins. No longer is it about skill and effort but about how much time you can spend playing the game.

The exception to this is the body-count leader board because it’s like a survival mode. Longer you survive, the better your score, so the people at the top of that one are actually working hard for it. Anyone can win games with a little bit of patience.

- Achievements

Having been released through steam, Worms reloaded has 12 achievements. These range from silly to just boring. The person in control of these really didn’t think his/her job through very well during the implementation of this part. Let’s use every multiplayer game as an example. I’ll even throw a few single player ones in as well.

TF2, Alien Swarm, Sam and Max, Borderlands and even Torchlight have in excess of 40-50 achievements. These range from killing, to using weapons to speed runs and going out of your way to play the game in much, much more difficult formats.

Because people love achievements, it’s the mini-game that keeps on giving in terms of life-span and fun. However it only works if they’re sectioned out right. I managed 7 of worms achievements through a couple of matches and the single player campaign. There was no difficulty regarding this at all. The last five are more endurance (Ninja rope and Fire Starter) or specific (Win a pro match in under 3 minutes) and I will get them eventually.

But why are there not more! The single player campaign could have done with lots more, as could the multiplayer. Even general ones could have been given a boost in terms of using weapons, crate collection, multiple kills and being in certain situations. I’ll not go into the tens of ideas, but I’ll state that this could have been a great thing that was dulled down.

Using all resources to the best of your ability is the only way you can really make a game start to excel. Steam is not a bad thing, so using it to ramp up a game in terms of achievements, popularity, sales, anything, will get you a head start.

- Help menu

This isn’t really helpful. Plants vs Zombies did it better. A comical help screen, but they backed it up with an almanac which explained game mechanics. I’d love something like a weapon encyclopaedia or a stats page for my current team. Even something such as a “report bug” function would be great.

And finally

I’ve tried so hard to write this without bringing up Worms Armageddon, but I think if I ignore it completely it’ll reflect badly. It’s no hidden fact that Armageddon has done a lot of things better, be it interactive training modes, a more intense map/battle customization or an impressively stylish presentation. The single player mode was tough and merciless as were the challenges like sheep crate collecting or rope swinging. The multiplayer was broad and accepting of all.

It is also still played and maintained.

And so, after all I’ve said and experienced, one burning question lodges itself in my mind.

Why would you devolve such a game?

I’m not going to whine, kick and scream about how, compared to Armageddon, reloaded is absolutely terrible. That’s counter-productive. However, it’s not too late.

There has already been one update to Reloaded. Not sure what it was since I didn’t see any patch notes. (Not comforting) But it can pave the way to improvements that are both structural and mechanical. More achievements can be added, these annoying crashing bugs fixed, even a new design overlay. Options, modes, maps and I’d even say weapons could be updated.

So rather than just say this game sucks and I’m off to play Armageddon, I’ll simply say the game is a sub-par development from a company that should know better. Everyone is allowed to stumble, and I don’t yet regret my pre-order purchase. What matters now is how you take what you’re seeing and re-shape it into something you can be proud of and we can really enjoy.

Good luck, I guess!

You can cancel the region locks part...an update, incoming tonight or tomorrow, is solving the problem!

This gap between posting and posts showing up is a bit halting.

Where's your source for the region lock update?

You can cancel the region locks part...an update, incoming tonight or tomorrow, is solving the problem!well thank glod for that, but where'd you get this info?

well thank glod for that, but where'd you get this info?
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=16804026&postcount=5
Got another update coming either later today or tomorrow.

Including in the install the DirectX files needed and some Visual C files (will fix some crashes on boot)

Fixed an issue with setting the region to Japanese

Should see improvements in navigation with pads, a few bug fixes gone in there (will need feedback on this one)

We have expanded the search region for lobbies, hopefully you should see more games now.

Fixed the issue where drilling/blow torching would sometimes cause the active worm to drown if you were on another worms head.

Again, it's not a lot of fixes, but I would prefer to do regular smaller updates so we can track them better.

certainly nice of T17 to ignore their own forum.....

We need T17 to start posting here. Not just on facebook, not just on the Steam forums.

certainly nice of T17 to ignore their own forum.....
Well, it isn't in the links section in WR or on the T17 homepage.
Guess that's where 'Web 2.0' has brought us to. :-/

If the campaign was like in Worms: A Space Oddity, or even better, Battle Islands, it would have been so much better. For example, I played the missions in the demo 3 - 4 times to figure how to use the tactics on the perfect, also you get rewarded with medals if you finish them in a certain amount of time. Additionally there's no shop but you have to collect crates put at places difficult to reach in the whole campaign which contain extra items - that was the most interesting thing during deathmatches, thinking of how to get there while defeating your enemies. As if this wasn't enough, both games got movies playing after you finished one theme, Space Oddity even contained minigames.

It would be very pleasing if Team17 added such a campaign with DLC.

If the campaign was like in Worms: A Space Oddity, or even better, Battle Islands, it would have been so much better. For example, I played the missions in the demo 3 - 4 times to figure how to use the tactics on the perfect, also you get rewarded with medals if you finish them in a certain amount of time. Additionally there's no shop but you have to collect crates put at places difficult to reach in the whole campaign which contain extra items - that was the most interesting thing during deathmatches, thinking of how to get there while defeating your enemies. As if this wasn't enough, both games got movies playing after you finished one theme, Space Oddity even contained minigames.

It would be very pleasing if Team17 added such a campaign with DLC.
Hmm...
Those features let WR look quite meager. :-/

Half of the (dull) achievements can be achieved in the firing range. Just use Armageddon ten times, or fire weapons 200 times (easy if you have as many turns as you want and no enemy). Or set 6 dummies close to water and quickly achieve six pest! This all makes no sense.

Leaderboards are extremely terrible. It sucks to know that you can't ever get on top because you are still a student or because you have to work longer than other people, or just generally can play this game only a few minutes to half an hour per day. Made me to completely ignore them now, apart from ranked matches to achieve "Ranked Master".

I agree with all you said but...

Help menu? How is it not helpful? It explained all weapons as good as possible.