FutureFive New Zealand - Consumer technology news & reviews from the future
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Mon, 1st Aug 2005
FYI, this story is more than a year old

BANANA BOMBSThe Worms’ series has come a very long way since its early days as a 2d, side-scrolling PC game - the last game in the series recently diversified with Worms: Forts Under Siege, a tactical RTS-like spin-off created for Sega. However, Worms 4: Mayhem is a return to the series’ trademark gameplay and sees Team 17’s core Worms’ design and development team regrouping for a game of explosive annelid annihilation. In this fourth installation, our brave invertebrates are back to knock ten shades of hell out of each other in open arenas and they have some hilarious tricks up their sleeve.

Straight off - everyone’s armed with a massive variety of wild weapons, as ingenious as they are incendiary - and for the first time in any Worms’ game, you can let your imagination run riot and create your own weapons! Using a genius device, called the Weapons Factory, you’ll be able to create your own weapon and enjoy the freedom to finish off your opponents in your own unique way. You want to make Exploding Chickens or Toilet Bombs? Now you can. The worms’ armoury of brilliantly conceived classic weapons are still there, but now they have built on them with extensively devilish devices.Now you can cause even more chaos and humiliate your enemy with a host of new weapons that create new strategies including the Poison Arrow, Sentry Gun, Tail Nail and the Bovine Blitz, which unleashes a bombing raid of cows.

The customisation options don’t stop at crafting new weapons. Another first is the ability to customise the look and personality of your worms, choosing their hair, hands, faces, glasses and dying words - all with Worms’ trademark humour. The multiplayer mayhem and single-player shenanigans are spread over five themed zones - Jurassic, Camelot, Arabian, Construction and Wild West - and everything is destructible (even the ground you’re standing on). In single-player mode there is more beyond the day-to-day business of destroying worms and through the 25 missions, you’re also charged with objectives such as recovering items or smashing scenery. All the single-player maps are available to play in multiplayer mode, along with a further set of 20 multiplayer-specific maps which have been specially designed for player-on-player mayhem.

With bold levels, an improved 3D camera and animation system, a stunning arsenal delivering comedy kabooms, the loveable, customisable, yet entirely destructible Worms are most certainly back.