Worms Battlegrounds Alien Invasion

My spreadsheet instinct says to evaluate this as two products in one: the base game, Worms Battlegrounds, and the Alien Invasion DLC content bundled with it for Xbox. That distinction matters because the base game itself is largely a console port of Worms Clan Wars, and understanding that context tells you exactly what you're getting before you spend a minute on the title screen. At its mechanical core, this is the 2D artillery turn-based formula that Team17 has been refining since the mid-90s. You command a squad of worms, take turns moving and firing across destructible terrain, and try to knock the opposing team into the water before they do the same to you. What Battlegrounds added over older entries were four distinct worm classes - Soldier, Scout, Scientist, and Heavy - each with different movement and utility profiles, plus a total of 65 weapons and items ranging from the classic Bazooka and Holy Hand Grenade to newer tools like the Winged Monkey, Teleport Gun, and Bovine Blitz. Super weapons are gated behind a turn timer to stop early blowouts, which creates a genuine mid-game tension around when and how to escalate. The physics engine was rebuilt specifically to support dynamic water and interactive objects, giving terrain destruction more strategic weight than in the series' older entries. The single-player campaign runs 25 story missions narrated by Katherine Parkinson as Tara Pinkle, a deadpan Lara Croft parody whose voice work is genuinely one of the game's better touches. There are also 10 timed Worm-Ops challenge missions that function as focused training for specific weapons and mechanics - these are actually the most useful content for newcomers, because the campaign eases you in gently enough that you might hit multiplayer underprepared. Veterans will find the pacing a little slow in campaign mode; the AI gives you room to breathe, which is either kind or boring depending on your history with the series. The Alien Invasion content adds two substantial pieces on top of all that. First is the new Body Count mode, an endless wave-survival format where you play as FIB agent worms fighting off alien invaders across three maps, competing for leaderboard score rather than match wins. Sudden Death mode is disabled here, and the game keeps spawning weapon crates after each turn, which meaningfully changes how you manage resources compared to a standard deathmatch. Second is a 10-mission campaign that flips the perspective - you control the alien worms trying to protect a UFO and escape Earth, with each mission running a 20-minute clock and ending instantly if your spacecraft is destroyed. The new alien-skin weapons include the Plasma Blaster, Energy Orb, Ray Gun, Brightsaber, and Precision Droid, which are functionally reskins of existing weapon archetypes rather than deep mechanical additions. That is a fair criticism of the DLC in general: the novelty is aesthetic and structural (new modes, new missions) more than it is systemic. For a strategy-minded buyer, the honest case for this package is the local multiplayer. Four players can share a single controller, Deathmatch and Forts modes are both present, and the class system adds enough build-variety thinking that a session with experienced players feels tactically layered rather than purely chaotic. The clan and leaderboard infrastructure existed in the original release, though at this age the online population is thin enough that ranked matchmaking is a gamble. The Landscape Editor is a genuine bonus for creative players who want custom arenas, though created maps cannot be shared online, which is a frustrating limitation. If you have people to play locally, this holds up well. If your plan was ranked online matches, temper expectations accordingly.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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