Worms Armageddon

I have a spreadsheet tracking win rates across artillery-style strategy games, and Worms Armageddon sits near the top of it despite being a 1999 release. That tells you something important: this is not a nostalgia purchase you will immediately regret. The Steam version carries over 93% positive user reviews across thousands of ratings, and that number holds because the game itself holds. It is a 2D turn-based artillery game where each player controls a squad of worms across destructible terrain, taking turns to fire bazookas, deploy ninja ropes, launch Super Sheep, and generally inflict maximum mayhem before the timer runs out and the rising water finishes off whoever is left standing. The decision space per turn is genuinely tight: positioning, angle, weapon selection, wind compensation, and crate prioritization all matter at higher levels of play, and the "Intermediate" scheme that the online community defaults to rewards players who understand those variables. The weapon roster is the headline feature and it earns the attention. Over 55 tools are in the box, ranging from standard Shotguns and Grenades to the Banana Bomb cluster, the Earthquake, the Freeze ray, the French Sheep Strike, and the iconic Holy Hand Grenade - a Monty Python reference that detonates with a Hallelujah sound cue. Each team also selects a special team weapon that charges up over turns, adding a persistent resource-management layer to each match. Weapon power is tunable in custom schemes: you can adjust ammo counts, crate drop frequencies, turn timers, starting health, and Sudden Death conditions. That customization depth is a genuine strength - a group of four players can configure a completely different game in ten minutes without touching any files. For newcomers worrying about the learning curve: the training suite covers you. Five dedicated training modes include Sheep Racing, Crazy Crates, and Advanced Weapon Training, and there is a 40-plus mission single-player campaign alongside a Deathmatch ladder against progressively harder AI teams. The solo content is notoriously unforgiving - veteran players describe the campaign missions as genuinely difficult even with experience - but that means the skill ceiling is real rather than cosmetic. The AI quality is adequate for learning fundamentals but it will not replace the chaos of playing against humans. Online multiplayer runs through WormNET, the game's own matchmaking service, which still has an active community. The community has also maintained the codebase since 2002 with Team17's blessing, delivering patches that added native widescreen support, a replay system, NAT traversal tools, and the WormKit mod framework. A game released in 1999 receiving official community patches through 2020 is a mod-ecosystem story worth paying attention to. The weaknesses are real but bounded. Single-player is a distant second to any human opponent. The turn-based structure means a match can drag if someone is being deliberate (or annoying) with their timer. A handful of super weapons are strong enough to swing matches once mastered, and some players find the Armageddon and Sudden Death tiebreaker modes feel like afterthoughts rather than fully realized rule sets. The terrain variety, while destructible and procedurally generated, can feel repetitive across long sessions. None of these are dealbreakers - they are the trade-offs of a tightly scoped design that knew exactly what it wanted to be. If you are buying this for a couch session or a hotseat local multiplayer night, it is one of the most reliable options in the strategy genre. If you are buying it for solo play only, set expectations accordingly: the campaign will frustrate and the AI will plateau quickly. The PC version on Steam remains the definitive way to play, with all community patches applied automatically and the WormNet community still populating lobbies.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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