Worms Clan Wars

I've spent enough hours with turn-based tactics to recognise when a game is padding depth versus actually delivering it, and Worms Clan Wars sits in a satisfying middle ground. It is a 2D artillery tactics game built around short, explosive turns where positioning, wind reading, and weapon selection matter more than reflex speed. The four classes introduced in the previous entry - Soldier (manual grenade detonation), Scout (faster movement, mine immunity, crate-peek ability), Heavy (bonus damage, bigger death explosion), and Scientist (per-turn healing for the squad) - give team composition actual strategic weight. Stacking two Heavies is a risk/reward calculation. Running a Scout-heavy roster to control crates early is a real opening strategy. For a franchise that usually treats every worm as interchangeable, that layer of build thinking is genuinely welcome. The single-player campaign runs 25 missions spread across five themed eras - Prehistoric, Viking, Inca, Feudal Japan, and Industrial Revolution - narrated by Katherine Parkinson doing a pitch-perfect Lara Croft parody. Think of it as a very well-produced tutorial that slowly hands you the weapon roster and contraption mechanics (swinging bridges, lifts, balloons, gas vases) before online play. Campaign AI is inconsistent - it oscillates between inert and eerily precise - but the mission design keeps things varied enough that you won't notice the singleplayer as a weakness until you hit the harder physics-object puzzles, where buggy interactions can force restarts through no fault of your own. The additional 10 Worm Ops time-attack challenges add a competitive leaderboard hook for solo players who want more after the main arc. The namesake clan system is the headline multiplayer feature, and it is solid on paper: create or join a clan, deck it out with a custom emblem and uniform scheme, then take ranked Deathmatch or Forts matches against rival clans to climb league tables. The structure is clean, and during launch years the system had real traction. In 2025, online population is thin - finding a stranger-versus-stranger clan match takes patience. The honest use case now is organising a private clan with friends and running your own structured competition, which the tooling supports well. Local hot-seat and standard online with friends both work fine and remain the strongest way to play. Dynamic water physics add a genuine tactical wrinkle - blowing open a water reservoir to flush a cornered worm is one of those moments the series lives for. The mod ecosystem partially rescues longevity concerns. Steam Workshop integration covers landscapes, hats, glasses, moustaches, gravestones, and full speech banks. Someone even re-uploaded the classic Worms Armageddon voice pack. The in-game landscape editor lets you build and share custom maps with contraptions baked in. For a strategy-sim player who values replayability over raw variety, the Workshop pipeline is the closest this entry gets to a "forever" game. The one legitimate complaint from the community is scheme customisation: compared to older entries, the options for tuning weapon availability, turn timers, and mode rules are narrower than they should be, which limits competitive community creativity at the margins. For a newcomer the question is always: where do I start with Worms? Clan Wars is a reasonable answer. The campaign onboards weapons and physics gradually, the class system adds a thin but real decision layer, and the Workshop content extends shelf life considerably. Veterans who memorised the Armageddon ninja rope will correctly note that the rope physics here are heavier and less acrobatic - it is a real regression for rope-specialists, not a taste difference. Go in knowing that, and the rest of the package holds up as the most feature-complete PC-native entry the series had at release.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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