Worms Rumble

I wanted to root for this one. Team17 swinging a beloved turn-based franchise into a real-time 2.5D arena shooter felt like a weird, brave experiment, and weird brave experiments are exactly the things I show up for. After spending time with Worms Rumble, though, my admiration for the concept keeps running headlong into the reality of what was actually delivered. The moment-to-moment chaos has genuine spark. Four modes are on offer: Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch where kills are currency, plus Last Worm Standing and Last Squad Standing, the battle royale variants where a slow wall of toxic gas herds everyone toward a final reckoning. The arsenal still carries the franchise's absurdist soul. Sheep Launchers, Holy Hand Grenades, Plasma Blasters, and Sentry Turrets share loot chests with more grounded fare like Bazookas and Shotguns. Grappling hooks and jet packs let you zip across ant-farm-style maps that are genuinely layered with hidden shafts and alternate routes. When matches fill up and everyone is bouncing around lobbing ordnance, there are moments of pure slapstick delight that remind you why the Worms name carries weight. But the structural problems start stacking fast. Gone are destructible environments, arguably the mechanical heartbeat of every classic entry. Gone too is any offline mode: no bots, no campaign, not even a private lobby for a group of friends at launch. The twin-stick aiming system, which sounds sensible on paper, has a steep and punishing learning curve, and the matchmaking drops you against level-capped veterans with weapon upgrades while you are still fumbling with wall hops. Maps rotate on a short enough cycle that you will see the same handful of arenas loop back on themselves inside a single session. Weapon balance tilts hard toward whoever grabbed the upgraded gear first, and server timeouts were a documented problem at and after launch. Then there is the player count, and this is the part I genuinely cannot talk around. On Steam, the all-time peak never broke 800 concurrent players, and current figures sit effectively at zero. Cross-platform connectivity with console players keeps the lights dimly on, but if you are buying the PC version today expecting to drop into a warm 32-person lobby, the odds are not friendly. The Last Worm Standing battle royale mode needs a full field to sing, and a lobby of seven people spread across ant-farm maps is a melancholy experience. The game's best audience always lived on PlayStation, where it arrived as a free subscriber title, and that audience has long since moved on. For a franchise that invented a genre of its own and held it for thirty years, Worms Rumble reads less like reinvention and more like a bet placed on the wrong trend at the wrong moment. The bones of something genuinely fun are here: the weapon variety, the zippy movement, the cartoony visual clarity. But a multiplayer-only game with a hollow player base, no offline fallback, and a content library that felt thin even at launch is a hard sell at any price in 2026.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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