Worms W.M.D

I keep a mental ranked list of every major Worms release, and after spending serious time with W.M.D I have to shuffle things around. This is the title that finally justifies the series returning to fully hand-drawn 2D, and it brings enough mechanical additions to make even a strategy-first player sit up and pay attention rather than treat it as a party curiosity. The core loop is the familiar turn-based artillery chess you either already love or have somehow never tried: each team takes turns moving a single worm, positioning for a shot, and unleashing one of an enormous weapon roster before the countdown clock forces a commit. What W.M.D adds on top of that formula is a crafting system, drivable vehicles, and enterable buildings, three layers that interact in ways the older games never attempted. Crafting happens during your opponents' turns, so dead time becomes decision time: you scavenge materials from crates, dismantle spare weapons for components, and construct upgraded munitions like a remote-detonated Banana Bomb or a Mega Bunker Buster tuned for flushing worms out of caves. Planning a crafted weapon two or three turns ahead, the way you might plan a research path in a 4X, is genuinely satisfying. The vehicles (tanks, helicopters, drillboats, mechs) add positional stakes to the map, turning certain terrain features into contested objectives worth racing toward. Buildings introduce a stealth layer: worms inside are invisible to the enemy until they emerge, which means controlling a structure buys you cover and lets you lay an ambush. Some reviewers have noted that the vehicle system can occasionally devolve into a back-and-forth hijack loop when two players contest the same tank, and if that bothers you, the game lets you disable vehicle spawns in custom rulesets entirely. The option is there, which is the right design call. Single-player is healthier than in most entries in the series. There are 30 campaign missions structured increasingly like logic puzzles, with secondary objectives that give completionists real targets, plus a full suite of training levels and unlockable challenge missions hidden behind wanted posters scattered through campaign maps. The early missions ease in almost too gently, but the difficulty curve tightens meaningfully once vehicles and multi-stage weapon interactions start appearing. The AI on harder settings hits its targets with uncomfortable consistency and makes reasonable crafting decisions, so solo players are not just grinding a passive dummy. A newcomer to the series should spend time in the training missions before anything else; the tutorial actually does respect your intelligence, walking through the Ninja Rope, the directional bounce physics, and the crafting interface without over-explaining. The series has a long history of being more newcomer-accessible than it looks, and W.M.D continues that tradition better than most. Multiplayer is where the game truly justifies itself. Up to six players with eight worms each on a single map is controlled chaos by design, and local hotseat remains one of the best couch experiences in the strategy-adjacent space. Online ranked play is functional and the netcode is noticeably cleaner than the troubled Worms Revolution before it, though the ranked mode is lean on incentive structure and the online player pool has thinned over the years since launch. If your buy decision hinges on finding random strangers in ranked, temper expectations. If you have any friends, locally or via invite, this is a different conversation entirely. Mac users should be aware there are reported performance issues on certain hardware configurations that Team17 has been slow to resolve. PC and Linux builds run cleanly. The weapon roster clears 80 entries including returning classics like the Holy Hand Grenade, the Concrete Donkey, and the Super Sheep alongside new additions like the Dodgy Phone Battery, which chains electrical damage. Some hardcore Armageddon veterans have flagged that a handful of weapons feel less mechanically crisp than their predecessors, particularly the Uzi and Minigun, and that critique has merit at competitive play levels. For everyone else, 80 weapons with crafted upgrades is more than enough variety to keep matches unpredictable across dozens of sessions.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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