Worms Ultimate Mayhem | a Review
originally published on 13/12/2024;
Hello everyone, I am the worm, G.E.M.Simov, a slimy, slitheringly-crawling thing that has seen so many battles they have become innumerable, and so I have come to share my memories of these fights in the form of a review of “Worms Ultimate Mayhem”.
Simple review details - I rank games on an out of 10 basis, granting up to 3 points in 3 categories, as well as a last, single point from my own self, depending on my experience with it.
Gameplay
Worms Ultimate Mayhem, (henceforth WUM) is one of the 3D Worms games. As such, it is both very similar to previous 2D Worm titles, but also very different. It features a plethora of weapons and opportunities to do silly things, as well as a simple premise. The Player controls a team of Worms and needs to kill all other Worms on the destructible map, and to do so they are provided with a multitude of weapons that do a variety of things.
However, one of the first things that need to be pointed out in relation to this game, is that it features customization. It allows for the creation of custom weapons that can be given to a custom team, as well as the creation of a custom game style (which is essentially a gamemode).
Having one’s own custom team is only important when one considers the custom weapon of the team, though it also features cosmetic differences - such as hats, glasses, mustaches, special hands, special sounding voices and unique names for every worm in the team. The custom weapon is where things get interesting, as the Player can, essentially, make themselves a phenomenal tool that kills almost everything instantly, and the only limit is a power gage that prevents the finalization of the weapon if it is simply too strong.
This brings up an opportunity to mention that there are five weapon types. There are ones that are thrown (e.g. a grenade), there are ones that are fired (e.g. a gun), there are ones that call down airstrikes, there are melee ones (e.g. fists) and there are special ones (such as sheep). However, which weapons are available is often determined by the gamemode that is being played, so some might not be present at all.
There are many gamemodes - there’s the Quick game, there are 5 gamemodes relating to playing, potentially, against other players, there are the campaigns (2 of them), there are the challenges and then there are the tutorials. Each of those is markedly different from the others, though they all share some similarities.
Let’s go over the things that are common among them, and then I might consider sharing what the unique aspects of them are. Most basic and common is the movement of the worms, which occurs by using the WASD keys. The worms are very… Pathetic, though, and they will be unable to scale any incline that is not wheelchair accessible. Simultaneously with that, though, there are also instances in which the worms can scale walls that are perpendicular to the ground (with absolutely no slope) if they are short enough and are set as scalable. Other times, even objects that clearly have slopes and are far shorter than other scalable objects cannot be scaled. As a result, the Player will need to rely on jumping, which occurs by pressing the Spacebar. However, the worms are very clumsy, and as a result of that the controls, themselves, are also very clumsy.
Under some circumstances (most often when the stars and planets align) the Player can make their worm jump backwards. However, this requires that the Player hold down the S key after they press (and hold) the spacebar, because otherwise their worm will either just jump forward (if the spacebar was pressed and released, or just tapped) or the worm will jump upwards, but still move slightly forwards (if the spacebar was held down).
This introduces some unpleasant jank to controlling the upwards mobility of the worms, which is problematic because they are rubbery. If they bump into something while jumping, they will bounce away from it. Not only that, but there are often, and many, platforms that are quite small and require very precise movements to land on, thus making the process of actually jumping and landing on them very risky - why? Well, because the worms take damage from falling from great heights, and if the worm takes damage, its turn concludes.
Thus, jumping is both a vital part of moving around and also a very clunky mode of movement. When the worm jumps from a tap, it can not change its trajectory and will keep going forwards. However, when the worm jumps from holding the spacebar down, there will be a modicum of control that remains, allowing the Player to make very slight course corrections. Alas, it remains clunky and clumsy, which does not feel good or satisfying at all.
Then there are supposed to be other movement options, according to the control settings, but there aren’t. Well, there don’t seem to be. Apparently, the Player should be able to make their worms roll either to the right or to the left by pressing E(for a rightwards roll) or Q(for a leftwards roll), however those buttons are, by default, also bound to controls related to the camera - E zooms out and allows the Player to get a bird’s eye view of the map, while Q zooms in and gives the Player a first-person view of what their worm is looking at.
What’s even more odd is that even when these functions are set to different buttons, they… They don’t work. There is no rolling to the left or to the right. This is odd and clunky, janky… Clumsy.
That theme of things being clunky and clumsy continues on. The mouse can be moved around to rotate the camera, but it is inverted, meaning that the Player needs to pull the mouse towards themselves if they want to look up and push the mouse forwards if they want to look down. Similarly, to look to the left they need to push the mouse to the right, and to look to the right they need to push the mouse to the left. That almost makes sense, but the convention does not feature this inversion - it is, sometimes, an option, but it is not the default and should not be, because it is not intuitive to a Player who knows that to look up they need to move their head up.
Another oddity is the incredibly high mouse sensitivity - which is actually not a bad thing in most cases, but when it comes to WUM it is more problematic than not, because the speed at which the mouse moves determines how quickly the camera moves… And when the camera swirls about violently, it has the potential of disorienting the Player, especially if the movements of the camera do not match the direction of the Player’s own movements(their hand on their mouse).
Some other very basic commonalities shared between gamemodes are the means of pulling up the weapon menu - which happens by using the Right Mouse Button - and the selection (and subsequent use) of a weapon, which happens by navigating the mouse cursor to the desired weapon in the weapon menu and clicking it with the Left Mouse Button.
Now, here comes a wobbly choice that, again, feels clunky. Whenever a weapon is selected, the worm will start holding it in their hands, and if the Left Mouse Button is clicked again, the weapon will be fired. Note that there is no opportunity to aim - the Player needs to go in first person mode, by pressing and holding down Q, to be able to aim - otherwise they can not aim and will use the weapon in the direction their worm is facing.
Another of the great commonalities is the time limit (though that is not present in some Tutorials, it is incredibly vital to WUM). When a game of WUM starts, one of the teams will be picked to go first. One of the worms on that team will go first, and that worm can be active for a set amount of time - when that timer expires, that worm’s turn ends and another team’s worm is next. The timer forcefully expires whenever the active worm takes damage, and it is set to 5 whenever the active worm uses a weapon.
With that said, all that’s left are some distinctions and the boxes. Every turn a box will spawn somewhere on the map - it might be a weapon box (brown and square), a health box (white with a green plus on it) or a tool box (purplish and reminiscent of a suitcase). Weapon boxes contain weapons, while tool boxes contain tools.It must be stated that both weapons and tools can either have unrestricted uses or a finite number of uses, and whenever a box is picked up, a random weapon or tool, dependent on the type of box that is picked up, is granted 1 use.
Tools are accessed via the weapons menu, but they do not set the turn time to 5 when used, and are most often used as a means of increasing the mobility of the worms, be it by allowing them to fall slowly (parachute) or fly (jetpack).
There is also one more thing that comes into play sometimes - and that is the wind. The wind affects some weapons by applying force to their projectiles, bumping them off course, and it requires that the Player aims while considering it. Sometimes it is not in effect, other times it is very prominent -that depends on both the gamemode and the map.
Now, killing worms - each worm has a certain amount of health, determined by the gamemode that is being played. That health is decreased whenever the worm falls from a great height or whenever the worm is hit by a weapon. When it drops to 0, the worm dies. Additionally, worms instantly die when they fall in water. Lastly, whenever a worm dies it explodes, doing moderate damage to anything that is next to it.
With that, everything is relatively exhausted. There are quirks here and there - the maps having teleporters or landmines laid out here and there - but the game boils down to these things. Completing campaign missions or tutorial missions awards the Player with coins they can use to buy cosmetics from the store, as well as a few new gamemodes, maps and weapons, but that’s a finite mechanic that’s also nearly pointless.
WUM is a game about fighting other Players or AI, and it presents the Player with a set of weapons that are all quite quirky and wonky, as well as a movement system that is clumsy an clunky, with the idea that the more the Player plays the more used to the weapons and movement system they will get, so that they will be able to take on the AI or other, more experienced Players.
It is decent, but not exceptional, and it does not grab me in the way a game should. The gameplay is just too janky for it to be truly enjoyable, and even though involving friends makes it a lot better, that does not fix the issues that are otherwise present. 2/3
Presentation
WUM is okay, presentation-wise. It does not try to wow the Player with its visuals, but it definitely does not want to be boring, either. Everything is 3D, naturally, but it is stylized and is very reminiscent of a cartoon - especially the Characters and some of the weapons.
When it comes to sound - both music and sound effects - the game does decently well. There is an odd number of musical tracks to go around, and some maps just don’t have any music, but the music that is present is decent. In regards to sound effects, everything is pretty spot on, with the exception of the things that the worms say.
In WUM, and in worms games overall, the worms chat shit with one another. That would be okay if the voices assigned to the worms were bearable, but there might be two or three okay-ish voice sets for the worms, and then the remaining 15 are dreadful, skin-peeling, ear-bleeding dog water. They are so unpleasant that they are one of the main reasons I’ve found myself stopping a play-session and resuming it after a week.
Then there are some inconsistencies. The Campaign missions, and the tutorial missions, start with a Character talking about the map and the circumstances that have brought the worms to the map. However, when the Player is given control of the worms, anything that is said to the Player is done so exclusively through text, which is odd.
Another big issue comes with the tutorial, which is, on the one hand, very good at explaining to the Player what’s what and how to use it, but then it horribly sucks, because instead of telling the Player to use mouse to look around, or instead of telling the Player to use a joystick to do that, the game tells the Player to use “Axis 4 + (?)”, where the question mark in parentheses is some kind of button.
Additionally, it gives suggestions that not only don’t work, they just don’t make sense - such as instructing the Player to press 1 to select a weapon when in the weapon menu (which, surprisingly, does nothing).
One other issue, which almost affects Gameplay, is the fact that the camera is very wonky. Whenever a worm is moved by an attack, the camera locks onto said worm, looking at it from a random angle, and does not react to terrain, meaning that the camera sometimes just winds up in terrain, showing the Player nothing, while a worm screams his brains out and, potentially, dies from damage taken.
With all that said, these issues are mostly peripheral and they fail to really impact the game, as a result of which its presentation is, overall, relatively decent. 2/3
Story
This game… Has a story. It has a story, but that story neither tries to make sense nor does it mean much. The Player starts off by either making a custom team or picking a team, and then that team goes to university, the members learn how to be worms (soldiers) and are then sent on various assignments to undermine the enemy’s movements.
There’s the implication that the worm civilization is torn by constant war, and there are countless warring factions vying for something - be it control or resources - but then it stops going and changes direction. From that wartorn setting the team has a mishap in a laboratory and is sent to the past and needs to recover the parts of a time machine in a medieval world, only to then realize that they need gold to operate the time machine and so they go to the wild west to get gold…
As can be seen, there is a story. It is incredibly rudimentary and it isn’t very interesting - there are no Characters, aside from the Professor, and there is no Character development of any kind. It’s just there as a vehicle to explain why the Player’s worms are in whichever place they are. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t try to be good or entertaining. 1/3
Legendary Point
Does this game get the legendary point, so craved and wanted by all and none at the same time? No, it does not. 0/1
Conclusion
5/10. Worms Ultimate Mayhem is a neat little game that might require the Player to get their brain going at some times, but will, ultimately, coalesce into a lengthy grindfest until the Player commits most things to muscle memory. I’d recommend it to fans of the Worms franchise, and maybe to folks who want some games to play with their friends, but aside from those groups, I wouldn’t say it is for anyone.
In the bag of mediocrity it goes - some neat tunes, a funky appearance, but, ultimately, very crusty and destined to be dusty.