captaind's Full Review: Worms: A Space Oddity for Nintendo Wii
Worms: Space Oddity is a game that you'd really expect to port perfectly to the Nintendo WII. In case you've been living on Mars for the last couple of decades, the Worms series of games is a turn-based strategy game where two or more teams of worms try to blow the others up and be the last team standing. (Surprisingly, a lot of the best friendships are created by games involving blowing each other up... strange but true.) There are a number of weapons at hand, some unlimited in use but tricky to use accurately (i.e. bazooka), some amazingly powerful but rarely found (i.e. banana bomb), and many in between. You play on randomly-generated landscapes - it's easy to have a completely different landscape each time so no-one gets too much of an advantage due to always being in the best position - and some items on the landscape can help or hinder you. An overhang of the rock-face can provide one of your worms with some useful protection, though it can also hinder their ability to fire their weapons. Barrels of oil will explode if a weapon lands too close to them. That sort of thing.
While there have been many worms games and many variations on the theme, the basic game has remained that outlined above, and Space Oddity is no different. Though set in space and featuring different weapons, it is to all intents and purposes exactly the same game - it looks a little different but it plays the same and the weapons are largely just renamed, not genuinely different. Okay, there are actually a few genuinely different weapons, but these are very much in the minority. The key selling point to the game was the use of the Wiimote - you use it to aim the bazooka (very fiddly!), shake it up and down like a mad thing to make your flying saucer attack, hold it horizontally and "push" down to push the plunger on a bomb's detonator, etc. Some of these work well enough and some are too fussy. The idea had a lot more apparent potential than has been realised here.
There are two main weaknesses to the game that really hinder it. Firstly setting up your teams, editing names etc using the Wiimote is a real pain. Much worse is the fact that the graphics are absolutely atrocious. Even given that the WII is not a graphical powerhouse, there is no excuse for graphics that look as bad as this game. Everything on-screen is so fuzzy and blurred that you really have to strain to see what you're doing at times. Perhaps with a signal booster for the WII (I haven't got one but I know they do exist) it would look better, but as it is, the game looks terrible. Thankfully the sound is okay, decent music and speech (you have several "voice packs" to choose from for your team of worms, who make different comments depending on what's just happened in the game).
As you'd expect from a Worms game, on the whole it's still fun to play, especially in 2, 3 or 4-player mode of course. The controls are so-so, some work and some are practically impossible to use, but mostly it's still enjoyable trying to outsmart your opponent / opponents. The console's AI is okay and with the adjustable difficulty level you should be able to find a challenging but not unbeatable opponent (or, indeed, opponents) when no are no human adversaries around. This version of Worms unable to have as many worms per team as the PC versions I've played, though you can still have a respectable number.
All in all, Worms: Space Oddity is definitely a missed opportunity. Virtually nothing significant has been added to previous incarnations of the games, the Space theme was really nothing more than a change of scenery, and only about half of the game mechanics work well enough. Combined with the terrible graphics, I can't really recommend this at all, unless you're desperate to have a version of Worms to play and don't have anything other than a WII in the house.
ESRB Rating: E - EveryoneGenre: StrategyFeatures: Worms: A Space Oddity is the 'Worms' experience re-imagined for the Wii. Built from the ground up to...More at Newegg.com
Worms A Space Oddity is the Worms experience re-imagined for the Nintendo Wii. Retaining the classic turn based gameplay, stylized environments and hu...More at eBay
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