MSPaint-Comic-less Zeor Thought Dump [Archive] - Team17 Forum

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Zero72
16 Oct 2012, 04:13
Sorry, but no scathing, scribbly, onomatopoeia-laden satire this time. I've just been chipping at the game for a few days and figured I'd make a thread about what I think about it, because apparently I'm a little narcissistic all of a sudden. It's kind of a mixed bag, so I didn't want to put it in either of the two "good job" threads or the 328 "this is broken, wtf" threads.
LittleBigPlanet graphics: Good! I love them. Maybe a little bit system-heavy though. There's pretty much statistically no way my little old laptop could have run it, since I think even the smallest resolution the game would apparently allow was its native desktop size, so I dunno what's up with that. Not your problem I guess, in the same way nobody's computer is ever the game designers' problem these days. But anyway the worms are modeled and animate really well. I love how they accrue visible cartoony battle scars as they take damage. All about the little things. Also, the music is cool. That's not graphics, but we'll just lump it in as presentation.
Customization: Decent hat selection, though I much preferred the full-worm customization W4 had. But that's no big deal I guess. That aside, you unlock more things by buying additional, singular worms from the in-game store at exponentially higher prices per one? What? And we can't make multiple teams, or AI teams? I know it's mostly about online play these days, I guess, but still. Huh? Also, the soundbanks sound largely the same, and not many of them are much fun.
Singleplayer campaign: Trash, as usual. It's like if paint could dry at you. To be fair, I understand how a game like Worms doesn't really translate itself well to pretty much any play style other than casual with friends, but already a few times in singleplayer mode I felt like the game had a hand reaching right out of the screen and holding a middle finger up in my face the entire time, in that oh-so-familiar "nope, you don't get anything for the 25 minutes of your life you just spent, start over" way. Great job by the narrator, too. You did inflect a couple of things correctly, but that's okay, you'll wrong 'em all next time! Games talk too much.
Physics play: Neat. A welcome addition. The objects are fun to play around with, where "play around with" means "blow up." Water is kind of cool, if a little hard to predict, such as where a singleplayer mission pretty much holds on a stationary view of some water for 35 seconds and tells you six times to use that to wash the enemies away, then you do that, and then one of them just starts his turn while still in transit, sticks there and takes forever to finish off. But anyway. If anything, I felt like maybe the physics objects should have had a little more impact, like more damage if dropped on a worm.
Weapons: Pretty cool. I haven't had much chance to play with a lot of the advanced stuff yet, but I like how all the classics are still there, and everything has a pretty good feel to it. Bazooka and grenade control feels pretty classic. The shotgun is badass. Not sure what I think about the sheep looking so angry, though.
Classes: I understand the motive to give Worms a bit more depth, but I'm not really a fan of the classes mechanic, especially, as I mentioned, how you have to suffer the singleplayer in order to individually buy specialized worms. Whenever I'm using a non-standard worm, he feels useless to me in some unique way. Heavy worm is cool for being able to blow things up better, but you literally can barely even get the damn lummox to the other side of his own teammate. For example. The weaknesses totally overshadow the strengths in my corrupt little mind. To be fair, it doesn't take much singleplayer grinding to get enough stupid tokens to unlock one of each for a varied team, I guess. But the whole deal strikes me as kind of a pain.
My overall impression so far? I'm... not even really sure. I might be a little biased right now because I just spent another too long grinding on the singleplayer again, when the last worm on the map, a scientist, decided to darkside teleport to clear to the other side of the map while i was utterly out of mobility items of my own, which is right around when that middle finger analogy occurred to me. I'm pretty sure that's exactly the **** the game should not be allowed to pull while expecting you to do everything within a completely unspecified amount of nebulously measured time. I've not had the chance to play worms correctly, which is to say, lightheartedly with friends, much yet. But I did have fun with that when I did. I really like the game's presentation and I can see the effort put in, so I'm doing my best to enjoy it, but so far the singleplayer and the unlock mechanics have left a bad taste in my mouth.

MonkeyforaHead
16 Oct 2012, 04:31
Amusingly enough, the first time I started the game and customized my team I was unwittingly witnessing a bug that allowed me to equip any combination of facial hair, glasses, and a hat all together. Evidently the game experienced an overload of style and crashed as soon as I tried to actually bring up the singleplayer menu. What with how the glasses and hats tend to clip through each other I can see why it's just one item though.
I appreciate that the scheme options have been re-expanded somewhat. It'd be even better if you could configure likelihood of crate contents again, for instance I want to set up a scheme to let everyone just knock each other around with water weapons but there's no way to limit crate contents to water strikes or anything.
The weapons feel good all round, the rebalancing of a couple weapons like the petrol bomb is nice, probably my biggest complaint is the rope -- surprisingly not about it not being W:A's rope, but in that its automatic "detach and jump" mechanic to get over ledges seems to trigger arbitrarily while swinging around or even if you just swing too close to the ceiling. Flubbing your turn due to bunging up your rope skills is frustrating enough, flubbing your turn due to the rope arbitrarily screwing you over is far worse.
It's another solid Worms game for multiplayer shenanigans as it should be, and here's to the DLC being something more substantial than "a few extra singleplayer missions". Hoping with Andy Davidson back on board you'll be able to build onward and upward with a little more ambition and vision than there was over the majority of the iOS and console ports period.

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