Worms: Open Warfare 2 Hands-on

***wraggster*** · May 7th, 2007, 22:27

via ign

It was a battle the little guy couldn't win. Outclassed, outmaneuvered and outplayed, the red team worms had been decimated by their blue team counterparts. The final reddy on screen knew he had no way to pull out a victory on the icy tundra that had been scarred by missiles and machinegun fire, so he donned his headband and kamikaze dove into one of his foes. He couldn't win, but lord help him, that tiny worm was taking down as many blue bad guys as he could.

THQ and Team17 Software want you to share lil' red's moral victory this summer with Worms: Open Warfare 2. Back for its second tour of duty on the PSP, the turn-based strategy franchise is set to bring six landscapes, 24 weapons and more modes than you can wiggle a wet one at to Sony's handheld.

Fire in the hole!Following the tried-and-true formula, gameplay revolves around two squadrons of worms duking it out on a destructible, 2D map, which is randomly generated in one of six wartime settings -- World War I, World War II, the Cold War, a pirate battle and two secret landscapes. As a Red Baron-esque plane flies in the background of the WWI brawl and a warship bobs in the pirate level, you might think the levels only differ on an aesthetic level, but THQ says each battleground will feature unique physics and gravitational elements. That might not sound like much, but when you're sliding down an icy slope while trying to bank a grenade into your opponents lap or watching the rising tide drown half your team, you'll begin to understand the importance of your surroundings.

The worms and landscapes are simple and cartoony, but there's a beefy strategy element to the game. You can wriggle your worm up to the enemy and blast away with your bazooka, but that's just going to lead to your attacker getting obliterated by the enemy's backup. Why not hang back, set up an electromagnet to repel metal-weapon attacks and dispatch homing missiles to do your dirty work? Heck, set up a sentry gun next to your worm and focus on wiping the enemy off the face of the planet with airstrikes while the gun tears apart anyone foolish enough to advance on your position. With weapons such as the shotgun, stampeding sheep and bunker-busting bombs being used in randomly generated levels that can be multiple stories tall or one flat swatch of land, chances are you'll have to modify your strategy on an attack-by-attack basis.

Even if you get to a point where you feel like you've seen all the AI has to offer -- guesstimates has the single-player campaign taking between eight and twelve hours -- THQ wants you to remember that Worms: Open Warfare 2 is all about multiplayer. The title will pack "Hot-Seat mode" so that you can pass one PSP back and forth with your in-house opponent, an ad-hoc mode to hurl your Holy Hand Grenades at your friends across two PSPs and an infrastructure mode to blow up foes across the pond. You can even create clans, text chat, track your online stats, share battlefields you've created in the level editor and download some of the classic maps from previous Worms games via the title's online capabilities.

Packed with a handful of modes -- campaign, deathmatch, a swinging ninja rope race, defend-a-fortress and puzzle, which puts one worm up against five enemies in a kill or be killed test -- Worms: Open Warfare 2 is shooting for an August deployment.

Keep your browser trained on IGN for the latest news from the frontline, grunts.