Evercade Worms Collection 1 Review

The Evercade seems to be going from strength to strength with it’s increasing library of retro game collection cartridges. The Worms Collection brings a great collection of three games to the handheld platform and home console Evercade VS, and whilst three games on the cartridge makes it one of the smaller collections available for the system, this is still what I would call one of the essential Evercade games to get.

For those who have never played Worms, it’s a turn based strategy game where you control a squad of four worms who have to try to kill another squad of four worms. You can do this using a vast array of weapons, and with it’s turn based gameplay where you have to control each of your worms as individuals in a set order there is a ton of strategizing involved in deciding which enemy worm to target when and which weapon to use.

The most standard of weapon is the bazooka, which when selected you can choose to aim from a stood position and control the fire power and speed of the shot. Hitting your target isn’t guaranteed as each level, which is randomly generated to be different every time, also features wind conditions which change continuously. This means you have to learn how to judge how much oomph you want to put into each shot to overcome the wind direction.

As well as the bazooka, there are shot guns, grenades, uzis and a range of other weapons which you may choose to use either for the most effect or just for the fun of taking a shot gun to a weakened opponent just to finish them off. Truthfully for the most part the bazooka will be your go to weapon with the longest range to fire and it does a lot more damage then many of the other weapons.

You get unlimited amounts of ammo for some of the weapons, but then there are some attacks which you only get a couple of chances to use and so are likely to save back until the right moment. This includes the homing missile which is basically the same as the bazooka but you can choose exactly where you want it to hit. There is also the airstrike which drops a few big bombs over a decently wide area – this is perfect is your enemy worms are a long distance across the battlefield. And then there is the Sheep Bomb. The classic from the Worms series is a sheep that you release and that runs and bounces across the screen and you can detonate at any point. It’s weird and wacky and I love it.

Beyond these kinds of weapons you also get some other items you can use including a pneumatic drill and blow torch which allows you to burrow into the scenery. This is great for creating safe spaces to hide in, or to tunnel towards an enemy without them being able to attack you. This doesn’t allow you to do sneak attacks however as they can see your position the whole time just as you can see theirs. Then there is the teleport item which allows you to beam up Star Trek style and land somewhere else on the screen. This has to be used carefully as using any non attacking item means you essentially skip a go in terms of doing damage to the opponent, so this is where an extra layer of strategy comes in.

Pretty much all of what I’ve described here applies to both Worms and Worms Armageddon in this collection, and whilst it’s not known if there are currently plan for an Evercade Worms Collection 2, it’s an interesting selection of games they have here. They’ve included Worms rather than Worms Director’s Cut, but that is probably due to these being console ports where as Worms DC was only on Amiga. It’s interesting then that we then get Worms Armageddon which is basically the director’s cut of Worms 2. So a future Worms Collection 2 could give us the better version of Worms 1 and the worse version of Worms 2.

The third game is Worms Blast which is an entirely different kettle of fish to the other two games and we’ll get back to that later in the review.

The original Worms which is included here appears to be the Sega Mega Drive version. It’s played with three buttons and is truthfully the first time I’ve played Worms with a game pad set up. In the past I’d played the original game for the Amiga 1200 and in recent years have continued to play it on PC. It took me a bunch of tries to get used to the controls and I say that because it has a weird set up where the same button that brings up the weapons menu first brings up an option which quits the game.

The original Worms game has graphics that feel very much like it’s Amiga era classic Lemmings. Each worm is just a few pixels, and in many ways this game will appeal to fans of Lemmings as it’s a bunch of critters who can use skills selected from a menu in the same fashion as Lemmings. The major differences are that in Lemmings you’re trying to save as many critters as possible, but in Worms you’re trying to kill them, and that the Lemmings will continually walk around, but the Worms stay put until controlled individually.

Worms Armageddon is the evolution of Worms 2 and has stylised graphics, which I can understand them going with to make the worms have more personality and be better for merch, but to me have never had the same charm as the originals. This port appears to be from the Playstation game, but could be the N64 edition. I never owned either back in the day and as much as I’ve always loved and returned to the original Worms, I’ve been scratching my head as to whether I’d ever played Worms Armageddon before.

The game has better controls as they are mapped to the Evercade and just using more buttons to select weapons makes life easier. There are more weapons in the game, and the animation is better, but essentially this is just more Worms. I think it’s probably that many people who get this collection will quickly decide if they prefer to play Worms or Worms Armageddon and rarely then play the other, as they are so similar gameplay wise. It’s not like they are story heavy games where you’d need to regularly return to both games to get the full experience. Either will give you your Worms fix. Certainly as it is, Worms Armageddon does give the better controls and richer gameplay experience and the addition of missions as well as the standard battles does give this the edge.

And then we come to Worms Blast. This is a Worms take on a game like Bust A Move/Puzzle Bobble. From what I can gather this is a port of the Game Boy Advance game (at least I hope so) as the graphics on the TV looked super blown up. This will only be an issue if you’re playing on an Evercade VS or have your handheld Evercade connected to your TV.

I’d never played this game before, and whilst I was overconfident that I could jump straight in I quickly realised that I needed to go back and do the tutorial. And oh boy this felt a really long tutorial. It was maybe 20 or 30 levels of tutorial which did help me get to grips with things, but made me realise that this game wouldn’t be the simple pick up and play Bust A Move clone.

Essentially it is like Bust A Move or Dr Mario etc where you want to eliminate coloured gems by connecting the matching coloured thing you send into the playing area. Unlike Dr Mario dropping pills, or Bub and Bob shooting balls, this is Worms, so you fire rockets. Like Bust A Move, the colour rocket you fire changes, although it seems to sometimes cycle colours in a predictable pattern and maybe it’s random at other times when I think about it.

Where it becomes different form those other games is that you can also move your chosen worm from left to right at the bottom of the screen to change your aim and dodge falling debris. Wario’s Woods had you control your character as well, but this goes another step further by giving you many different weapons to use that all do slightly different things. You can control the power of the shot of the bazooka that fires rockets, but then other weapons like the lazer gun and shot gun always fire at full speed. The lazer destroys everything in the path of where you shot, and there are also times when you’ll need to bounce shots off of rubber panels.

This all adds strategy to the game which fits in with Worms as a franchise, but I actually found this game quite hard at times. Like even the tutorial would be punishing on some levels. There was one very early level in particular that I attempted maybe 30 times as you had 1 minute to hit a target which would require you first to obtain a lazer gun hidden in the level, then you only get two shots and have what requires a pixel perfect aim. I was ready to give up until I remembered that the Evercade allows you to do save states on any game. With this I used trial and error to get past this overly tricky early level. I see Worms Blast as a game which I’ll return to here and there just to chip away at the levels but wasn’t one I fully experienced for this review as it was just instantly too challenging.

Conclusion

Despite my feeling that Worms Blast here is too hard to be a pick up and play game like other puzzlers of a similar nature, I’d still say that it is a lot of fun and that the overall package of Worms and Worms Armageddon with it make this one of the easiest recommendations for the Evercade. The games are addictive and control well with the dpad rather than traditional mouse controls. Worms is perfect game to lose yourself in whilst you have a few minutes or a few hours to spare and fans of the series will love it. If you’ve never really loved the Worms games this release won’t change anything, but if you like turn based action strategy games with lots of humour this is the game for you!