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The average Worms game is filled with tedious waiting screens, embarrassing examples of blind firing, eyerollingly out-of-date pop culture references… and that one perfect moment when you send a rocket across a football field and nail an enemy dude for an instant kill.

Worms 2: Armageddon (you’d be forgiven for any confusion about where this sequel falls in the Worms timeline of over fifteen releases in fifteen years) is a turn-based strategy game where your team of worms must eliminate all enemy worms. The battlefield is a flat, oddly shaped structure that can be demolished and tunneled. The weapons range from normal guns and land mines to exploding sheep and Holy Hand Grenades.

Remember back when video game comedy meant “Let’s be as random as we can,” alongside a wacky font? Worms is packed with what internet memes would have been if we had internet memes in 1995. I’m half-surprised this 2010 edition (which was released in 2009 on XBLA) doesn’t include a Chuck Norris joke.

When you start W2A, you have to first create your team of four worms. You get to name them, dress them in hats, and select a voice. I named mine for four of The Three Stooges before I realized that “Stooges” was in fact one of the selectable sound effect banks. The customizable hats and voices are unexpectedly deep. Sure, you can choose a boring Medieval voice, but why not Scouser or Wildlife Announcer? The hat list even includes some nice PS3 fan service, with game-specific gear from MotorStorm and LittleBigPlanet.

Then you can slog through a lengthy and exhausting tutorial that still manages to show you only a fraction of the game’s available weaponry. Sure, there’s a Trophy waiting at the end, but it’s a lot to wade through just to learn that the jump controls stink. (The timing and positioning on the absolutely necessary double-jump are absurdly unintuitive.)

Worms 2: Armageddon contains a decent single player campaign that takes you through five environments (with several unlockable bonus levels). Most of the levels are the usual Worms fare, but some switch things up with jetpack races or limited-weapon puzzles. It’s nice that the campaign isn’t just thirty boards of the same thing, but it would be nicer if we had some advance notification of the alternate modes… and a way to bypass a level that is particularly troublesome.

For example, I suck at the Ninja Rope. You probably will too; the controls for using it are a nightmare. So when I got to a challenge board that was a timed lap through a maze using only the Ninja Rope, after multiple attempts I figured that was it for the torrid romance between me and W2A Single Player Campaign Mode. Eventually I got through it, but it was disheartening to face the idea that one solitary level could derail the chances of beating the campaign.

Your progress through single-player is marked with prize money, which you can use to unlock additional weapons, hats and boards.

You can have a passable time in single-player… sometimes the AI worms will be amazingly spot-on, and at other times they will waste five turns slamming a rocket into a wall. But the real deal, however, is multiplayer in both local and online flavors.

Although the system for online matchmaking is barebones (no account profile, match history, game recording/uploading, etc), you can’t argue with the glee of smacking around enemy players with a mix of good tactics and environmental luck. Although a Worms newb with little knowledge of the full gamut of available weapons, I was still able to work to my advantage by combining what I did know with what the level gave me. With the board being randomly generated, you won’t run into the old online problem of the grizzled gaming vet who knows all the secret spots. One level – where I was set against someone who definitely DID know the game better than I do – began with one of my worms sitting right beside one of his, and a pool of water behind him. Water kills instantly. So I used the Prod attack and shoved his guy into the water on turn one. JOE 1, ENEMY 0.

It’s clear that developer Team 17 knows online play is Worms’ chief raison d’etre, as over half of the Trophy list is dedicated to online matches.

There’s a definite funk to the game. The questionable control choices and ugly menu screens give off the reek of an ancient PC game tarted up to modern HD visual specs. But when you master the steep learning curve and start really fighting it out in the trenches, you’ll find a dastardly fun multiplayer game. Good luck in search of that perfect kill.

For fun multiplayer but that musty melange of bad controls and minimalist interface, Worms 2: Armageddon gets 3 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.

Worms 2: Armageddon was released September 2010 (NA) on PlayStation Network.
Rated E10+

Check out Worms and other PS3 reviews at Test Freaks.