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Publisher:- Team 17	Price:- £19.99
Programming:- Andy Davidson	Release Date:- OUT NOW

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A demo of this game can be downloaded my clicking on the following link
- Worms - Directors Cut Demo -

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I'm sure many of you know what Worms is about about and if you don't, why not? It is considered to be one of the best Amiga games ever, this is confirmed by the fact that it currently holds 3rd position in the Amiga Nutta top 100 games poll. For those of you who have in hibernation for the last few years the game is essentially a refined version of Tanks. Your group of worms are placed upon a landscape (which is randomly generated each time you play), given some weapons and tools, with the aim being to make sure your worms are the last ones standing.

Each team takes it in turns to bombard the opposing worms with whatever weapon they see fit too. The range of weapons that is available is massive and it will take you a long time to work out which is best to use in different situations. As well as weapons there are also a range of tools available to each worm, these consist of things such as bungie ropes, drills and ninja ropes. Each worm has an initial energy level which is depleted throughout the battle, once this reaches zero is is time for the worm to say 'bye, bye', it is then removed from the game. When all of one teams worms are removed from the game the other team is announced the winner.

Once you run the game you will be presented with the title screen (There is an intro animation available which was on a CU Amiga CD, however, due some problems this can not be tied in with the game yet, there will hopefully be a patch for this and a few other problems soon) From here you can Start a new game, enter your own team, edit a hugh amount of options, view records, put the game to sleep and quit. The 'put to sleep' option here is quite interesting as it allows you to virtually shut the game down to a small title bar on the workbench screen so you can go and do something else, this is a nice option but the game multi-tasking would have been much better.

A mention must go to the options as from here you can alter virtually anything in the game. Such things as move time, round time, wind and controllers can all be suited to your own tastes. There are also options to turn each weapon on and off and to alter the damage that they do. You can also save these options so you don't have to change them every time you play, however, in the version I reviewed due to a bug the game would not load in previously saved options. Again, this will be fixed in the update coming soon.

Those of you who have played the orginal may be asking what does Worms - DC have that the original doesn't. Well to tell the truth, not much really. It is more of an enhancement of the features that are already there. For example it now has 300+ colours on screen with some excellent parallax strolling. There are also some subtle new additions such as cavern levels, these levels have ceilings on them so making it much harder to use many weapons, it also brings ninja and bungie ropes into the game.

There is also a hugh range of new weapons at your disposal. For more information on some of the weapons available see the boxout. New weapons in the game include things such as Mad Cows, Old Women, Sheep and Baseball Bats. Some of these are totally 'mad' and are more there for a laugh then being of practical use, but still they do add quite a bit to the game. There are enough weapons here to keep you experimenting and playing for quite a while.

A new feature that deserves a mention in the Graffiti Mode. Using this you can draw anything you want and have it turned into a level to play on. This is done directly from inside the Worms - DC game, there is no need to load up a paint package or anything. Using the mouse to draw, once you have finiished the landscape it can be filled in using textures from the game, you can also invert the level so you can create a cavern level. This is a very smart feature that allows you to create your own levels quickly and easily. Of course there is still the option to create your own landscapes using a paint package. There is a also a Worms Prefs GUI seperate to the main program that makes helps you implement your own landscapes into the game, this worms prefs will hopefully be expanded soon to allow you to set other options from outside of the main game.

As with the original Worms there are still some excellent sound effects in the game, this is especially true for speach that each worm makes when firing, being hit etc. Some of these samples will leave you in fits of laughter. There is also the option to replace these samples with your own.

To sum up Worms - The Directors cut is an excellent game and should be brought by anyone who does not have the original Worms. However, for those of you who do have Worms I'd think twice in recommending this game to you as there is not a massive difference between the two, I'm not saying don't buy it, just think about weather you need the extra features that are in the game before you do. Also you should remember that this game is much better when played with friends, playing against the computer is fun but soon gets boring. Hopefully there will be a TCP upgrade for Worms - DC in the future, allowing you to play against friends over the Internet, this is one thing the game could do with and is something that will please many Internet users.

Like I said at the start this will be Team 17s last Amiga game, this means that we will not get the Worms 2 that is due for release next year. However we can be safe in the knowledge that we currently have the best version of worms on any platform. I'd personally like to say a big thankyou to Team 17 and Andy Davidson for supporting the Amiga as much as they have. Last I heard Worms - DC was not selling very well, this is a great shame as it is an excellent game, and it deserves better. I urge all you Amiga users out there to buy this game and show that it is not dead, if only to make sure that Andy takes the time out to produce the TCP add-on for it. Remember he has hardly made anything from this game, he has done it for the love of the computer. When I recently saw him on #amiga he was quite upset that it was doing as bad as it was, please re-pay his loylty buy buying this game....As for if it's Team 17's best ever game, well I'd have to say it's a close match between this and Alien Breed 3D. Buy it and decide for yourself!!!

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