1) "If they're describing it in terms of social events, it must be useless as a one-player game."

That's nght. In one player mode you'll be bored in 20 minutes at the outside, largely because of the useless computer intelligence - the enemy worms are either ridiculously good at the high setting, ridiculously stupid at the low setting, or a random and highly unconvincing combination of two at the medium setting, and they only ever use about four of the 23 or so offensive and defensive abilities available.

2) "If it got rejected in a magazine compo, it's not going to be the most original idea ever."

Right again. Worms is, in fact, nothing more and nothing less than a thinly-disguised variant of a known PD game usually known as 'Tanks' or something similar, whereby two or more players shoot at each other across a mountain range, altering shot trajectories and strengths to take account of wind and suchlike. The differences here are that you get several different kinds of weapons, and up to 16 combatants can be on screen at once.

3) "16 combatants? That must be a bit confusing, surely?"

Partially correct. The worms all look the same and the terrain is pretty nondescript, so it's easy to get a bit lost. However, if you're actually playing a 16-player game, there's an extremely good chance that you'll get killed by all the other players who go first before you actually get to have a shot, so it doesn't really matter.

4) "But at least I can play it on my 386, yeah?"

Technically, yes. But the scrolling is so jerky and the mouse movement so agonisingly slow and awkward on a 486DX2/66, that we wouldn't like to imagine it on a DX/33. This isn't a hairsplitting quibble - the game is largely about scrolling and moving the mouse around, and it doesn't take very long for the technical failings to really get in the way and start to irritate you.

5) "But it's from Team 17, so it'll be funny and irreverent and stuff."

Er... depends how amused you are by some scratchy sub-Lemmings speech samples and the opportunity to rename your worm 'Arse' or somesuch. And also, in the fantastically annoying way that has become Team 17's trademark, the 'Team 17' worm team is stupendously talented and will beat you almost every time if you play against the computer. And when a worm dies, it does a little comedy death sequence where it blows itself up with dynamite and injures any nearby worms in the explosion even though it was already dead, which is just silly, not funny, and a bit crap.

6) "Oh."

Well, it's not quite as bad as it sounds. There are some funny moments, like when a worm throws a hand grenade uphill at an enemy worm atop a ridge, who gets blown off the ridge and rolls down the side of the mountain, crashes into the worm who threw the grenade, and both of them fall into the sea and die. But mostly you'll be itching to get back to Micro Machines 2 after half an hour at the most. Oh, and if they're expecting this to be a big hit on the Saturn and PlayStation, they're in for a nasty surprise.

PC GAMER-THE VERDICT

Moderately entertaining but desperately flawed as a multi-player game. Barely better than the PD versions.