Worms Ultimate Mayhem Cartoon warfare with terrible aim

The classic Worms formula, rebuilt in 3D. Each turn, you move one worm across a wobbly island, line up a shot and hope the physics cooperate. The third-person view adds verticality and angles the 2D games never had: you can climb with a rope, drift down on a parachute, jetpack to a high ledge or teleport out of trouble, then attack from a position nobody saw coming. And you can always just nudge someone into the water. It plays a little slower than the flat classics, since you are reading a whole landscape instead of a line, but every turn is still a small puzzle in how to ruin someone else's day.

The classics are all here: the Bazooka, Dynamite, the Baseball Bat, the Holy Hand Grenade, the Banana Bomb and the Super Sheep. Then it gets stranger. Alien Abduction, the Old Woman, Bovine Blitz and the Fatkins Strike are among the surreal weapons you can wage war with, and they are exactly as dignified as they sound. Best of all, you can build your own weapons from a selection of components within a power limit, then slip them into your arsenal. They stay hidden until the moment you deploy one and your opponent discovers, mid-turn, what you have been saving. The picture-in-picture display follows every shot even after you retreat, so you never miss the result.

Over 70 single-player missions and challenges in total, from shooting ranges to speed runs, with a time-travelling campaign that hops between Medieval, Wild West, Arabian and Prehistoric settings. The challenges drill individual skills against the clock: piloting a jetpack, steering a parachute, hitting targets. They are short, sharp and surprisingly demanding once the timers tighten. Win and you earn currency to spend on cosmetic extras for your team.

Because turns are short and the rules take a minute to explain, this is a natural party game. Four players can share one screen, no extra controllers-and-accounts ceremony, and a round is a quick, loud argument about whose fault the last explosion was. The customization does half the entertaining: name your team, pick hats, glasses and moustaches, choose what your worms shout and what gravestone they leave behind. When a worm dies mid-sentence with a moustache and a sombrero, the room takes notice. Randomly generated landscapes keep every gathering fresh, and you can save and share the good ones.

Five multiplayer modes cover the moods: plain Deathmatch, defensive modes like Statue Defend, and Homelands, among others. You can set up custom game settings for your own house rules, and in-game voice chat lets you cheer teammates on or win the battle verbally. If rivalry is the point, standard and ranked games feed the Steam leaderboards, and the turn-based pace means a serious match is about angles and damage maths rather than reflexes. Local co-op and split screen work offline on one machine, so a lobby is as simple as the people already in the room.