Worms Crazy Golf

My initial thoughts on Worms Crazy Golf was that it was gonna be a pointless, random spin-off, but after a few minutes of playing, I was convinced it was the perfect spin-off for the series. Instead of choosing the power and trajectory of grenades or bazookas based on the current wind speed and map obstacles, you are choosing the power and trajectory for a golf ball, based on these same factors. It is therefore a natural fit for the series, and can also utilise the crazy aspects of the game to live up to this games title, and the series' reputation.

You control a single worm who is playing golf over familiar looking landscapes, with the aim of achieving par across 4 courses, each consisting of 18 holes. Additionally, there are extra challenges; to collect all the coins on the course, collect the single crate, and achieve a hole-in-one. With the coins, you can purchase new clubs, hats, balls, or voices for your character.

The Britannia course looks like a standard grass/golf theme, but then you will move onto Pirates, Graveyards, and Carnival. Each course may have a different aesthetic, but for the most part, they play the same. It's just that the objects are replaced; bunkers will be piles of gold or graves, warp points will change from castles to cannons or clowns, worms will wear different attire. There are former weapons that now reside on the map as objects such as sheep and old women.

For each turn, the appropriate club is automatically chosen, but can be overridden if you desire. The choice of clubs are simplified, so you get a choice of four; driver, iron, wedge, and putter. You can equip a power up, then aim and power up your shot. After the ball is moving, you can apply spin or choose to activate your power up to add modifiers to the ball's movement and behaviour.

To power up the shot, you press and hold the space-bar, then release when ready. There's an optional control scheme to press once to start and once to stop if you prefer. On the power gauge, there is an area at the top which activates 'overdrive' and this is surrounded by red sections. Stop the gauge in the red and you slice your shot. Stop it in overdrive and you add some extra power at the expense of accuracy.

As you progress, power-ups are awarded to you. Utilising these can be a great help in collecting the coins/crate or going for the hole in one. They aren't necessary to use to achieve the par score, and I'd recommend not using them for this; otherwise the game can be a little too easy. You gain the ability to slow time, blast shot which gives the ball an extra push mid-flight, the highly useful parachute, the wonderful reverse gravity, the heavy ball, and the bouncy ball. Each hole lets the player use each utility for up to ten seconds, or five times for the blast shot. Once you’ve unlocked each utility, they’re available for all previous holes too, so you can go back and improve your score and collect coins/crates you have missed. The parachute and reverse gravity make collecting coins and achieving the hole-in-ones a little too easy. The reverse gravity can be toggled on and off to basically hover great distances over the course.

Completing all four challenges in one go is not feasible. The coins are scattered around the map, some of which are in hard to reach areas, and you will have to go out of your way to collect the crate. This design choice forces players to replay a hole multiple times, rather than use skill and ingenuity to complete it all in one go. Since you have unlimited shots if you aren't going for par, it's just a matter of time before you collect the crate and all the coins. There should be some kind of restriction where you have to collect them all in a certain amount of shots.

Worms Crazy Golf does feels like an iOS game, which it is; but for a much larger price. Bizarrely, it costs £6.99 on Steam for the PC version but only £0.99 on iTunes for the iPad version. Still, there’s a lot more content than it seems, and it’s a great game to play in short bursts which soon can rack up to around 5 hours. It's surprisingly enjoyable, but could be improved by offering more of a challenge by limiting the amount of shots available to collect the coins and crates.