Worms Reloaded

Over the years, video game developers have discovered two sure-fire ways to make violent content palatable: use cute cartoon graphics, and make sure violent offenders are animals.

The Worms franchise is the perfect example of this formula, containing as it does squeaky-voiced animals and bazookas. Birthed on the Amiga back in the mid-'90s, the series found its way onto mobile handsets a few years ago.

It's a formula that has changed little since those 16-bit days, and Worms Reloaded, bar a couple of new modes and a more cramped playing area, could easily be mistaken for any number of its ancestors.

A little setup first: you control one or more worms, who are dropped into a 2D map with a team of AI-controlled adversaries. Taking turns, you have 45 seconds to choose a weapon from your arsenal and use it to cause as much damage to the opposing side as possible.

The humour that helped to set the game apart from its sterile peers is, thankfully, still present in the mobile version.

Whether you're fire-punching a worm with your flaming fist, releasing an exploding sheep onto the battlefield, or just listening to the high-pitched exertions of your wriggly warriors, there's a kind of glee to the carnage that's hard to resist.

It's a handsome package, too. Enviroments and characters are vibrant and defined. The worms themselves, while necessarily small, are well-suited to the screen dimensions. Even small objects like mines are comfortably visible amid the action.

The single-player campaign walks you through a variety of themed levels and modes. Fans of the classic Worms experience will feel immediately at home with the standard Deathmatch mode, which invites you to drain your enemy's health points by any means at your disposal.

Instant Kill mode, meanwhile, allows every worm to be taken out with a single shot, making for some quick, but tense matches. One mode sees you outnumbered one to four, while another limits your weapon set, forcing you to specialise if you plan last out the match.

For a game originally designed for keyboard and mouse, the controls are surprisingly well implemented, making it easy to maneouvre your slimy soldiers into position and adjust the sighting and trajectory of your projectiles.

Sight, however, is one of the major issues with Worms Reloaded on mobile. Despite the comparatively miniscule maps, too much of the action is off-screen.

This means you're either cumbersomely scrolling around the environment in search or your target, or obscuring the top quarter of your already cramped display with a mini-map. Couple this with your opponent's wanton lust for random self-destruction and you'll find matches can quickly descend into haphazard bouts of depressingly random chaos.

Though there is a welcome pass-and-play option, there's no support for online play, leaving you at the mercy of the unpredictable enemy AI.

Ultimately, while well-contested victories can be satisfying, it's difficult to take pleasure in a conquest that might just as easily have occurred had you left your cat in charge of the handset.