Game Reviews

Worm Run

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Worm Run
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| Worm Run

Modern video games aren't very good at making you feel vulnerable. Inevitably you're a one-man army, able to shrug off literally thousands of bullet wounds while dishing out hot steaming bowls of righteous justice.

Worm Run is different. Here's a game that constantly reminds you how small and pathetic you are, using your fallibility and mortality as spurs to drive you on. It's cruel, indifferent to your suffering, and a little bit special.

Worm your way out of this

You play as a miner out to collect gems. Dwarfed by the caves you're sprinting through, you're little more than a stick figure in a big helmet. It's not the caves that are out to get you (although they hold plenty of hazards too). It's the giant, all-consuming worm you need to worry about.

To escape you're given a perfectly inadequate set of controls. Your leaps and boosts are all controlled with swipes, but so is your running, meaning you're constantly, frantically, dragging a finger across the screen.

Double-jumps and wall-jumps are par for the course, but they're hard to pull off. And that giant fuzzy orange death beast is closing in.

You're screaming at the screen, desperate to get up to that outcrop of rock and continue your journey. But it's too late, and those hilariously fanged cartoon jaws are already closing around you.

So you do the only sane thing. You start again. You're rarely conscious of the gems you're collecting or the boosts you're grabbing, because dallying for too long will get you killed. You just run and hope against hope that this time you'll get a little bit further.

Fangs for the memories

Sometimes you grab a block of ice that lets you slide along more quickly, or plant bombs to slow down the advance of the terrible beast. The gems you collect can be spent on new ways to slow it down and speed you up, which you'll pick up at random as you leg it.

Some might say that the controls are too fiddly, that they detract from the experience, but to all intents and purposes they are the experience. They cement the fact that you are a rubbish little man sprinting away from a force of nature.

And as you sprint you're reminded by the gravestones of other runners that yours is a hopeless task. Those jaws will close, sooner or later, but that doesn't change how much frantic, desperate fun you'll have before they do.

Worm Run

A brilliant variation on the endless-runner genre, Worm Run is breathless, addictive fun of the highest calibre
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.