Historically, trophy lists from Worms games have provided a medium to solid test, but this iteration of the series definitely takes a step in the opposite direction, serving up a Worms game with a generally casual list, but not without the odd challenge along the way.
The moderately sized list, comprised of 31 trophies in total, can be further split down into 3 different parts, including a Story mode, Worms Ops mode and an Online mode.
The story mode focuses around controlling a single Worm, and being tasked with retrieving the Stone Carrot from the evil Lord Crowley-Mesmer, and takes you through a series of 25 levels, where the main goal is to eliminate all the enemy worms, and usually fulfill another specific goal to complete the level, such as rescuing an allied worm from another section of the map or reaching a certain point of the map to conclude the level, and subsequent progression to the next.
It's very linear, and there isn't exactly much of what you'd call a "story". You just jump from level to level, completing one to unlock the next, with some dialogue to provide you with the instructions on what you'll need to do in order to beat the level and advance.
The "Mesmerised" trophy, awarded for defeating the evil Lord Mesmer, is the final trophy awarded in a series of progression based trophies as you reach the conclusion of all 25 levels of the story, which will take 5-6 hours maximum. The difficulty does somewhat spike towards the end of the campaign levels, as enemy Worms become way more accurate when using weapons and tougher to defeat, but it peaks at a reasonable enough level to not cause you too many issues. There are 5 prior trophies to this one awarded for progressing beyond certain points through the story.
The second mode is Worms Ops, which are a series of challenges, each with a specific focus around mastering the use of a certain weapon or utility, which will be the primary method of completing the challenge. The overall goal is to beat all 10 of the challenges on offer, but also do so as quickly as possible at the same time.
The "Sergeant Swift" trophy, awarded for Completing all Worms Ops missions in under 8 total minutes, is the most challenging trophy in the list, and will require you to be both time efficient and skillful.
It's important to clear up the description of the trophy, because you don't actually have to beat all 10 of these challenges in a cumulative single run of 8 minutes or less, you just have to beat them for a total combined time of less than 8 minutes. Your best completion time for each challenge is recorded, and then graded between 1 to 3 stars, with 1 being a slower than desired time, and 3 being quick enough to suggest little room for improvement, which provides good guidance when trying to decide on where you need to improve your times in order to bring you below the 8 minute threshold and achieve the trophy.
Some of the challenges are fairly easy, whereas others will require you to play through them over and over to shave valuable seconds off them to get within the 8 minute time limit. The most notable challenges for difficulty are the Holy Hand Grenade and Teleport Gun challenges, and the margin for error is small, so you'll need to put up strong times in most levels to achieve the target time for this trophy.
One thing I did notice, is the fact that the timer only seems to run when you're actively performing an action with your worm, so standing still or moving on the spot, which includes aiming a weapon, doesn't actually make the timer tick, so this works in your favour and allows you take your time with certain aspects of levels, such as aiming weapons or judging line of sight. Even with this though, you still need to make sure you're accurate and not making too many errors which will cause the clock to total up, so even though this is useful information to know, it is certainly still the toughest part of this list. Having to beat 10 levels within 8 minutes, doesn't give you a huge amount of margin for error, but it's just a matter of going back over the 1 and 2 star levels and seeking continuous improvement.
Finally, the game also has a collection of trophies dedicated towards the online mode, which is fairly standard for most Worms games. Although, previous Worms titles have had a very heavy emphasis on online trophies which have required a hefty time investment, this isn't quite the same outcome here, but there are certainly a few challenges in different ways.
The online portion of the game is split into standard, classic Worms ranked mode, where you fight in a 1 v 1 environment against another human player to simply win the match, and then a new concept called Clan Battles, where you create your clan, invite your mates into it, and you fight other clans in a 2 v 2 environment. This will contribute towards progression into a higher league, and give you the chance to fight tougher clans with better players, so it effectively plays out like a sports league.
The "Steamroller" trophy, awarded for Achieving a win streak of 5 ranked online games, relates to the standard classic ranked mode, and is probably the toughest online trophy to earn. You'll need to be of a reasonable level of skill to win 5 matches in a row at most things, but there isn't any matchmaking to skill level here, so you could play anybody and run into much tougher opponents than you, who will jeopardise your winning streak, which can be frustrating when trying to chain together enough wins to earn this trophy, and knowing that 1 defeat will reset the counter makes this a decent enough challenge, but with the right level of practice, you should get there eventually, and if you win cheaply by adopting a cautious approach defending your worms and letting the rising water level do the rest, then this will help you achieve some safe victories along the way.
The "Ding" trophy, awarded for Levelling up with a clan, relates to the Clan Battles mode, which is, unfortunately, horribly broken. It only takes 5 wins to level up your clan for the first time, and thus, unlock this trophy, but a combination of connection issues with the Battlegrounds servers, which then subsequently leads to faulty stat-tracking, means that wins just don't register properly around 80% of the time.
I had to win 24 matches to get just 5 wins to correctly register to the clan statistics screen and level up, which is terrible. The worst thing about it is, this was never addressed and remained unfixed for the duration of the time since the game's release, so a very frustrating experience all round.
The remainder of the trophies in the list are awarded for miscellaneous activities. Some of them look challenging on face value, but when you realise you can unlock most of them in local Multiplayer (which you don't even need a second controller for), this becomes an incredibly easy clean-up activity, because you can alternate teams between yourself and fulfill the trophies unchallenged. There are cumulative kill trophies too, for killing Worms up to as many as 300, but you should get this naturally as you go through all game modes mentioned above, but even if you do still need a few more, you can always resort to the direct above approach of setting up local games with as many worms on the landscape as possible to help you tally those kills up.
Overall, this isn't anywhere near as challenging as the Worms games that have preceded it. The Story mode is fairly casual, and will only take around 5-6 hours to complete in full, whereas the Worms Ops mode will push your skills a little bit further on. If it wasn't for a completely broken online mode, which works completely against the player and, as a result, is easily worth an extra point on the difficulty rating, then this game would be among the company of some of the easiest game's I've ever finished. The fact you can also unlock most of the other trophies in local play extracts any potential for an additional challenge out of the game too.
The list can also be finished off in anywhere between 15-20 hours, though this depends largely on how many wins you'll need to earn from Clan Battles, compared to the number of wins you should need. My figure of 24 seemed to be both less and more compared to others, so it's hard to say what the average is, but more wins will increase your overall completion time, so I think 15-20 hours is an accurate guess for most players.
Despite this, still one of the easiest Platinum trophies in my collection.
Notable Trophies -
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| Mesmerised - Defeat the evil Lord Mesmer. Sergeant Swift - Complete all Worms Ops missions in under 8 minutes total. Steamroller - Achieve a win streak of 5 online ranked games. Ding - Level up with a clan |
Sergeant Swift
Complete all Worms Ops missions in under 8 minutes total
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