Platinum #138 - Worms W.M.D

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 8/10

As far as strategy games go, Worms will never be the biggest dog in the fight. After all, it's an old, tried and tested formula that Team 17 has stuck to for decades, and why not? 

No matter what form it's ever been presented in, it's consistently good, hearty fun built around a very simple turn-based concept. I was actually surprised to discover that this is the fourth Worms Platinum to grace the collection - A testament to everything I've just said. I've been coming back for more over the years and barely realised it.

Worms W.M.D doesn't exactly re-invent the wheel. I've played Worms Ultimate Mayhem, which was a 3D dosage of Worms. However, W.M.D takes us back to the roots of 2D canvassing.

Each game begins with each player placing their team of Worms strategically across the landscape, and then you have 20 minutes to eliminate the other players worms before they eliminate yours. The winner is the one who fulfils this task first. I told you it was simple, but you knew that anyway because you've surely played Worms before, right?

There are different modes to the game that add interesting twists to the core gameplay, and these are wrapped up within the trophy list, and we'll visit these one by one, but Worms has always been such a charming offering. It benefits from such a simple concept to the point that it doesn't feel the need to do anything drastic in the fear of becoming stale. Team 17 know full well that Worms is loved for what it is.

Combat is intuitive and easy to learn. The plethora of weapons on offer are diverse, fun and at times, just a little bit batshit crazy. Even just cycling through the huge armoury, just to see what they all do, is a hell of a lot of fun in itself, and the game will give you ample opportunities to experiment with it's impressive arsenal.

However, it's not just about brute force. The tactical element of the game is just as important to master. From the positioning of your worms on the landscape, navigating terrain and understanding how to reach advantageous positions to both attack and defend is just as important. Amongst all the dynamite, bullets and exploding sheep, this is still a strategy game at heart, and your success will be determined by outthinking your opponent and your ability to always be two steps ahead.

A shout out to the design team too. Graphics which have maintained their cartoony charm that has been a crown in the jewel of the series over the years and voice lines that are witty and charming. The customisation options on offer for your worms is vast and really draws out some personality to the in-game character models - Right down to selecting the tombstone displayed on-screen when one of your worms faces is shotgunned into the ground.

Worms is exactly how I remember it and it's a prime example of a game that doesn't need wholesale changes to still present an engaging package to it's audience - and that is a rare occurrence. It feels like games are constantly under more and more pressure to adapt and implement change, but Worms pivots on that and sticks to it's guns to serve up more of the same turn-based, 2D death.

Regarding the trophies, this is a medium-sized list, coming in at 30 trophies in total, including the Platinum trophy.

These span across a variety of different modes within the game, including the Training Academy, Single Player Campaign, Challenge mode and finally, the online Multiplayer.

As you'd expect, the Training Academy is a breeze, and you'll learn the ropes of most of the basic, and some of the more advanced gameplay strategies, but as a mode intended to help you cut your teeth, it's very straight-forward. The overall list is very Gold-heavy, and you can collect 4 Gold trophies purely through obtaining Gold medals on each of the 20 Training exercises, so this particular mode is heavily incentivised within the trophy list.

As a more seasoned Worms player, I jumped straight into the online Multiplayer component of the game, rather than continue forth with the rest of the Single Player aspects. This contains the most challenging trophy in the list, and there's a lot to say about the online element of W.M.D.

The "Bleating Ranker" trophy, awarded for Reaching Sheep Rank, is a tough battle to the top, driven by a regressive levelling system where you'll be rewarded with points for wins, and punished with deductions for losses. This isn't a standard levelling journey, which usually just allows you to level up via experience points, and losing rarely matters. Every win counts, and so does every defeat, and the amount of points you gain or lose is relative to your oppositions ranking.

Sheep Rank isn't the highest rank in the game though, which is something worth noting, though it isn't that far from the top. You'll begin in Prod, and then advance through Girder, Fire Punch, Uzi, Shotgun and Bazooka - Before eventually reaching Sheep, which is the beginning of Gold tier. The amount of points you earn for a win is determined by your opponents rank relative to your own. If they're at the bottom in Prod, you'll earn significantly less points for beating them than if they were in say, Bazooka, which is higher and will earn you more points. 

The catch is, if you lose to players of a lower rank than you, your points deductions will be heavier, and you can easily lose 20-30 points after being beaten by lower ranking players, and this is where you'll really see the detrimental impact of the regressive levelling system. You ultimately need to achieve consistency, and there are direct parallels to that of Motorstorm : Pacific Rift, which also adopted the same method for it's competitive online mode. This was the last game I played where I experienced a regressive levelling system, and whilst it makes things fiercely competitive, it also comes with a lot more pressure when you know that the stakes are higher.

You can earn bonus points, which massively help you cover losses. Your first win of any given day will net you 5 bonus points, and every time you achieve a winning streak of 3 or more games, you'll earn an additional 10 bonus points per win, which can significantly scale your levelling progression. Sheep Rank will require a net total of 600 points, so you'll need to polish up your skills to a reasonably good standard.

There's also no skill-based matchmaking either. This can either be a blessing or a curse. At this point in the game's cycle, you tend to run into either new players at Prod rank or experienced professionals at Armageddon rank. I'd rate my ability fairly modestly, and what I mean by that is, I'd generally be fairly comfortable against new players, but have my ass handed to me by Armageddon players. The Armageddon players are good. Really good. It was rare to run into people that sat anywhere between this scale, which made for a very feast or famine experience. The positive thing about running into Armageddon players is the fact that you don't lose many points, because you're significantly lower ranked in comparison, and by contrast, you can really reap the rewards for knocking them off with some big points.

These little boosts are not only good for points progression, but confidence too. However, it can be a slippery slope if you're constantly matched up against stronger players. Some sessions would actually leave me down on points, and I had to give up early in order to prevent myself getting into a heavy slump of losses. It's important to know when to fold them sometimes.

Just a few more things to call out; The progress tracking is a bit glitchy. For some strange reason, you have to manually save your levelling progress by hitting a "Save" button after each game, otherwise you'll reset back down to the very start of Prod rank when you next log on. On one occasion, I just randomly lost an entire rank, despite saving my progress. Frustrating.

Finally, there is a restricted weapon set in Ranked play, meaning you cannot access around half of the entire arsenal in the game. It's important to know which weapons and tools are worth crafting, and when to craft them. Using resources effectively is imperative in Ranked, and the best players will know exactly how to manage their resources effectively. Jet Packs, Bunker Busters, Demon Strikes, Poison Grenades and Girth Girders were all personal favourites, depending on the situation.

According to the in-game stats screen, I played 314 ranked games with a 41.72% win ratio. This equates to around 131 wins and 183 defeats. It's painful to realise that I played 183 games online and not a single one of them ever counted for anything. I always felt like I learned from every defeat, but in reality, they just took me further away from my end goal.

The good news is, it's mostly all downhill from this point onwards. The worst that this list has to throw at you is behind you if you've finally reached Sheep Rank. Just two more modes to beat, starting with the Single Player Campaign.

The "That Camp was no Pain" trophy, awarded for Completing the Campaign, requires you to beat all 30 Campaign missions, with a main target requirement needed to pass each mission. This isn't quite the tough part though. The main objective is fairly easy to fulfil, if you purely just want to advance beyond the mission.

The "Billy No Mates" trophy, awarded for Completing all the Sub Goals, is where the Campaign actually gets a little bit tricky. On top of the primary objective for each mission, there are 3 additional sub goals for fulfilling some smaller tasks within the mission. These range from defeating all enemy worms on the map, collecting a certain number of crates, defeating worms using specific weaponry and finishing the mission with a certain level of health - Among other things.

All of these requirements need to be completed in a single mission, including the primary objective, and cannot be spread across multiple attempts. My biggest issue here is the Worms AI. They have a frustrating variance of unpredictability in their behaviour, which can directly scupper your progress towards Sub Goals.

To give a specific example, there's a mission that requires you to complete it with at least one worm having 180 health. You only have 2 worms on the map, and there are 2 health crates in positions that cannot make them collectible in one turn. After working out how to access the crate with the required number of turns to reach it, the enemy worm standing next to it would just decide to fire off a Bazooka 2 yards away from itself and destroy the health crate. Mission over, 15 minutes of work undone and a pending restart.

On the opposite end of the scale, another mission required me to make sure I ended the mission with at least 50 health to the vital worm. Believing it was well protected in a building, and witnessing the enemy team consistently use the "Skip Go" utility, I didn't think there was any imminent danger. Until one worm randomly decided to turn around, fire a bazooka upwards, and use the wind direction to land a rocket with pinpoint precision onto a barrel above the building that triggered a chain reaction of explosions that devasted the worm I was specifically protecting as per the requirements of the Sub Goal. Mission over, 15 minutes of work undone and a pending restart.

You can literally go from seeing pure suicide to the wildest trickshot accuracy from turn to turn, and it just feels like it's only that way purely to add a guaranteed blocker to the achievement of simple side goals. It's some of the wonkiest AI I've ever seen in a game, and these specific examples occurred on at least a dozen occasions and made the Campaign longer and more frustrating to complete than it perhaps should have been.

Finally, there is also the Challenge mode. Within the Campaign levels, there are 10 wanted posters to collect which unlock the challenges available in this mode.

Within these scenarios, you have a find a specific way to defeat a boss worm, and only have a couple of weapons at your disposal. It's designed to be a mode of logic. The route to success isn't always immediately obvious, and may require you to think slightly outside of the box. It's a neat little addition to the game, but they're not overly demanding and don't require too much elaborate thinking, though you will unlock another Gold trophy for your efforts.

Outside of this, there are trophies awarded for a handful of kill related tasks, mostly focused on the range of vehicles available within W.M.D. These include earning a certain number of kills with the Mech, Helicopter and Tank, and can just be farmed within local Multiplayer with a single controller. I had actually made really good progress towards the 80 kills for each during the Multiplayer journey, so it didn't take me long to finish the rest off with some casual custom matches.

If you removed the Multiplayer requirements from this list, it probably barely pushes the mid-way point of the difficulty scale. The Campaign is generally fine to handle, minus some frustrating rubber-banding AI that has a habit of unfairly handicapping you, but the regressive levelling system is the true star of the show. It's brutally unforgiving towards anybody that's unable to show progressive improvement. Armageddon players are merciless, and have been playing this game way longer than the average player just trying to reach Sheep Rank. 

If you've seen anybody with this list on their profile, and they're missing the Platinum trophy, this'll be the reason why. A solid Platinum that'll sort the men from the worms.

Notable Trophies -

Bleating Ranker - Reach Sheep Rank.
That Camp was no Pain - Complete the Campaign.
Billy No Mates - Complete all the Sub Goals.

Hardest Trophy -

Bleating Ranker

Reach Sheep Rank

DLC #197 - Call of Duty : WWII - War Machine

After the welcome reprieve through United Front - the DLC pack that sent us back to the roots of good, old-fashioned Zombie slaying - it's somewhat apt that the final dosage of WWII zombies comes in the form of the most complicated and challenging Easter Egg yet.

War Machine adds the Shadowed Throne Zombies map - A bombed out area of central Berlin, with various points of interest, including a war museum, theatre, church and a hidden Courtyard that acts as a focal point to the Easter Egg journey.

From an aesthetic perspective, it's my favourite map out of the 3 larger maps across all DLC packs, and the fact you get transported up into the Zeppelin for the boss fight is a neat way to extend the variety of the map.

There are also a healthy selection of new weapons added to the game too, mostly focused on melee. You'll need to acquire all of them as per steps towards completion of the Easter Egg, including an Axe, Dagger, Baseball Bat and Blade - all of which you'll need the upgraded versions of. They're all incredibly overpowered in their upgraded form, and you can have alot of fun deep into the run by using the range of new melee weapons available across the map.

For something more conventional, the new Wunderbuss allows you to harvest ammunition with it's alternate fire by firing a bolt into a zombie to drain their body. This charges a prolonged power beam which gradually wears them away with it's primary fire option. Another fun weapon to use against the hordes, and just like the melee weapons, a critical component to completing the Easter Egg.

Speaking of which, the Easter Egg for War Machine is the most difficult yet, mainly down to the fact the final boss - the Stadtjager - is absolutely nails. Some of the steps along the way are a bit funky too, but if you're in the business of being carried through the Easter Egg by seasoned Zombies players, this part doesn't matter as much.

Despite being carried through, the boss battle is still a tough fight, and requires everyone to  contribute. The other maps bosses were nowhere near as health-rich, and you also still have to contend with hordes of Zombies from whichever wave you entered the fight on amidst the boss battle, just to further the complications.

The pack comes with 10 new trophies. The standout trait for most of these trophies has always been the fact you can tandem them up with each other and unlock the majority of them in a single run if you're tactful in the way you strategise your approach. You can technically adopt the same approach here, but it's a lot more challenging, due to the fact there are some very specific tasks that are best focused on one at a time.

There's a big emphasis on the melee weapons within the trophy list, with trophies tied to feats awarded for reaching round 15 using only melee weapons, obtaining the blade without firing a gunshot, killing 250 Zombies with the blade, in the museum, in a single match and killing a Wustling with each of the melee weapons in a single match.

These will require deep progress into the run. Wustlings only appear from wave 11 onwards, and you'll need the upgraded version of each melee weapon to kill them too. Obtaining the blade is one of the final steps to the Easter Egg, which will also require some deep progress. Not to mention the exact specification of reaching wave 15 with melee weapons, which is best done as a run on it's own.

Throw in the ever-present Easter Egg, which again, was tackled in a separate run, and I ended up running this map 5 times to cover each of the trophies within the list. A stark contrast to the other packs, which only required a couple of runs to grab everything I needed. They're not difficult tasks when you play with veteran Zombies players, but they have the potential for underlying challenge if you're attempting them solo or in groups without the aid of competent players.

In all honesty, there are a lot of parallels you can draw up between these DLC packs. It feels like I've been writing the same review each time. They're all heavily focused on Easter Eggs and the elements of such, and my approach to beat them all has been exactly the same - Rely on other players and mostly take a back seat. I'm just relieved I can shelf it all for good at this point.

DLC #196 - Dirt 5 - Energy

If there were awards given out for doing the absolute bare minimum to prolong the shelf life of a game, Dirt 5 would be a clear front-runner.

I don't say that lightly. Dirt has been one of my favourite franchises of all time, but I did express my concerns about the drop off this series has gone through in my Platinum Difficulty review with it's latest instalment.

DLC can often bring about an opportunity for titles to redeem themselves, but the Energy pack raises more questions than it does solve the flaws of the main game.

Here's the summarisation of what you get in one sentence. A total of 4 new cars, 25 new career events and a sense of confusion that the audacity to slap a price on this even existed in the first place.

There are no new tracks or environments, nor any new race types or modes. It's essentially just an extension of the main career you've already been through if you have acquired the Platinum trophy. The only new additions are a couple of new cars added to the existing catalogue. It's so uninspired and shows no desire to put in any level of reasonable effort to offer something genuinely exciting to the player. As a long-standing Dirt fan, it really is disappointing to see such a lack of passion towards producing exciting content for a game that dropped the standards of the series.

In regards to the trophies, there are 5 on offer here, which mostly span across the handful of new career events you have available to progress through.

The main goal is the "Extra Energy" trophy, awarded for earning all 75 stamps available in Energy. This spans across the 25 new careers events. In the main game's list, Stamps for events were awarded for in-race objectives, and there was no pressure to actually win the event. Within this DLC pack, Stamps are now awarded for placement in races, so this time round, you will need to win all 25 events in order to collect all 75 stamps. This is a big change in comparison to the main game.

However, even on Hard difficulty, it's still fairly easy to win races. A small handful of events took a couple of tries at worst, but the majority I found could be beaten on the first attempt.

You'll unlock the other trophies as you progress towards earning all 75 stamps, and the only trophy you'll potentially need to go out of your way for is the "Full Charge" trophy, awarded for Driving 30 miles in the Porsche Taycan. For me, this was just a matter of replaying a Sprint event over multiple times until I reached 30 miles. A fitting trophy for a piece of generally uninspired content.

You can unlock all 5 trophies within 4-5 hours. It's just a shame that is feels very shoehorned. Even the trophy tile artwork is duplicated, which is essentially the cherry on top.

DLC #195 - Hitman 3 - Hitman 2

The chronology of Hitman is actually way more confusing than I initially gave it credit for.

Whilst attempting to grasp the understanding of how Hitman 1 and Hitman 2 are linked, I'd led myself down a rabbit hole that had me reading all about how the 3 modern Hitman games are interwoven and the mission timeline has you constantly jumping between all 3 of them. Also, it turns out Hitman : Blood Money is not Hitman 2 either, which seems like an obvious oversight, but that's just a confession to how confused it all got me at one point.

In simpler terms though, Hitman 2 is the successor to Hitman 1. They're both included as separate DLC packs within Hitman 3. I think the original element to this game that confused me was the final DLC pack, titled Hitman 2 Expansion. We don't need to go into detail about that right now, but I originally thought it was a continuation of the Hitman 2 story, when it just turns out to be made up of a few additional missions that exist separate to the main story. DLC within DLC, if you will.

However, despite the fact that they are different games, Hitman 2 is identical to Hitman 1. Naturally, you'll visit different locations, tackle a brand new set of missions and experience a different story, but the template for the foundations that lie around all of this are practically the same.

The story consists of 7 different missions, and the 6 locations you'll visit on this occasion include New Zealand, USA (twice), Colombia, India, the Andaman Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean.

I said in the Hitman 1 review that the strongest suit of the Hitman games has always been it's brilliantly creative level design, and Hitman 2 maintains a high standard of this, with every mission offering an array of choice on dispatching your targets. It should be testified to that a game that barely changes it's template formula can still offer such extensive variation between 2 games, but the depth of the level design is so good, it helps to maintain a fresh-feeling approach each time you jump straight back into a level.

Mission Stories return. They're still a little bit too keen to hold your hand through levels with the amount of information they reveal about your targets and subsequent opportunities to kill them, which was my biggest criticism of Hitman 1, but they're still mostly engaging, and the cathartic feeling they give you leading up to the dispatch of a target is ever-present.

Most people would feel the necessity to be critical of a game that doesn't really make any significant changes - Especially for a sequel - It's just more of the same again, and I don't think that's a bad thing in any regard.

The similarities also extend to the trophy list. Again, there are 13 on offer here, and the trophies follow the same template as they did in Hitman 1. There are 6 trophies awarded for beating 6 of the missions you'll progress through on any difficulty, and a further 6 for achieving level mastery of each too, which totals 12 of the 13 trophies.

Interestingly, the "Shadows in the Water" level is excluded from the trophy list entirely, though you'll still need to beat it to progress to the final level of the game. I imagine this to be down to limitations on trophy points quota - 13 trophies is alot for a single piece of DLC content, and it's possible there were challenges in meeting this, which meant a level had to be sacrificed along the way.

Level mastery works in the exact same way as it did before. You're provided a number of various challenges that you have to complete within the level. Completion of these will award experience points, and these experience points go towards the mastery of the level. You'll need to reach level 20 for all the levels bar 1, for which you only need to reach level 5.

There isn't a need to go into much detail about the level mastery system. My views on an unchanged system remain exactly the same as they did before. I do still like the way that setting the level target to 20 ensures you complete the vast majority of the level challenges - The brilliance of Hitman's level designs and possible outcomes deserve to be explored to their fullest extent, and this is exactly what the level mastery trophies promote. Good implementation of longevity that doesn't just feel like grind-padding.

I stuck to Professional difficulty throughout. This isn't the hardest difficulty level, but it's still enough to make you think about your approach and always maintain consciousness of your surroundings. Without the trophies driving a necessity to beat the game on the hardest difficulty, Professional is a nicely balanced medium.

The remaining trophy requires you to complete The Last Yardbird Sniper mission on Silent Assassin. This is fairly simple, and the Sniper missions will become more prominent later on.

As briefly mentioned, there is a final DLC pack for an expansion to Hitman 2 to go through, but reliving these first 2 episodes in full with the modern facelift of level mastery applied to them has made me excited to go back through Hitman 3 again at some point.