Matching bubbles in a way that others are no longer connected to anything will also cause them to plummet towards the ground, possibly bonking you in the head that way, as well. It’s possible to crash into bubbles that are level with your boater, doing damage until they sink into the ocean and disappear. Your boater has a health bar, with the boat sinking into the ocean once it hits zero. Unlike most other games of the style, where the bubbles reaching the bottom of the screen would spell defeat, Blast takes a different approach. Firing into the ocean can be somewhat safer, as the game often spawns stars that’ll lower the ocean when your boater collects them. Fire a shell off the sides, and a heavy object will come raining down upon your head, fast enough that dodging it can be very difficult. Fire a shell into the water and the water level will raise slightly, putting you a little closer towards the bubbles that spell your doom. Unfortunately, the game has already planned for that, although in a tight situation, it might still work.

If you can’t do anything with the shell color you currently have loaded, you might think you could just fire it off and get a new one. If they don’t match, the bubble and each one connected to it will change color to match the shell that hit it. The shells it fires comes and colors, and if a shell matches the color of one more bubbles, both the shell and the bubbles will vanish. In typical Worms tradition, your boater comes equipped with a bazooka that can be adjusted for angle and power. At the top of the screen are rows of bubbles that come in variety of colors and types. Whichever character you pick is placed in a small boat that can drive from side to side at will. You may wish to avoid having to risk listening to Boggy B’s (the male worm) particularly abrasive voice clips for terribly long, however. The only major difference between each of the characters is how the boat they use to travel around the field handles. There’s Calvin the sheep, Starvos the skunk, the old woman Ethel, as well as Chuck the homing pigeon. There’s a male worm and a lady worm, as differentiated by her bow, with the other slots being taken up by what used to be weapons.

There’s plenty of unexplored territory to be seen here, most obvious of which is the chance to play something besides the titular annelids. More than likely, however, ‘Puzzle Bobble-esque puzzle game’ wouldn’t have been anyone’s guess on what would follow. One could hardly blame the creators for wanting to try something new, to do something with the worms that hadn’t been done before. Even Armageddon, its prequel, was more of an improvement upon Worms 2 than anything radically different. That game had little to offer for those who didn’t own it on Dreamcast, which itself was already near dead by its release. It wouldn’t be hard to assume that Team 17 was running low on new ideas for the franchise after World Party.

Worms reloaded deleting boards