Developer Team 17 has made good use of the Xbox Live service, including extensive leaderboards and achievements that track your progress. During our play tests we didn't encounter any of the bugginess of the first game. You can either join a random quick match or design your own battle by selecting from a variety of game modes like Deathmatch, Forts, and Race. Up to four players can participate in multiplayer games both locally and online, and each player can customize their team of four worms. Completing stages provides you with cash you can use to buy new weapons and costumes. The single-player game here is more robust than in the first Worms. Interspersed within all the deathmatches are puzzle levels that require a bit of thinking to get through - some of which provide quite a challenge.
Before you venture online you may want to work through the lengthy single-player campaign, which is made up of 35 missions.
The tutorial doesn't explain how everything works, so there is some trial and error during your early play sessions. The shotgun can be fired twice during a turn. How long you hold down the fire button determines how far you throw grenades. Some projectiles like the bazooka are affected by the wind. It even lets you customize your own worm team from top to bottom, voice and equipment-wise.Each weapon has its own behavior that needs to be learned. Character voices are even more varied this time around, including most of the downloadable voices from the past game and a few new ones. Worms 2 looks even better now than you might remember from the Dreamcast days – the action on the 2D plane occurs in various layers, as explosions take out huge chunks of the battlefield and worms leave little grave stones where they die.
The online play is relatively lag free and stable, though there shouldn’t be much lag in a turn-based tactical game like this anyway.
There are three types of game modes that move beyond the simple rules of deathmatch, although most of the time, you’ll be killing or defending yourself anyway. Of course, the real reason you’ll start playing Worms 2 is the online multiplayer, and happily, it’s the area where this game shines all around. Sadly, though, it takes a while before you can use them, since they’re among the more expensive unlockables. The additions to the arsenal are fun on their own, like the aptly named Armageddon missile strike that decimates a map and the hilarious Holy Hand Grenade, which needs no introduction and with which you can bloweth thine enemies into tiny bits. Worms 2 plays very similarly to the first game and includes all of the weapons from that version, but the big difference this time is how the weapons have to be unlocked instead of being available right off the bat. The only real draw to playing alone is accumulating gold coins, which unlock gear for your worms to wear, more map editor tools and pieces, weapons to use in the campaign, and even more missions. As you progress through Worms 2‘s single-player campaign, the 38 or so challenges continually became harder, in part to prepare you for multiplayer.