Doing this, you can probably send him flying in the direction of the nearest landmine or instant-death pool of water. Having to aim from the first-person view is an understandable change in a 3D environment, but the trajectories are obviously much tougher to judge correctly, so a lot of them require real hard graft to master and, coupled with the smaller levels, it's much easier to find a way to walk up to a worm and bash him in the face instead. The weapons remain silly and often unique, but many are simply hand-me-downs that don't convert well to the new conditions, mainly because the learning curve has spiked upward dramatically. Customise the way you throw your granny around with the Weapon Factory. The sense of bounce on the ninja rope is different, and it's much less useful than it used to be, and the idea of floating someone down a river of fire into the sea is out because now worms just roll off the wayside back onto terra firma. They aren't deep, either, so tunnelling is out and watery graves are easily fashioned, whereas once there was something of an art to arranging them. The levels obviously spread out in several directions but actually feel much more compact, and the worms much bigger within them, so it's often much easier to stand right next to your prey. The addition of a third dimension has seen Worms 3D and Worms 4: Mayhem (last year's Forts Under Siege can be discounted, as it was a total departure and very unconvincing) depart significantly from the balanced equation of the past - whether deliberately, unwittingly, or by virtue of necessity. Coating the ground in a bed of napalm might achieve the same effect or, if you were really clever, could be used to ferry enemy worms off the edge into an abyss as they bounced uncomfortably over a bed of flames, but it was always a question of picking the most effective weapon for a given situation and trying to save the really useful ones until the end. This often took him out completely, whereas a conventional weapon might only have wiped off a few health points.
But the cluster bomb - which was often only available in limited numbers - was a better choice if the enemy worm was sitting quite low in the level, because the resulting chain of explosions could conceivably rip the ground out around him and send him into the murky depths below. For example, a grenade with a one-second fuse could, with practice, be hurled short-range and expected to blow up in someone's face. Weapons were often silly but had unique properties that made them useful in certain situations. It looks alright, but without the cross-section view Worms 2D had, the severity of it is diminished. Doing so effectively against the clock was a real skill. Although the little worms themselves moved slowly, it was simple to get the hang of swinging back and forth using the fabled ninja rope, carefully adjusting length and bounce to manoeuvre yourself into useful positions high and low. Worms in the olden days was two-dimensional and had tiny characters roaming around huge, often intricate environments that ran very deep - so much so that you could tunnel out holes and explosions would radically alter the shape of the level - and eventually hit water far below. Beyond that, the similarities are more superficial. Both have cute, stylised graphics, quirky team names and designs and bundles of amusing little taunts and battle cries recorded in squeaky voices and accents. First things first, both are strategic games where teams of several worms face off and take it in turns to try and blow chunks out of each other using outlandish weaponry, navigating the landscape slowly on foot (well, figuratively) or quickly with the aid of various tools like ropes, parachutes and girders - the latter acting as platforms to bridge gaps. Worms 4: Mayhem is the same kind of Worms game as Worms 3D with a few new bits and pieces, including some weapon and game-type customisation and an extended mini-game-based "Challenge mode, but, if you ask us, Worms 3D had already abandoned a lot of what people liked about Worms in the first place. We reckon the answer's quite simple: everyone keeps claiming that this is just Worms in 3D. It would be easy to glance at the score below (actually, we should probably add rings of fire and puzzles involving the placement of runes and crests to stop people doing that) and assume that Worms is simply getting old.