Game Reviews

Battle Bugs

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Battle Bugs
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| Battle Bugs

We know that turn-based games can be slow to play, but Battle Bugs takes this to a whole new level.

On a supposedly compatible mid-spec Desire HD this lacklustre Worms clone looks like it's running in Matrix-style bullet-time, thanks to the creeping frame-rate.

Things pep up to a more reasonable speed on a Tegra 2-powered tablet, but the general lack of imagination in the game design is nearly as disappointing as the lag.

Too many legs

The default mode in Battle Bugs is Team, in which squads of ant armies duel to the death in one of eight landscapes of your choosing (including Winter Wonderland, Beach, Castle, and Ruins).

If you prefer a more committed experience, there's a Campaign mode in which you take turns to conquer areas of a blocky map in a simplistic version of Risk.

While the backgrounds are modestly detailed, with some fun touches (like snowmen and mushrooms that dwarf the diminutive bugs), a lot of the art is clearly clipped from other sources and slotted into the randomly generated landscapes.

You can fight against up to three other AI squads, or take on real-life friends by passing your handset. The bugs all come with Worms-inspired funny themed names. We’ll admit that playing as a crack team of poets (including Keats and Sylvia Plath) is mildly amusing.

Unless you choose to play without a time limit, you’ll have only a minute to move your ants around the map, selecting units with a tap and using chunky directional arrows to move them. When they’re in the right spot, you can take pot shots at the enemy forces with a (yes, Worms-like) arsenal of weapons.

Slow worms

These range from mundane machine guns to bizarre efforts like an inflatable anteater. By far the most fun you can have in the game is picking which surreal version of hell to unleash on the enemy.

Aiming for most weapons is pretty precise, too, thanks to a rotating laser pointer (controlled by two virtual buttons) that ensures shots are nearly always on target - unless you’re using one of the more random offensive devices, anyway.

As a generic Worms clone, Battle Bugs superficially ticks the right aesthetic boxes, but it’s apparently only playable on high-spec devices - which seems ludicrous given how basic the visuals and audio are.

This matters all the more because the Team17 original is available on the Android Market for just a few pennies more, and has exploding sheep.

Battle Bugs

A dreary, weary attempt to cash in on the winning Worms formula that’s crippled by an awful lag that makes the game creep and crawl agonisingly
Score
Paul Devlin
Paul Devlin
A newspaper reporter turned games journo, Paul's first ever console was an original white Game Boy (still in working order, albeit with a yellowing tinge and 30 second battery life). Now he writes about Android with a style positively dripping in Honeycomb, stuffed with Gingerbread and coated with Froyo