Hands-on with Worms Crazy Golf for iPhone and iPad

Everybody knows that worms shoot themselves with bazookas by firing into a strong breeze. They don't putt 14-footers with a shot to spare. It's just common sense.

So when Team17 first announced that it was going to make a golf game with its Worms franchise, you may have been sceptical about the prospects for this surprising genre mashup.

But the veteran developer has done an impressive job in retaining the core Worms experience – that is to say, turn-based strategy with surreal humour – and building a crazy golf game around it.

Worms Crazy Golf retains the 2D perspective and look of the more traditional titles in the series, so it’s not a complete shock when you first start up the game.

Indeed, you can almost play it like a traditional game of Worms - altering the angle by dragging the crosshair and holding or tapping the golf ball icon to shoot.

But when it comes to your weapon selection, you’re given the choice between drivers, irons, wedges, and putters. There’s also a selection of unlockable utilities, like reverse gravity or power shot, that can help turn a bad shot into a slightly less-bad shot.

These are unlocked by picking up the 20 coins scattered around in each level (no in-app purchases here), with further courses and holes unlocked by scoring par or under. It’s almost sounding rather normal.

But that’s about where the normality ends. The three courses (four on iPad) of 18 holes are effectively mazes, with multiple routes, tunnels, and obstacles like cable cars for you to puzzle over in the quest for the perfect hole-in-one (which is possible on every course)

Then there are other worms milling about on the fairways and greens, which explode and deform the landscape when hit. Meanwhile sheep chomp up stray balls if you shoot too close to them (and can be sheared if you strike them with the ball).

There’s also a series of skill challenges reminiscent of some of the single-player portions of the earlier Worms games, like trying to shoot through as many targets as possible or attempting to keep the ball from hitting the ground by rebounding off mines and the local wildlife.

Being a Worms game, there’s a whole host of silly customisation options available to dress your invertebrates up in, with ‘hats’ like a giant bat and clown costume alongside different accents/impressions, and coloured golf balls.

If there was one blemish I could see from my hands-on time with the game it was that there was no online multiplayer component, although it’s still playable with four players via pass-the-handset.

It may not sound like the most obvious of combinations, but Worms Crazy Golf is shaping up to hit a strong round on the App Store when it launches on Wednesday the 19th October for both iPhone (£1.99) and iPad (£2.99).