First of all, Hedgewars resembles the original Worms game more accurately than WarMUX, and I’m not referring to playability, which is great for both, but only to the way weapons and characters look like, and also to the in-game configuration and sounds. Here’s how the last Hedgewars release, 0.9.14.1, looks like:

The game highlight features:

- single player and multiplayer (online or LAN)

- bundled map pack

- wide range of weapons to choose from

- in-game fun sounds and in-game music (several entertaining soundtracks)

- possibility to configure teams, weapon settings, fullscreen/windowed mode

Hedgewars allows you to configure it in pretty much the same way the original Worms did: you can configure teams, weapons (weapon set, probabilities, ammo and also weapon delays), change screen resolution, run it in a window or in fullscreen mode, enable or disable music/in-game sounds.

Online playing is straightforward – connect to the official server, chat, choose a game and play:

Weapons include the usual bazooka, grenades, cluster bombs, dynamite, happy birthday cake, kamikaze, or even seduction, a weapon which will make the enemy hogs jump towards you (used best to make them jump into a gap or whole).

Default weapon set

I found the background music to be actually great and really entertaining, and the in-game sounds made by the hogs are pretty funny too.

All-in-all, Hedgewars is great. It succeeds in recreating that special feeling you had when playing the original Worms game, and it does it actually better. Great configurability, nice sounds and great music, both single player and online playing support, these are its strong points. Give it a try if you haven’t already!

Download Hedgewars

Sauerbraten is the continuation of the original Cube game, which had its last release in 2005. Sauerbraten takes a different approach as opposed to AssaultCube, in that the environments in which the action takes place and the weapons are rather unrealistic.

Sauerbraten comes bundled with a huge number of maps which cover almost any environment possible: there are space maps, city maps, castle maps, all of them more or less realistic, with a high texture detail. The game features seven weapons: chainsaw, pistol, grenade launcher, rifle, rocket launcher, chaingun and shotgun.

The rocket launcher

Except for the single player and online multiplayer, there is also a series of campaigns. Although the AI is not very smart, the campaigns can produce a pretty good experience due to a high number of monsters that spawn on the map (the game includes 8 types of monsters).

The gameplay is somewhat different from the one found in AssaultCube, and so at the start of a round you get all the weapons, but you will have to pick up ammo packs to use them. Other items include the usual armor (100HP, absorbs 40% damage), heavy armor (200HP, absorbs 50% damage), quad powerup (damage four times bigger), health boost (which adds 10 HP which will last until the current map ends). Regarding modes, except for the usual DM, TDM and CTF, Sauerbraten introduces the so-called “Capture” mode, in which the goal is to capture and holding bases. In this mode the most time a team took hold of bases wins at the end of the game; if one team captures all the bases (which are initially neutral) it wins automatically. Holding a base gives ammo at certain amounts of time; capturing a base can be speed up if more players on the same team are within a certain radius of it.

A classic Instagib map

The background metal music is quite entertaining and, in combination with the highly paced rhythm of the game, produces a really dynamic gaming experience.

Regarding configuration, Sauerbraten is very rich. It runs in either fullscreen or windowed mode, offers many configurable graphics effects and it also includes an in-game editor for the autoexec.cfg file.

A weak point may be the fact that there are only four player models to choose from in multiplayer, and their look kind of lacks imagination.

Overall, I think Sauerbraten’s strong points are the fast pace, which makes you want to be always in motion, the detailed and very interesting maps, cool music, high playability level. All these ingredients make up a good action game on top of a great engine.

Download Cube 2: Sauerbraten

Suicidal thoughts put in practice

For those who never played Worms-like games, here’s what WarMUX is about. It’s a turn-based, team game, taking place on various 2D maps, with each team formed by 1 or more characters which you will be able to control, one at a time, when your turn arrives. You can move your characters around and choose from a wide range of weapons to exterminate your enemies. In WarMUX each team can have a minimum of one and a maximum of 10 characters, and the game also offers various configuration settings before the game starts, settings which will have an impact on the game (like gravity, duration of a turn, enabling/disabling character switching and so on). The game ends when all of the enemy teams’ members are dead.

Main menu

WarMUX takes a funny, yet clever way of naming teams and characters, which are inspired from various free software projects, applications, programming languages or even mascots (like the Firefox Team, or the GNU Team, or the PHP Team — of course, the Tux Team is also present). However, if you’re not comfortable with the default teams, you can create your own. There is no Super Cow, but there is a Super Tux. A maximum of four teams are allowed, and the game is free for all.

The in-game help menu shows how to use the keyboard shortcuts:

Online server

The options menu – here you can create new teams, configure resolution, sound settings, and miscellaneous settings

The game comes with quite a large pack of maps, a wide range of weapons to choose from, it offers music and character/weapon sounds. I liked that the sound when the player’s turn starts is borrowed from Wesnoth‘s turn bell sound, another (quite popular on Linux) open-source game.

Creating a new game – you can assign a side to AI by clicking on the icon below the team icon:

Notice the available arsenal – bazookas, grenades, mines, dynamite…

After a game you are presented with team statistics, like most violent character, or most useless, or most accurate etc. and also with team evolution graphs.

WorMUX comes translated in 36 languages, it can be played in either fullscreen or windowed mode, and has support for screen resolutions varying from 640×480 up to 1280×1024. The 2D graphics do not require hardware acceleration and the background music is relaxing.

One minus I could catch regards the in-game character animations, which should be worked out to make the characters more fun and realistic. Other than that WarMUX is really a great and fun game to play, especially for those looking for a good replacement of Worms on Linux.

To play WarMUX, you only need to download the Linux standalone binary and it should work out of the box.

AssaultCube takes place on realistic maps and includes 12 multiplayer game modes, including the classic DM, TDM, CTF or Survival, 24 maps (and more available to download), 8 weapons to choose from and various pickup items. The game doesn’t offer a storyline (and I believe most multiplayer shooter don’t even need one), and it offers two different teams, the so-called Cubers Liberations Army (CLA) and the Rabid Viper Special Forces (RVSF).

The interface of the game is a little unintuitive and it lacks several features which would be more user-friendly (e.g. menus accessible only from the keyboard, or the online server which can drive away a first-time player until he can actually select a game to play on). But once the settings are applied and you’re connected to the game, the fun begins.

AssaultCube offers a fast-paced experience at a low amount of resources (as low as Pentium III and above according to the homepage) and there are enough busy servers to choose from online.

The weapon range varies from the classical knife (and by the way, a knife kill counts two frags) to sniper rifle, shotgun, pistol or grenade. The recoil for all the guns is pretty high, so short, controlled bursts is the way to go. Just as with the knife, a headshot from the sniper rifle will also count two frangs instead of one.

There are 12 multiplayer game modes. Here is a brief description for each of them:

• Deathmatch – the classic FFA (free for all)
• Survivor – round-based FFA
• Pistol Frenzy – FFA mode with only pistols, knifes and grenades
• Last Swiss Standing – round-based FFA with only knifes and grenades
• One Shot, One Kill – as the name suggests, one shot is enough to kill the opponent; FFA with 1 HP for each player, a sniper rifle, knife and no pickups
• Team Deathmatch – two teams which fight each other, the winning team is the one with most frags at the end of the game
• Team Survivor – just like TDM, only round-based
• Team One Shot, One Kill – two teams, each player starts with 1 HP, sniper rifle, knife and no pickups
• Hunt the Flag – two flag bearers, the team which frags the enemy flag bearer and collects the flag scores, your own flag must have a bearer
• Team Keep the Flag – one flag, grab and keep the flag for 15 seconds for your team to score
• Keep the Flag – one flag, FFA, grab and keep the flag for 15 seconds to score
• Capture the Flag – the classic CTF, collect the enemy flag and bring it to your base to score; your own flag must be in your base

Except for these, there is one multiplayer cooperative mode and three singleplayer modes against the AI (Bot Team Deathmatch, Bot Deathmatch and Bot One Shot, One Kill).

AssaultCube is a great game, and very addictive. Its strengths are the vast amount of gaming modes and the fast-paced rhythm. The only problem I could find annoying was navigating through menus and the server browser, which makes it very hard to choose a game due to a pretty uninspired color scheme.

To install, you will need SDL 1.2, SDL_image 1.2, OpenAL, SDL_ttf 2.0. On a Debian/Ubuntu system, these should be fetched by issuing the following command in a terminal:

apt-get install libsdl1.2debian libsdl-image1.2 libsdl-ttf2.0-0 libopenal1

Official website

Game introduction

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