Team based cooperative gameplay has always been popular. Whether you’re joining with friends to become the greatest fake band of all time or shooting up aliens with a buddy across the country, gamers have often gotten by with a little help from their friends. Yet nothing equals the sheer joy of smashing your friends into a grim digital pulp and dancing on their electronic graves.

That’s the idea behind Worms, one of the most recent additions to the Playstation Network. It’s already been out for Xbox Live Arcade for more than two years but its continued success prompted a port. It’s actually even older than that, with the original Worms having debuted on PC in 1995. After remakes and spin-offs the game landed as a remake on these two current-gen systems.

While they’ve updated the graphics and sound, the gameplay remains essentially unchanged, which in this case is an excellent, excellent thing. The setup is simple; each player begins with a team of four worms who are spaced randomly around a randomly generated landscape. Each turn you have sixty seconds to move and attack.

The weapons are wide enough in terms of both tactical usage and amusement, though there are some you won’t find yourself using often such as the sheep, which usually just meanders itself off a cliff or explodes nowhere near your opponents. One of the more amusing and useful weapons is the holy hand grenade. Set your arc and toss it. Once it comes to a stop, angelic music sounds and it explodes, smiting your enemies if your aim was true.

One the huge appeals of the game is the high level of customization. First off you can create your own team of Worms, with the ability to give them all names as bland or humorous as you want, though you might want to check out the voice options. If you’re unfamiliar with the game simply know that your worms will squeak out various comments as you play. Your options are quite broad; they can speak French, talk like robots, howl incoherently or whatever you prefer. I myself went with a team of worms named after various Scotch Whiskeys (Disclaimer: neither Digital Battle nor myself promote underage drinking, drinking and driving, alcohol abuse or pouring high-proof alcohol on worms and setting them on fire) with the ‘angry scotsmen’ voice option. You can also choose what their tombstones will look like when they kick the bucket.

Game types are also customizable; you can set the number of rounds, starting weapons, health, etc. as well as choosing the overall style of landscape, number of mines and a handful of other options before each round. Throw in online multiplayer matches and the ability to face off against up to three friends locally as well as computer opponents and you’ve got a recipe for a lot of replay value.

Overall the controls are simple and a tutorial gets you up to speed very quickly on the basics of gameplay. Honing your skills however is on you. The only complaint I can voice is that when you’re moving around the level the camera doesn’t automatically follow your current worm; moving the worm uses the left analog stick, the camera moves with the right analog stick. When plodding along at the slow crawling pace of the worms this isn’t an issue, but one of the more useful methods of getting around is the jet pack. This is where things can get a mite tricky. If you’re not operating the two in concert it’s very easy to lose track of your worm, which can lead to accidental death if you steer them wrong or if your jet pack runs out of fuel at the wrong time.

If you’re a more experienced gamer who tired of the Worms series long ago then there’s nothing here to rekindle your interest but for fans or gamers completely unfamiliar with the experience it’s a blast and well worth every penny of the download price.