In its heyday, it was THE must-have title for N-gage!

The Nokia N-gage had a really bumpy ride in its short-lived 3-year existence, and it suffered the fate of getting hardly any recognition. This loss hurt it most in its last days when it finally was proving to be worth it to have one. Worms World Party was one of the key titles that came out in N-gage's last major year (2005), and offered plenty of bang for your buck. However, those days are behind us now. But still, if you just bought an N-gage original or something on ebay and you still want to collect some great games for it, Worms is still worth your time, especially if you know someone else who has an N-gage.

Worms World Party is another rendition of the world-reknown Worms series. Basically, Worms is a game in which you command several little worms with personalities of their own (cute little voices, bandanas, and what-not) across dozens of different battlefields in the style of a side-scroller. Although it isn't a platform game but rather a strategy-type turn-based war game. And this is what makes it unique and thrilling!

Basically, each turn you get, you're able to move one worm fighter at a time a pre-determined amount of spaces across some pretty dense, colorful, and vast battlefields (life-sized to the worms, but sometimes up-sized versions of things small to us like a dinner table full of food, a garbage can full of crap, and so forth!), and you are supplied with tons of awesome weapons including, but not limited to, bazookas, machine guns, shotguns, rocket launchers, and many power-ups that can revive you or lift you off the ground, and the list goes on. You can press the search button on your N-gage to scroll across the battlefield to find out where your enemy worms are, and you basically move a cross hair around you to aim where you will fire your weapon, and if it's the kind of weapon you throw (like a grenade), you hold down a power-up button to size up the power meter which will determine how hard you throw it. So bascially, it's a game of acquired skill and wits. And is a lot of fun!

Unlike earlier N-gage titles, the presentation of everything, the title screen, the intro, the menus, and features are all to console quality standards (all except the N-gage is not in stereo). In game sound is amazingly hilarious, as each worm has his own one-liners for victory or defeat, the music is catchy and infectious, the weaponry makes the most delightful firing sounds, and the game has many suprises throughout.

While the N-gage Arena was up and running for the original N-gage, Worms featured online multiplayer where you could actually go online via GPRS and literally play other N-gage gamers, anywhere in the world, a live game of 1-on-1 Worms!!! This literally made me overjoyed to have an N-gage, but sadly with the evolution of the N-gage platform to the newest N-series phones, the servers for this game have been shut down (MAJOR BLOW!!). So the defining reason to have this game no longer exists.

However, it features the same multiplayer experience via bluetooth with other N-gage handsets, where up to 4 people can play a game together in heated competition.

For collecting's sake, this game is worth getting ahold of. If the N-gage is your everyday cell phone, and you're a fan of Worms on other consoles, well this is a no brainer. However, with handheld consoles such as Nintendo DS and Sony PSP offering their own incarnations of this game in far superior versions, I'd have to say that the N-gage has run its course and you'd do better to live in the here and now.