WingusWallus

I initially picked Writhe up on launch night for it's low price and promise of gnarly creatures, boppin music, and addictive arcade shooting, with colorful throwback graphics. Good lord, it delivered on all fronts. Playing Writhe feels like being in an extreme 90's game ad. It's fast, intense, doesn't let up, and might leave your heart pumping. When it puts you in the zone nothing else exists but you, your shaking controller, and the endless horde of wriggling hell worms before you. Also the hours you might spend chasing top leaderboard scores. Gameplay is simple. run, jump and shoot. Your goal? survive as long as possible. You've got two guns; a plasma machine gun and a shot gun. While your machine gun can mow down grubs all day, you're going to have to have to know when make use of the shotgun. While you have unlimited ammo, reloading your shotgun takes half a second, but in Writhe, every second counts. When things get going, that half a second could make or break it. In place of grenades, you can knock back fusewyrms, which explode and take out everything around them. Health is minimal, but you can refill it by blasting open cocoons (which are now highlighted, post update) and collecting the health boosts inside. Neglecting to splatter the cocoons, however, does result in the spawn of a bullwyrm. think of it as an armored t-rex head crawling at you at top speed. The base feel of the gameplay took me back to other classic highspeed shooters like Doom and duke Nukem 3d, even without a full blown campaign mode. Speaking of guns, the devs just added a simple, but good update to the game. Originally, your guns would get a slight bump in performance after every hundred seconds of **** up points off splattered enemies. Now you can instantly swap between which gun your points go to, and they upgrade much faster with much more worthwhile effects, like turbo charging your arsenal or giving your bullets new effects like penetration or extra spread. The game only features three maps so far, but each one offers a different challenge. Rundown feels like the smallest map but is crammed with verticality. Ledges, bridges, ramps, tunnels, and two tiny open spaces cram together in a fun way that doesn't feel too complex. Let it also be noted that Rundown has the tightest corners of all the maps, meaning you gotta be on your toes more. Jungle feels much larger with more room to run from the horde between all the ruins and bridges, but that also means there's more places for the worms to pop out of. Factory still retains a good amount of verticality but also feels more arena-like, in that it's the most symmetrical and simple layout, but in a way that makes it much easier to navigate and maneuver through, helping to focus the action more on combat. The music gets brought up often when talking about Writhe, and for good reason. The techno rock soundtracks for each level bump and bop not over or under the action, but with it. The sound effects work well. each gun sounds loud and strong enough to ramp your senses up, but not deafening enough to drown out the sounds of incoming worms, and their inevitable splatters. I especially like the sweet sound of the soda can health pick ups. The Graphics are a stunning mix of old school low poly games, and modern hd graphical touch ups like reflections, shading, glow, and a modern screen ratio. My favorite instance of this was walking into the in-game museum and seeing everything from the lit-up display cases, to the long orange banners and even the roof overhead reflected into the polished black floor beneath me. Although the game is all about gameplay first, there is a story and it works really well. You play as a random unnamed soldier dropped into 70's/80s Thailand, where hordes of mutated worms are running rampant and it's up to you to try to stop them, and eventually die trying. Throughout the game you collect points which gradually unlock pieces of lore that shed light on the events leading up to the outbreak and the soda company behind it. Even outside of the lore pages, the story still peaks out all throughout the game, like how each map acts as a key point in the timeline of the worm outbreak. On top of that, there's so many little touches strewn throughout the maps that make them feel like believable locations, from little things like a knocked over chair, to odd graffiti, to a small corner in Rundown where you can find a shirt hanging in what looks like someone's old hangout spot, now desolate. While the story isn't (nor should it have to be) the next great epic, it is eerie, fun, and intriguing, and makes the monster movie fan in me happy. On top of all that, this game has been receiving worthwhile updates since launch, adding things like gyro aiming, the gun upgrade system, extra settings, and even a tutorial, with seemingly more support to come. Writhe is a small, simple game that packs so much fun and polish behind a low price that I can't not recommend it.