Worms games date back to just slightly after the Big Bang. Available at one time or another on just about every platform, with the possible exception of the Abacus, the Worms franchise has seen unequivocal highs and a few depressing lows. At its best, the Worms brand offers some of the most addictive, strategic, quirky, vicious and downright funny multiplayer combat out there -- and Worms: Open Warfare 2 finds the squeaky-voiced, battle-scarred franchise in top form.

On the off chance you've spent the last decade or two in a pinched-off space-time bubble all by your lonesome, the classic Worms brand of gameplay is comprised of 2-D (and often surreal) battlefields populated by opposing armies of cute, big-eyed, cartoonish worms hell-bent on annihilating each other with an arsenal of weapons and tools that range from the militarily mundane (shotguns, pistols, grenades) to the Pythonesque-ludicrous (Holy Hand Grenades, and a variety of luckless, exploding livestock).

Turn by turn in rotation, the various worms have a certain amount of time to slink about the battlefield, do something hideous to any nearby enemy (or, in all too many cases, friendly) worms, and then try to scuttle off to a position of relative safety. Every shot fired, explosive detonated, or air-strike called in takes an actual chunk out of what remains of the landscape, so the tactical and strategic position is always what the military calls "fluid." Add to that an ever-rising, deadly oceanic tide surrounding most landscapes -- and the fact that worms can't swim -- and you have a recipe for danger, disaster and sometimes total humiliation: Why shotgun an enemy worm to death when it's just as effective (and twice as shaming) to simply poke him boink right in the eye and send him tumbling off a cliff to his just-as-permanent doom?

There are single-player tutorials in Worms: Open Warfare 2, carefully-crafted solo challenges and campaign games, of course, but the real heart and soul of Worms has always been in deadly free-for-all deathmatches between real human-controlled teams. With meticulous shot-angle physics, ever-changing windage and the unpredictable bounces of tossed explosives to keep everything lively, the Worms brand of mayhem is a natural fit for portable gaming, and the PSP and DS versions of the game do almost everything right, with a few key differences.

The PSP has a larger screen and tighter, crisper visuals, of course, and allows players to zoom the battlefield view in and out, which can be immensely helpful. The DS, meanwhile, cannot zoom, but offers a more vertical view of the battlefield spanning its two screens (the topmost of which can be toggled between normal and full-battleground viewing modes). Either handheld version allows for wireless or hot-swapping multiplay, and even if your prospective foes and/or cheap friends don't have their own UMD/game card yet, there's still some shareable (if limited) gameplay to be found off a single. Depending upon your handheld of choice, there's infrastructure multiplayer, community clans, detailed global leaderboards, ad-hoc four-player clashes, etc. For the DS version specifically, there's an exclusive lab mode that utilizes some of the odder Nintendo functionality, like using the stylus for navigation, or even blowing on the mic to give an updraft boost to parachuting worms.

The cutscenes are just as cute and heartless as ever -- which sounds weird when you read it, but to play it, the ambient and combat sound is the same-as-it-ever-was awesome, and there's replay value to burn.

In the case of either handheld, the downsides are minor, quibbling things -- some of which won't even be missed by any except the most diehard Worms fans. For some reason -- it's hard to believe it's technical in nature, particularly for the PSP -- the crates and weapon-drops that litter the landscape blow up in "dry" explosions (as opposed to the napalm-like, liquid-fire explosions of earlier PC iterations, which would leave burning glop dripping into every nook and cranny after a detonation). One of the long-time customizable voice sets for the various worm teams (there are many), the faux-Japanese "Kamikaze," seems to be have been removed by default(can a developer that brought us exploding sheep really worry about politically-incorrect default voice sets?), though you can 'purchase' the voice-set covertly, in-game when you go to the 'shop.'

Thankfully, as a way of offsetting such sucky exclusions, Worms: Open Warfare 2 lets you knock up your own maps with a level editor.

Playing Worms by yourself is not the best experience to be found; the enemy AI, even at its most vicious and precise, is a pale contender next to the human unpredictability of a real, live opponent, and the solo campaign and challenges are good practice for that, Worms gaming at its best.

Worms: Open Warfare 2 is a must-play, especially with two.

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