Back in 1996 a completely original and insanely fun game came out for Sony’s then-risky Playstation console. A game that let you take control of a team of four bizarre but battle-ready worms and go nuts over some very peculiar 2-D environments. Nine years later and Worms returns another Xbox 3-D instalment, and in the words of Andy from Little Britain: “I don’t like it.”

You can’t help but look at Worms 4: Mayhem and wonder what happened to the once-great cult franchise. It’s conversion to 3-D appears to be one of the biggest problems - it just doesn’t feel right. The worms look really child-appealing, coloured in a bright-pink, given huge eyes and Rayman-style hands. The environments they fight in have gone from cool surreal playgrounds filled with TVs and palm trees to American Football stadia and generic Wild West towns. Everything weird and different seems to have been changed in order to appeal to a mass-market - the kiddies.

The humour has also changed for the worse. Python-esque quips spouted by the worms before lobbing a banana bomb have been replaced by cheesy dialogue and jokes that only kids will chuckle at: “I smell something burning...it’s me, AAHH!” being the most annoying example for the Scottish worms. And if you play this game for more than a few minutes you will hear all of the voice samples - the same hilarious lines over and over. Even the cool weapons like the holy hand grenade seem poor when not accompanied by equally quirky dialogue.

Mayhem also gives you the chance to create your own weapon, tailoring things such as type, power, poison, wind resistance and loads of other elements. This adds to the fun of the game as there are so many weapons to choose from, although trying to figure out what each one does and how best to use them is a bit of a pain, as you’re always under a time limit. As before you get the create-a-team option, letting you pick names, voices, hats, hands and other accessories for your Worms. You can even use the create-a-weapon option to create a personalised weapon just for your team, which is quite a cool feature.

Well no, not really. It still likes to get stuck behind objects and although you can usually position yourself after some fiddling (clicking the left stick zooms the view in and out), seeing where you’re going or trying to aim a weapon is still more difficult than you feel it should be, with a distinct lack of analog subtlety, and there are still no visual cues as to how far a thrown weapon will go, even a partial aiming line would have helped here.

So Worms: Mayhem fails to impress on its main selling point-the multiplayer mode. But what about the story mode? Well, it is pretty tough to think of how you can really work a story mode into a game as inherently arcadey (a gamer’s word for “shallow”), so respect to them for trying to come up with some original ideas. Unfortunately, it tires pretty quickly and boils down to either collecting tokens strewn across the map or blowing up a certain amount of enemy worms. Both involve jumping around an awful lot, enough to make you wonder what genre this game is in now. You know it’s not a platformer because the worms jump about one inch off the ground, making negotiating even the simplest of stairs (which they still get stuck in if you try to just crawl up them) an aneurism-inducing task. And these worms still have no ability to actually tunnel through the terrain – not even with a weapon or power up – they might as well be… well… Pigs or Elephants. The only real reason for soldiering on through the story mode is to use the coins you get for completing a mission to buy extra annoying voices, or multiplayer maps, or differently-coloured wigs for your worms to use in multiplayer, yippee…