Craciun Dan | December 16, 2010

Previously known as Wormux, WarMUX is a free, open-source clone of the popular game Worms, with completely new, free-licensed graphics and music/sounds, available for Linux, Windows and Mac. Starting with version 0.9.0, WarMUX introduced single player games versus AI too. The available game modes are single player (vs AI) and multiplayer on the online server, as well as hotseat games.

Suicidal thoughts put in practice

For those who never played Worms-like games, here’s what WarMUX is about. It’s a turn-based, team game, taking place on various 2D maps, with each team formed by 1 or more characters which you will be able to control, one at a time, when your turn arrives. You can move your characters around and choose from a wide range of weapons to exterminate your enemies. In WarMUX each team can have a minimum of one and a maximum of 10 characters, and the game also offers various configuration settings before the game starts, settings which will have an impact on the game (like gravity, duration of a turn, enabling/disabling character switching and so on). The game ends when all of the enemy teams’ members are dead.

Main menu

WarMUX takes a funny, yet clever way of naming teams and characters, which are inspired from various free software projects, applications, programming languages or even mascots (like the Firefox Team, or the GNU Team, or the PHP Team — of course, the Tux Team is also present). However, if you’re not comfortable with the default teams, you can create your own. There is no Super Cow, but there is a Super Tux. A maximum of four teams are allowed, and the game is free for all.

The in-game help menu shows how to use the keyboard shortcuts:

Online server

The options menu – here you can create new teams, configure resolution, sound settings, and miscellaneous settings

The game comes with quite a large pack of maps, a wide range of weapons to choose from, it offers music and character/weapon sounds. I liked that the sound when the player’s turn starts is borrowed from Wesnoth‘s turn bell sound, another (quite popular on Linux) open-source game.

Creating a new game – you can assign a side to AI by clicking on the icon below the team icon:

Notice the available arsenal – bazookas, grenades, mines, dynamite…

After a game you are presented with team statistics, like most violent character, or most useless, or most accurate etc. and also with team evolution graphs.

WorMUX comes translated in 36 languages, it can be played in either fullscreen or windowed mode, and has support for screen resolutions varying from 640×480 up to 1280×1024. The 2D graphics do not require hardware acceleration and the background music is relaxing.

One minus I could catch regards the in-game character animations, which should be worked out to make the characters more fun and realistic. Other than that WarMUX is really a great and fun game to play, especially for those looking for a good replacement of Worms on Linux.

To play WarMUX, you only need to download the Linux standalone binary and it should work out of the box.