How do you make a Worms game better? Sprinkle a bit of British humour on top.

Released in the year 2000, Hogs of War is a 3D turn-based tactics game similar to the Worms series. Hogs of War swaps out the worms and replaces them with tubby little army pigs thrown into a World War 1 setting. The world war 1 themes are present throughout the game from the weapons, such as the poison gas which is presumably based on the mustard gas that was frequently used in WW1. The training video cutscenes and the armies that you can play as such as Britain, which are renamed as Tommy’s Trotters, the US which are Uncle Ham’s Hogs and the Japanese pigs Sushi Swine.

The game was highly praised at the time for its excellent British humour which is brilliantly portrayed through the voices of Marc Silk and the late Rik Mayall. Although the humour may be frowned upon by some these days for its racial stereotyping, the humour overall holds up very well and odds a great deal of personality and life to the game. Hogs of War also references many war movies throughout such as Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, which is parodied on the games front cover pictured below.

The game received somewhat average reviews at the time of it’s release, mainly due to it’s graphics which were sub-par at the time. The term ‘cult following’ is thrown around a lot these days although Hogs of War certainly seems to have one, this cult following spurred Infogrames to announce Hogs of War 2 in 2008 which would have been released 2009 on the Nintendo Wii, PS2, Nintendo DS and PC. Unfortunately, the game was cancelled, likely due to the financial difficulty that Infogrames was in at the time. A picture of Hogs of War 2 is below.

I played Hogs of War religiously as a child, either playing the great multiplayer with friends or struggling through the campaign which I found near impossible at the time. Although I used to play through the campaign every 6 months or so, I hadn’t played the game for a number of years. Eager to see if the game held up, I dusted off my old copy, which I completely forgot was bundled with Worms and got to work on this retrospective review.

Initial release date: 8 June 2000 Platforms: PlayStation 1 & PC Version I played for this review: PlayStation 1 Developer: Infogrames Publisher: Infogrames Metacritic score (PS1): 62

The single player campaign begins with an optional tutorial level. I don’t think I’d ever played this tutorial before but did so for the sake of this review. I’m happy to say that it was a great tutorial level that does an excellent job of teaching you the games basic mechanics and weapons. The tutorial map, although small, has a great design and immediately makes the player feel like they’re in the WW1 era, (ignoring the fact that you’re controlling a walking talking pig of course).

Once the tutorial is complete you can begin the main campaign. The campaign features 25 levels which take place across a multitude of regions, you are fighting each nation in the game five times (apart from the one that you selected to play as of course). Each time you complete a mission you earn a medal; medals can also be earnt by finishing the level with all your pigs alive or by collecting one of the games few hidden medals. Finally, you earn 5 medals for each time you conquer a region. What are these medals for I hear you screaming at your screen? Well each time you earn a medal you get a free month subscription to amazon prime… Okay that’s not true, you actually get to upgrade your piggy soldiers.

Your pigs start the campaign as basic infantry with a limited number of weapons, the best of which is the grenade that does 30 damage with a perfect hit. Once you upgrade a pig for the first time you have four choices: Heavy, Engineer, Espionage & Medic. You can then upgrade these classes further before reaching the penultimate level for each class Commando and then the top level Hero.

The missions themselves all take place on vastly different maps which have a surprisingly high amount of variants such as water which will drain your life if you fall in, mines, bunkers, static tanks and mobile tanks, all of which given each map its own feel, challenge and demands the player to think tactically to win.

As you can imagine the various weapons play a large part in the gameplay. Sticking to the WW1 theme, the weapons are all based on that era meaning there are no Worms like flying sheep or concrete donkeys in sight. Overall there are a good selection of weapons which, generally speaking, are well balanced throughout. The hardest weapons to use do the most damage such as the mortar and homing missile, whereas the easiest weapons to use such as the knife or the pistol, do minimal damage. Moreover, the weapons have fantastic physics for a PS1 game. The Bazooka, Mortar and similar weapons can have their angle of fire adjusted and fly true to how you’d expect, the rifle and pistol bullets dip during their flight and the grenades can be skimmed across the water like a stone if thrown correctly.

One of my few issues with the weapons is that I feel the TNT is overpowered. It does 50 damage, 10 more than the bazooka which is far more difficult to use. To use the TNT you simply need to place it next to your foe, which isn’t as easy as it sounds as often the maps are designed in a way that makes it difficult to get next to your enemy but this is also the case with the melee weapons such as the knife and the fist which do some of the smallest amounts of damage in the game. As I say though, this is just a minor issue as the weapons are well balanced overall.

The campaign had a great difficulty level throughout I thought. Although I didn’t have anywhere near the difficulties that I had as a child, I thought that the game produced a tough but fair challenge throughout that keeps you thinking of how to best approach each of your turns from the very first mission. (It could be argued that the gameplay isn’t fair as the enemies usually start in superior positions and are already in tanks at times, however you’re invading their territory so it makes sense that they’d start with an advantage). Furthermore, once you complete the game you unlock ‘hard mode’ in which the enemy pigs are all one level above what they were before, adding a vastly increased challenge and great replay value.

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Although I had a great time playing through the campaign, I did have a few issues with the enemy AI. The AI would sometimes make baffling decisions on their turns, such as shooting directly at a wall, skipping their turn for no reason whatsoever or constantly ‘hiding’, a feature in which the player can hide in a box or transform into a tree (which is something all pigs can do of course). Hiding is somewhat useful in a 3 or 4 player multiplayer game, as you disappear from the mini-map and take far less damage when hit, meaning other players will likely ignore you and fight one-another. However, the hide feature is pretty useless when you’re fighting one and one and some of the AI pigs will do it constantly.

It’s not just the single player that is great though, the multiplayer is a blast to play also. One thing I greatly appreciate about the multiplayer is that they made a whole host of new maps. The developers could have easily just duplicated the maps from the single player campaign and called it a day but instead they introduced all new maps which clearly had a lot of thought and care put into their design.

To be perfectly honest, although I loved the game as a child, I wasn’t expecting to think much of it when playing through it again this week. I’m very happy to say that I was wrong though as I had a great time revisiting Hogs of War and it certainly wasn’t just for nostalgia reasons. For what it is, a simple turn based comedic WW1 strategy game with pigs, it’s very good. Although it doesn’t go into anywhere near the depths of modern turn based strategy games like X-COM, it still delivers in what it sets out to accomplish.

Not only would I recommend this game to people who loved it when it was originally released but I would also recommend it to anyone who hasn’t played it before and are a fan of the turn-based tactics genre. One word of warning though, be sure to play the PS1 version if you can. I haven’t played the PC version myself, although I’ve heard that it is inferior to the PS1 version mainly due to the AI pigs not moving around the map, for some reason.

The verdict:

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