Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

Super Worms gets its hook across immediately. You are not merely trying to take a racing line and reach the finish first; you are guiding a worm made from circular body segments through a track full of power-ups, where the right hit can strip segments away. That makes races feel a little more personal than a straightforward behind-the-vehicle sprint. A mistake can linger on your body instead of disappearing the moment you recover your speed.

The racing mode is where most people will start, and it has the right ingredients for quick competitive sessions: two people can race together, AI fills out the field, and power-ups ensure that position alone is not the whole contest. The more you play, the more the segmented-worm concept becomes the point. You need to race effectively, but you also have to treat combat as part of staying intact. It is a nice wrinkle on the Mario Kart-style formula rather than a complete reinvention of it.

Battle mode is the sharper option when you have someone beside you. It drops the race framing and lets two players focus on destroying each other’s worm in a death-match arena with power-ups. There is no need to pretend it has the long-term variety of a bigger combat game, but the objective is clean and immediately understandable: collect something useful, land hits, and reduce the other worm segment by segment.

That directness is both Super Worms’ strength and limitation. Its two modes are built around the same core idea, so the game lives or dies on whether you enjoy racing with combat interruptions and the vulnerability of a segmented vehicle. If that sounds amusing, it is easy to imagine pulling it out for short versus sessions. If you want deep driving simulation or a huge range of race types, the narrow focus will wear thin.

Graphics

Super Worms uses a 3D behind-the-worm view, with circular segments visibly forming each racer’s body. Seeing that body trail behind you gives the damage system a physical presence: losing segments is something you can read from the worm itself rather than just from a number on the screen.

The tracks and battle arenas serve as clear spaces for racing, pickups, and head-to-head attacks. This is an early-2000s 3D game built around its unusual racers, and the segmented worms are the visual detail that sticks.

Story

There is no story campaign to carry Super Worms between events. It puts you straight into races or arenas and lets the competition do the talking.

That is the right call for this kind of game. A goofy premise—armed worms racing and battling while pieces of their bodies are knocked off—does not need a layer of explanation before it can be fun. You pick a mode, learn what the power-ups can do, and get on with trying to outlast the other racer.

The lack of narrative also makes it better suited to drop-in local play than to a long solo commitment. There is no dramatic payoff waiting beyond the next race or duel; the payoff is the occasional scramble where a well-timed power-up changes who still has enough worm left to win.

Overall Experience

Super Worms is a compact oddity with a genuinely memorable twist on kart racing. The central image of a worm breaking down segment by segment is more than a cosmetic gag, because it ties its combat and racing together. When the power-ups start flying, protecting your position means protecting your actual vehicle.

Its best use case is clear: get a second person involved. The racing mode supports two players with AI opposition, and battle mode is specifically built for a two-player grudge match. The game’s straightforward rules make it easy to hand over a controller and settle into a few rounds without much ceremony.

Go in wanting a focused, unusual local multiplayer racer rather than a sprawling driving game. Super Worms does not need to be larger than it is to be worth a look; it just needs you to appreciate the absurd pressure of racing while your vehicle can literally be whittled away. For fans of eccentric DOS and Windows-era competitive games, that is a solid reason to give it a chance.

Retro Replay Score

7.2/10