Worbital Review – Worlds of fun

In Worbital, from Team Jolly Roger, you begin as a human-like race. The tutorial is fun and quirky and sets the scene of worlds struggling to provide resources for their growing populations.

In an attempt to counter this, they build weapons to destroy nearby asteroids and other planets to generate much-needed resources. This, however, is not good enough and these planets launch a colony into space. This colony’s goal it to populate another world and provide the home planet with the resources they require.

In doing this though another world has been created and this new world decides to destroy the home planet instead of helping. Because of these actions, there are now three sub-races all vying for control of the system.

Worbital Review

Worbital is a brilliant take on a classic Scorched Earth or Worms if you like. You play as the commander of a planet and must collect money to build and then upgrade turrets and other structures.

The buildings must be placed on one of eight locations on each planet which will affect the firing angles of turrets. Shooting directly at your opponent would be too straight forward and you must take into account the orbit of your world around your sun.

If that’s still not enough of a handicap, you must also work against the rotation of your world’s day-night cycle. And just to add more to the element of space other planets, asteroids’ and the sun’s gravity will also affect the path of your shots.

Worms-bital

Turrets and buildings can be upgraded to have increased damage or numbers of shots. Some turrets have a firing arc and can be shot into space to follow the ebb and flow of gravity before smashing into your opponent. Missing can have unforeseen consequences though.

Some other turrets fire in straight lines doing more damage but needing the perfect opportunity to land hits. To round out your arsenal you have access to defensive turrets that will shoot down incoming projectiles or get in the way of destruction.

As you damage the world of your enemy, you slowly chip away at their land mass until you expose the core. Destroying this will win you the game. On the flipside, if yours is destroyed first, you’ll lose.

Fight, For Your Right…

Worbital has three playable races; each with access to their own types of buildings and turrets. Multiplayer is a brilliantly chaotic cluster fest of stray missiles and dodgy alliances.

This is where you will need to maintain tight control over what you build for more recourses will result in low firepower. And more turrets will result in less money being generated. There are team-based modes and free-for-all which adds a nice amount of variety to the multiplayer side.

Worbital is a damn fun, quirky and clever game and absolutely recommended if you are into the Scorched Earth genre. 

Worbital was reviewed on PC using a code provided by the developer.