by jesse
It doesn’t happen too often that a game gets a hold of me so that I play it for more than one hour. This one did.

I’m talking about Hedgewars, another free (GPLv2) Worms Clone, which had more Downloads than Wormux in February 2009.

Being a round-based game, the aim is to kill adversarial hedgehogs while positioning oneself as safe as possible. Aiding in that are various weapons and tools, among them old fellows like bazooka, grenades, dynamite or air strikes. But there are new inventions, too. You can remote-control a small airplane and drop bombs or send a walking birthday cake to explode on your enemy’s head.

Not to missed, of course, is the ninja rope. Much like in worms, it attracts sportive players because, with some skill and training, you can have a lot of fun with it. Weapons are documented on the official wiki pages, but keep in mind that it is missing some newer weapons.

You can play against a (quite lowskilled) computer ai, with friends on the same computer or over the network. The online multiplayer mode had half of our teranetworks crew addicted in a days. Playing online with five friends can, depending on the configuration, quickly take over an hour and is pure fun. Just try it once.

You can download Hedgewars on the official website hedgewars.org, it’s available as sourcecode, packages for the various linux distributions or binaries for windows and mac os x. Note that you should install the latest version since the multiplayer servers depend on it.

So, are you curious yet? Just watch the trailer and join our IRC channel. We’re always looking for new victims players.