Backgrounds and level designs are crisp and clean in Worms: A Space Oddity. The theme here is space, of course, so there are appropriate starry backgrounds and alien planet scenes. As always, the scenery is like a flat cardboard cutout, and weapons will just eat perfect circular chunks out of it. Someday it might be nice to see some terrain physics enter this game. The worms show up nicely as well and all the tiny weaponry is pretty easy to distinguish. The only problem that showed up was some very tiny icons in the customization menu. They were very hard to make out, but once you went back into the game, you could see the flags, helmets, and other customized items fine. Otherwise the menus were big and colorful, making it easy to find your way around. The space theme is carried on throughout with switches, lights and other things you'd expect to find on a sci-fi ship's console. It's actually an entertaining interface to navigate through.

Again you've got the worms yelling out (tiny) taunts and yells in several styles of speech and different languages. The music is over-dramatic, in a humorous clash with the tiny cartoon worms. Again, it's all part of the formula at this point.

Worms: A Space Oddity doesn't deviate from the standard Worms formula either. You pit one team of tiny, warmongering worms against another. All manner of rockets, grenades, lasers, and exploding sheep make up your arsenal. The game is turn-based, giving you a short window of time to choose your weapon and plan your attack for each worm on your team.

Several modes of play keep things from getting stale. There is the standard single player Story mode, along with Training. The Story mode is pretty vast, and has some short story to accompany each level. Mini-games are actually a fun break from the main game, and involve simple uses of the Wii's motion control, like steering a small rocket ship through a cavern. Training mode in this game is actually a necessity, as the controls are not intuitive, even if you've played and mastered Worms games before. Multiplayer is here, but its missing (wait for it) online play. This complaint is getting worn out for Wii games, but when they managed to squeeze some online play into even the DS version, it really makes you wonder.

You can adjust the difficulty in Worms: A Space Oddity, but for Story mode, you have to take whatever difficulty is preset. It seems like the Story mode is made to be a bit easy, probably to make the funny extras like the humorous CG cinema scenes available to more people who pick up the game and play. It seems the marketing idea behind the game is to be a more "casual" Worms game. But not all levels are centered around annihilating everything in sight, so there is actually a bit of a puzzle element involved at times.

Expect the CPU to adjust for wind, have perfect aim, and be all around ruthless at higher difficulty levels. If you want a challenge, it can definitely be found here. You'll unfortunately have to create your own battles to get that challenge, so it may feel like less of an achievement when you get through them.

Worms: A Space Oddity has about the least intuitive controls you could create for a Wii game. If you're planning on this being a fun party game, you're going to have to prepare to explain the controls over and over again. As an example, in order to fire a projectile weapon, you first tilt back the Wii remote to adjust the power of the launch. When you have the right power, you hold the B button, and swing the remote, letting go of the B button at the end of the swing to launch it. It works fairly well once you've learned the routine, but just as with all of the Worms games, there are lots of different weapons with different firing techniques. A tutorial is available, but it is easy to hide, and also takes up precious time during a match to read it. After some practice, however, you can get everything done pretty easily. Still, the motion controls don't feel necessary, and it would have been nice to have the option to go without them.

Worms: A Space Oddity is the first version of the Worms series to make it to the Wii. The formula hasn't changed much, but of course there are a few tweaks for the Wii. It doesn't do anything particularly new, though it does have a new space theme. It may be for the best in this case, that the developers stuck with the formula and produced a solid game. But now that the Worms games seem to have made their rounds through the consoles, it would be nice to see something new for a change. Pick this up and prepare to flail around and curse over the control system. When you're over that, you can sit back and enjoy some classic Worms action.