Concepts come and go. There was once a time when picking up bird seed and stealing eggs was the ultimate idea. Or maybe getting hoards of dumb animals from one end of the screen to the other. How about a group of worms striving for a cause they believe in through the act of mortal combat? Well Worms has been around as long as the ability to virtually manage an ant farm.

The broad concept of Worms is derived from early "Artillery" type games. Take a number of worms, put them in a number of groups, fire miscellaneous weaponry at each other until there is only one represented group left alive. Every iteration of the Worms games, even the side step into the puzzle genre, has played out in the 2nd Dimension.

2D games are usually pretty straight forward to get to grips with, there's X, left and right, and there's Y, up and down. Firing things in this mystical realm is just like drawing a line on a sheet of paper. The weapons may have different characteristics, some bounce, some arc, some bound across the landscape like a sheep running from a wolf, but essentially its point and shoot. Worms 3D, as the name suggests, has taken Worms from the 2 Dimensional universe, into the 3rd Dimension. It's not the twilight zone, but for 2D to 3D games transitions, it can be.

3D still has X and Y, but then it all gets complicated with this Z fellah, that'll be in and out. Some games have survived and excelled with the metamorphosis from 2D to 3D and still retained the fundamental charm and playability that is associated with the franchise .Worms 3D keeps its charm but the playability is only for those with extreme levels of spatial awareness, like astronauts or submarine captains. The Worms are there, the weapons are there, the landscapes are there, even the high levels of customisation are there. But what has happened to the ability to let anyone play it? It's gone, nowhere to be found. Sticking to the defaults and getting a group of mates to play is arduous. After the initial confusion of not knowing which team colour is which and where the heck everyone else is, it is then quite a task to select a weapon, position the worm, point the thing and then shoot it, within a fairly constrained time limit.

This doesn't sound that different from the original, and that's true. But with the added dimension, it's more an exercise in depth perception on a 2D screen. Judging distances is a real art, not easily learned unless ten years of 3D games have been drummed in. The tools have been supplied to aid the player in choosing, positioning and shooting, but with a grand total of three camera angles to choose from combined with simultaneous button presses and no impact hint system for the uninitiated, it makes the 2D game all the more appealing.

The landscapes aren't entirely suited to the extra dimension either. There are a selection of pre constructed maps that are, on the whole, usable but the randomly generated levels are abysmal and all of the levels suffer from the same tactical flaw. In the original it was feasible to evade death through tactical movement within the level, edges were a no go area. However, in Worms 3D it's nothing but edges. It's very unlikely that Johnny McWorm will die with the life meter reaching zero, but rather through falling to his untimely death by unheroically slipping, pinging or screaming in a flaming inferno off the edge into the calm waters below. This changes the tactical balance from skilled shooting to, more or less, waltzing up to the unfortunate victim and prodding, batting or bombing the foe off the edge.

Customising the game is possible in order to try and balance the experience and, once all the bits and bobs are unlocked, there is a lot of customisation to be done. But when Pete, the guy who likes football games, tries to play, the poor fellah can't judge the offside trap let alone the virtual distance from Worm on slope to Worm on cliff, making the whole thing rather pointless and aggravating.

Curious quirks surviving the revolution are the inability to use more than one controller, so a WaveBird is vital. Now this could quite easily be construed as a design choice and is a legacy from the previous generation, but seriously, what's the point? True, not all people have four controllers and not all consoles have four controller ports but the option or the choice would've been nice. There's nothing quite like passing a controller to a foe and accidentally, yes accidentally, shooting and wasting their turn. Adding to the list of bizarre design choices is the compulsory wade through the single player game to unlock the "extras". Initially this is all well and entertaining when one is playing alone, but with a multitude of other single player games on the shelf whose sole purpose is to entertain the one, why bother? It's a multi player game, dammit.

Typically for a multi platform game, the graphics aren't particularly outstanding or particularly bad, just comically functional, like a plastic parrot. Everything deforms, explodes and dissolves with functional finesse. In the same way, the sound also covers itself adequately. Surviving the transition from 2D are the usual splay of pithy comebacks and comedy taunts.

Imagine Worms. Now imagine Worms in 3D. That's what Team 17 have managed, but turning or moulding a franchise into a new dimension isn't as simple as applying the rules that made the previous incarnations successful. Some of the touches necessary to take it above a straight idea are evident: the use of the third dimension with a few of the special weapons is a bright point in what is mostly an uninspired, placid and, in the main, perplexing experience.