I must say, Hedgewars is a really beautiful experience, in that it perfectly resembles the feeling of the original Worms game, and adds a great online playing experience via the in-game online server browser, new weapons, sound themes and game modifiers.

Hedgewars uses the so-called “hogs” instead of worms, and it takes place over a series of 2D maps in which you have to use various weapons to take out your enemies. You can use bazookas, grenades of all kinds, punches, shotguns and a lot more weapons to accomplish your task. You can throw hogs in the water to kill them or detonate a birthday cake in their proximity, or call in an airstrike. Speaking of which, the game requires some skills aiming, as well as taking into account various map factors, like the direction and speed of the wind.

The melon weapon does huge amount of damage:

There is a wide selection of weapons available:

You can edit the game modifiers, which control the behavior of the game. There are also several map types to choose from, terrain tiles, and game modes, which completely change the classic game style. For example, you can start with no weapons and use your rope to steal crates and destroy the enemy, or you can start with unlimited turns per hog but only with a few weapons.

Editing weapons availability:

Playing a game with the “Crazy” amount of weapons:

Just like in the original Worms, you can also edit your teams, which includes the hogs’ names, grave, flag, and the most fun and important, the voice theme. Hedgewars comes with some really cool voice themes, like Pirates, Singer, or HillBilly.

There are a few options when starting a new game. You can choose to quickly play a random settings game against the computer, play locally versus the AI or a human opponent in a hot-seat match, start a campaign or choose from a wide range of training scenarios. The training scenarios are really nice since they teach you how to use different weapons, like the rope for example. In addition to these, playing online is also available, and it’s probably one of the nicest features Hedgewars has.

Hedgewars offers an online game browser, and there are enough games to choose from and play over the Internet versus real players. You can play as an unregistered user or you can register a new username on the website. Then, while in-game, go to Preferences->Network and fill in the username and password fields. Now you can connect with your registered nickname to the online server.

Online game browser:

Starting a new game:

More game content can be downloaded from within the game, by clicking the Downloadable Content button in the main menu. Here you will find more themes, maps, or scripts.

Hedgewars comes in Ubuntu’s repositories. Saucy includes Hedgewars 0.9.19, but you can add the backports repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list file to install the latest version:

And install with:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install hedgewars

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