Genre Artillery game | Mode Multiplayer video game | |
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Platforms Microsoft Windows, Linux, Android Similar Artillery games, Other games | ||
Open source game review 5 warmux
WarMUX is a free and open-source video game in the genre of "turn-based artillery games" like Scorched Earth or Worms. The project was started in December 2002 by Lawrence Azzoug Moy as Wormux, and was renamed to Warmux in November 2010. Using at a time the ClanLib library, it now uses SDL; the game is multiplatform, available for Windows and Unix-like systems (including Linux, FreeBSD, Android, AmigaOS 4, AROS, Maemo, Symbian^3 and Mac OS X). The latest version is 11.04.1, released on the 30th of April 2011. The game became quite popular, and it is now packaged by several Linux distributions, although the packaged version may vary between distributions.
Contents
Features
As in SuperTuxKart, the teams are styled after the mascots of various free software projects, such as GNU, Linux, FreeBSD, KDE, GIMP, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird, Suse, Workrave, NuFW, SPIP, and Bugzilla. Warmux, both code and data, is free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Several players can play together, typically each one using a team. The game can be played online if every player uses the same version of the game. There are 2 modes: private mode (one must provide opponents one's address and port) and public mode (an index server will publish your game). Online games have been available since 0.8beta1.
As of 0.9.0, a CPU player can be selected, allowing to compete against computer-driven teams. The feature first appeared in 0.7.9 but was hidden due to its limited abilities.
Reception
Critiques of the game are generally positive. Raiden's Realm praised the game's similarity to the original Worms games, saying "for anyone who ever loved and played the famous Worms PC game series, then Wormux is the game for you" as well as noting that "Even if you weren't much of a fan... you'll find Wormux none the less captivating and enjoyable". FOSSWire declared that "Wormux makes a formidable clone of the original series" and that it was "absolutely in love with Wormux right now." MiniFrag.com said that "Wormux is loaded with turn-based cartoon combat goodness" and that "for the netbook gamer, Wormux has everything going for it." It is also included on LinuxLinks listing of the "42 of the Best Free Linux Games" as well as holding a four out of five star rating at The Linux Game Tome.
Name Change
In November 2010 the old name 'Wormux' was dropped in favor for 'WarMUX'. The name 'Wormux' originally was a homage to the old classic 'Worms'-games, who were among the most popular of the artillery game genre. The developers decided for renaming their project in order to avoid possible confusion.