Cute buggers with guns. Look at ‘em. That’s me, as a Mudkip Tee. And as a Mudkip Tee, I get to bash, grapple and blast my friends into a cute happy oblivion with a 2D action platform game that weighs in at only 4.44MB, for Windows and Linux.

The cute bugger with guns in 2D thing has been done on PC before, most famously as Worms. But that was all turn based, and turn based gaming with more than two players is about as much fun as watching chess. Teeworlds gives you cute buggers with guns, in fast, cute, real action time.

Downloading the game is easy. The game comes as a zip file which you may deploy as you please. Upon starting the game you’re asked to give your Tee a name. Your Tee is the Teeworlds manifestation of you, an adorable ball of armless, legless death. Choose from an assortment of skins, take a peek at the controls, pick a server and get cracking. For us Australians, this most likely means playing on the GameArena servers, which are quite powerful, though lacking good map rotation. If you’re playing on a LAN, the game provides a server with a slightly confusing but usable config file. The game unfortunately provides no AI bots or single player.

All hail the hammer

Playing the game for the first time is easy and entertaining, a relief from other games where new players are endlessly insulted and penalized, since its players are primarily casual. The game offers deathmatch, team deathmatch and capture the flag modes. Your first discovery should be the sheer delight of using your first weapon, the hammer. Like the Gauntlet in Quake or the Crowbar in Half-life 2, its power is so great you may use it exclusively given enough skill and a small map. Eventually you should make a kill, at which point you are rewarded with a smiley face on your Tee and a happy chirp. Consequently, this also makes it that much harder to hate your enemy tee when he kills you because he looks so happy!

In addition to the hammer is an assortment of usual weapons: handgun, shotgun, grenade launcher and laser. The game uses its own physics model, including gravity, which applies to all weighted particles. This means that bullets, shells, and grenades don’t fire in straight lines, making it difficult to fire uphill, adding some realism and a strategic element to the game in seeking high ground. Unfortunately, player speed is not added to projectile speed, which can lead to some odd circumstances where the player moves as fast as the grenade he just lobbed. Weapons also have limited ammunition but for some odd reason, do not switch automatically when you run out of shots.

You should quickly discover that the right mouse button deploys a grapple hook, with which you can attempt to reenact a Tee version of Tarzan, molest your fellow tees or catch enemy tees so that you may teabag them relentlessly. The grapple hook is the most difficult tool in the game to master, and also the most critical in determining player skill. A Tee’s default walking speed is rather slow, but a Tee with a well-used grapple hook flies faster than Spiderman, invaluable in Capture the Flag, evading enemies and snatching power ups.

Flying Ninja Tee

As a final fun power-up, the game boasts a Samurai sword which, if on the map, appears at random. Picking up the sword results in your tee transforming into a ninja, complete with alternate skin. This allows you to slash forward, dealing immense damage while shouting a fierce Tee war shout. Like the Quad Damage in Quake, chasing down Tees and slaughtering them mercilessly is a great highlight.

The game’s graphics are clear, simple and functional. Everything has obvious purpose from its appearance and being vector based allows the game to scale to weird resolutions, ideal for your low specced Eee PCs or you crazy Crysis gamers with 30” monitors. The game offers a number of performance options, but unless running on a pitiful PC dinosaur, I’d advise that all options are turned on as strange artifacts can occur without quality textures on.

Mudkip Tee and a Laser pistol

Additionally, all game assets are stored as plain PNG files, meaning that the game graphics can be turned into just about anything. There is an official Teeworlds database with hundreds of custom skins, game world replacements and so on, making everything damn easy. This means I can be a Mudkip with a freaking LIGHTSABRE.

In light of all its greatness, the game still has its flaws. The game menus feel like an afterthought, with no scroll wheel function on the skin browser and no attractive interface graphics. No manual is given and the online documentation and wiki, while cute, are of poor quality in light of their immaturity. And without bots, the game requires that you have mates willing to play if you want a game without lag as the Australian servers are often empty. Not only that, but after a while, the game’s novelty begins to wear off and feel samey. This can be remedied with a visit to the forums or database to add variety, but the game is best enjoyed casually.

That all said, Teeworlds epitomizes everything that makes casual gaming great: tiny learning curve, simple fun game play, no price tag and a tiny download. You could have certainly downloaded and played the game in the time taken to read this review, so why are you still here? Download and give it a try now!