Just decorating the tunnels with a nice deep red colour...
Liero is a freeware 2D shooting game by Finnish programmer Joosa Riekkinen.
It can be best described as Worms in real time. The original was discontinued after the loss of the source code in a hard drive crash, but several remakes and clones with more features have been made, with the most popular being Liero Xtreme.
Tropes:
- A.I. Roulette: The AI is entirely random. Even in tweak programs, the only things that can be changed about the AI are its actions' probabilities. Needless to say, it was pretty dumb. Worse yet it can force you to have to quit.
- Attack Reflector: The Fan can blow enemy projectiles back to the sender, depending on direction you aim it.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Big nukes are incredibly deadly, but their fuse time makes it extremely easy to run away when playing on a non-random map.
- Bouncy weapons in general, with the arguable exceptions of zimm and bouncy larpa.
- Bilingual Bonus: Take a guess what Liero means in Finnish. Earthworm.
- Booby Trap: One of the available weapons, disguised as a weapon/health crate.
- Death from Above: Larpas leave behind a lot of falling shrapnels that can be used that way.
- Energy Weapon: That behave rather like actual lasers, being hitscan and unaffected by gravity.
- Gatling Good: Minigun hurls by far the largest amount of lead per time from all rapidly firing weapons.
- High-Pressure Blood: which can be normally maxed out at 400% of normal in version 1.33, and mods can push this over 1000%.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Players can do this very often, especially if not careful when handling powerful weapons.
- Joke Weapon: RB Rampage, an SMG firing incredibly weak rubber bullets. (Three clips are required to kill a worm).
- Kill It with Fire: Napalm, flamer.
- Lethal Joke Weapon:
- The Fan. In a fashion akin to the Team Fortress 2's Pyro's Airblast, you can blow aside all projectiles with mass.
- The Dirtball and Greenball. While they don't do damage in themselves, they can block explosions and be used to trap opponents in a tight spot and corner them with buried explosives.
- Ludicrous Gibs: Worms in this game splatter quite messily when killed.
- Magnetic Weapons: Gauss Gun's name strongly implies it's using electromagnetic force to propel its projectiles.
- Matryoshka Object: The Grasshopper explodes into another similar looking bomb, which then explodes into another one, and into another again. This gives it the impression of "hopping" around.
- More Dakka: Several weapons allow you to simply spray bullets at high speed. The Uzi, Chaingun, and Minigun in particular allow you to spam ammunition rapidly. You can also set the reloading times for all weapons to 0%. This makes all single-shot weapons this.
- Nuke 'em: The Big and Mini Nuke weapons.
- Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Wounded worms bleed continuously and endlessly. Just wait a bit, and soon they will have bled more blood than they can possibly have!
- Player-Guided Missile: After firing, Missile can be steered by left and right directional keys. If the reload time is set short enough, it is possible to steer multiple missiles.
- Poison Mushroom: There's a Booby Trap weapon disguised as a weapon/health crate.
- Recoil Boost: Several weapons have a recoil effect when used. If weapon reload time is set to zero, you can get some rather interesting results, especially with the Gauss Gun.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: Two, both are decent weapons.
- Shoutout: The Chiquita Bomb is a reference to the Banana Bomb from Worms.
- Stuff Blowing Up: Many weapons have explosive effects.
- There's No Kill like Overkill: Some of the weapons produce utterly thorough barrages of explosions and shrapnel. The aptly-named Hellraider explodes repeatedly as it launches, before detonating and spraying cannonballs everywhere, and these cannonballs can produce even more shrapnel. The Larpa and Bouncy Larpa leave trails of shrapnel behind as they fly.
