Nice idea!
But a few failures:
1. Too diffucult (no health, cause u eat the maggots accidently due to lack of space)
2. If u kill a ship in mid-air, the people who were supposed to come out dont get killed, so when u killed everybody, there are 2 kills remaining, but the people wont spawn.
My own two cents re: Your difficult curve
The game is pretty fun. Playing a giant monster that attacks by leaping from the ground seems to be developing as its own subgenre here on Newgrounds and this is one of the coolest efforts on that mechanic to date. There have been a lot of complaints about the difficulty though and I have to second a lot of those. "Too hard" is a pretty subjective notion but the introduction of the armored soldiers and then later, the giant robot worm do represent sudden, incredibly harsh jumps in difficulty and that's in general a poor design decision. In the case of armored soldiers, I blame it mostly on the fact that you don't introduce the lightning powerup until much later, and up to that point you give us little reason to upgrade the damage on the fire powerup far enough to make even a direct hit with it a very viable way to kill them - it's already good enough to one-shot infantry, so we've got no reason to spend our points there. In the case of the giant worm robot, I thought the game was turning into a little bit of a cakewalk before I ran up against it and now I just can't beat the thing. I think this is the point where I run up against a wall and give up.
The robot worms in general seemed a little poorly implemented to me. They're an interesting idea and if you kept them to a few stages to mix up the action that could have been cool, but using them in -every- stage from the time they're introduced really changes the style of the gameplay too much from the routine I was starting to enjoy. It's just not cool having to run from something all the time in what was supposed to be your personal realm underground.
Getting back to the giant worm battle, just how fast this thing is makes it insanely lethal to let it get on your tail and so you're bound to spend a lot of your time and energy on avoiding it. That makes it really difficult to line up safe shots on anything on the surface, which is a problem because you drop so many mining craft that they present a very serious risk of game over if the player doesn't target them anyway. That's compounded by the fact that its low turn radius tends to mean it's almost impossible to lure it into the core without luring it to the surface first, and unless you're really lucky with powerups it's incredibly difficult to find a safe spot to do that. It could have been an interesting boss on its own but you swamp us with too many distractions to really put more focus on the boss battle itself.
Finally - being able to eat soldiers for HP is a really nice mechanic to reward precise attacks, but the HP gain for it is pretty negligible and later in the game barely feels worth it. Increasing that would make it feel more like a real reward.
Great Game
This game was a challenge and I enjoyed it immensely. If you have trouble beating a boss or the final boss, check the comments for hints
bad...
This game is a bad flash copy of the free game called "Death Worm". The moving place is too small.
Very well polished game
I'm surprised, I thought this game would have more positive reviews. It's got creative enemies and is relatively well polished except for the upgrade system.
PROTIP: If you're out of the planet for more than half a second when you're jumping out to attack non-air units, you're playing totally wrong. And probably dying too. Position your worm so that you jump out sideways to the planet's ground, so that you'll land back into safety after a very brief moment.
The controls definitely take some getting used to but it's not because the controls are bad, it's because it takes time to get used to the worm's limited ability to change directions quickly. Overall though they are very smooth and without the worm's bad turning the game would be far too easy and mundane. Well, except for all those people who don't seem to know how to attack without getting half of their health shot out in one jump.
That said, the upgrade system in this game is fairly useless. Health is virtually the only worthy upgrade, with attack helping a minor amount and speed only helping on the last boss. In fact I'm willing to bet if I only got the health upgrades and the rest didn't exist, the game would have been just as difficult without them. The health power-up was slightly useful though.
If an upgrade system exists in the game it should give a feeling of progression. Except for the health upgrades, the worm didn't feel like it was getting ANY stronger. The power-up level upgrades are too unreliable because the power-ups that appeared during levels are selected at random. There should be more customizability for useful stats on the worm instead, such as upgrading the worm's turning ability slightly or giving it a better chance/range of eating soldiers instead of knocking them aside.
That aside though, the game is very nice. Good music, very pleasing and cute graphics, relatively fast-paced action, moderate difficulty, and best of all relatively creative and fun enemies to fight. The fact that I have to change my target priorities in the middle of a level frequently is a good thing (Such as deciding whether to take out Lirium farmers or to attempt to pick out a few enemies on a less crowded side so I don't lose as much health, or attacking any dangerous jet soldiers who didn't have friends around to protect them at the moment).
Make the upgrade system more fun and appealing to use, and then this game could be a 10.