Liero – Sling'n'shoot Worms Game

Liero is part of the Finnish shareware game scene that lasted from early 90s to mid 00s [1]. These games are super nostalgic for me and a lot of other tech minded Finns of my age!

[1] https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luettelo_suomalaisista_sharewa...

I've played Noita (https://noitagame.com/) for quite a bit, and lately it clicked to me, that the core mechanics of the player and environment come from Liero. Though Noita is a single player rouge-lite, it has wands instead of guns, but environment is destructible, and explosions work the same.

It's much deeper, both in mechanics and in lore, it has actual levels with progressions, but I was curious why did I enjoy that game so much. Turns out, I spent a ton of time playing its predecessors with my friends :)

One of the best PC hot seats classics. Endangered my high school graduation :) I wanted to recover some of the custom maps we created and played but sadly they are in the silicon heaven already.

It's fun how everyone's youth is the best time ever, but I bet i find many fellow connoisseurs here: Liero, windows 2000, electronic music of the early noughts, the internet before Facebook, Matrix, Futurama, Lebowski.

A Gen X can show up saying Nirvana and BBS was the real deal before it all got whack or someone younger can make a point with more recent cultural phenomena.

I am defined by the era of Liero.

You can also play multiplayer in the browser at webliero.com

There is an active community, simple to pick up and play, no login. Although most of the active servers use some more fast paced mods with different weapons, but you can start your own server in the browser with the classic mod.

Related:

Liero can be played in browser now, for those who remember - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22980676 - April 2020 (86 comments)

Show HN: A browser-based multiplayer clone of the DOS game Liero using WebRTC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20668273 - Aug 2019 (7 comments)

My highest claim to fame is to be in the original Liero readme credits. I sent in the idea for a capture the flag mode as a kid. Me and my friends spent some hundreds of hours playing it. I remember you could tweak the reload speed of the weapons somehow to make it pure madness

I loved playing Liero when I was a kid. One of the best patterns of play I had found and one of the few shooters where I was even remotely competitive with others. Super cool to see that it's still alive and that there is even a web version.

I'm a fan of artillery games. I created Gravity Wars (based on previous art) - artillery in space where planets pull projectiles with gravity:

https://github.com/whyboris/Gravity-Wars

Loved playing Worms as a kid, not so much Liero. But before Worms, it was really Scorched Earth[0] that got me introduced to the genre. And with which I must have spent untold hours.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_Earth_(video_game)

Anyone remember Soldat?

https://www.soldat.pl/en/

> It takes the best from games like Liero, Worms, Quake and Counter-Strike and gives you fast action gameplay with tons of blood and flesh. Little ragdoll soldiers fight against each other on 2D battle arenas using a deadly military arsenal.

And it was so hard! You had to have the perfect coordination moving and digging while aiming, shooting, roping, dodging and switching weapons and checking everyone's health. Sometimes all at the same time!

I feel so lucky to have played it on a slow amd 20+ years ago, because banana bombs and big nukes slowed the game down and gave you the perfect bullet time matrix fight experience.

I have known and loved Liero since at least the early '00s, played it endlessly after Friday night dinner with my brothers and featured it on my high school era personal website.

Glad to see it get the love and respect it deserves. We also used infinite reload speed, so that the most powerful weapons, which normally only fired one shot before reload, instead became super weapons that released like a stream of water continuously, a waterfall of big nukes, chiquita bombs, or sniper rifle shots which became a death beam. It was marvelous.

Later on when imitation versions of the game were made with online play, a single game mode, castles with mortars, became the hit style. It was nice, because the game could be so many things, and the slow motion opera of flying through the air in mortar fire was quite something, but it also pared the game down to something so simple that it missed out on dozens of equally fascinating configurations every bit as radical and fun.

Fantastic game. One of my favorite multiplayer experiences, besides San Andreas, classic UT/Q3 and some Tron based lightcycle game that was basically fast 3d multiplayer snake.

There was also Wurmz!, a networked multiplayer version of Liero. Some history and binaries of various version as well as the source code can be found on this website [1].

[1] https://mental-reverb.com/wurmz.php

Aaaah so good to see this here - played the hell out of Liero, modded it a LOT. My pals had a bunch of our own insane versions we played endlessly for years. Wonder if I can find them somewhere

Single keyboard frenetic split screen multiplayer is still a gaming nirvana I can never seem to get back to these days.

Noita is a good modern reimagining in single player, I used to quite like Soldat etc too but none had the sweet kick of Liero...

This seems about as close as we might get to another fun one, https://cratebeforeattack.com/ for more traditional worms style gameplay. It's fun but crashes randomly, and hasn't seen much since 2020. It anyone knows more details about if the game is looking for a new maintainer please reach out! There is so much potential here.

So many good memories from high school! Gaming in the computer lab was banned in theory and the teacher always tried to delete any games found on these machines. So we always kept about a dozen 'hidden' copies on each machine.

I prefer OpenLierox over Liero

So many good memories of playing this with friends in the early 2000s.

Thetr was a fully 3D version at some point. It was novel and fun, but didn't really work.

What fantastic times. Thanks for this post!

The copy of Libro we got our hands on was configured to have cooldown time on all weapons reduced to barely anything. It was incredible, ridiculous fast mayhem.

I’m not sure how I discovered it, but Liero became a massive part of 10th grade Comm Tech and Elec Eng classes in 2001 when I shared it with everyone.

Damn, I think I played this game like 20 years ago on my friends computer? (taking breaks from playing Aliens vs Predator 2)

Liero is a classic and a favorite, but weapons are a bit imbalanced, esp. spikeballs.

Is this an open source clone of the Worms games by Team17? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worms_%28series%29?wprov=sfla1

I'd enjoy it more if it was WASD + mouse aiming and shooting

In what sense is this the "original" Worms game? Is there a particular tie between them? There's been a lot of ballistic artillery games going back to the very dawn of computers.

Looks like the classic Soldat [1], except uglier, only 1v1 and less interesting maps...

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/638490/Soldat/