worms were tested five or six times before they were determined to be complete. Holmes was responsible for the game's themes, including their landscapes and background. These were sketched before they were digitally scanned. Holmes said that each of the game's eleven themes took about one month before being finalised. He has also described the visual style as being a "very clear-cut cartoon style" that was at odds with his preferred general style. The game uses parallax scrolling to display the battlefields and backgrounds. The soundtrack was composed by Bjørn Lynne, and the instruments used are synthesisers, a guitar, and a bass guitar. The game's lead programmer was Karl Morton, who produced the engine. Cris Blyth was responsible for the full-motion cutsceneswhich are cel-shaded unlike the original game's cutscenesand along with Andy Davidson and Matiné Studios provided the voices for the worms' speech banks. Worms 2 was published by MicroProse on various days across Europe in November 1997, and in North America on 13 January 1998. It was later rereleased on GOG.com on 5 September 2012, with the only difference being that online play is disabled. Reception Worms 2 launched in Europe with a shipment of 200,000 units to retailers. In the United States, PC Data reported sales of 68,396 copies for Worms 2 during 1998, which accounted for about $1.88 million (equivalent to about $ million in ) in revenue. Worms 2 received generally very positive reviews, being praised for the customisability, integrated online play, the level editor, and the humour. Trent Ward of GameSpot lauded the destructive environment and described the physics as being "minute-to-learn-lifetime-to-master", citing the latter as the reason for the addictive gameplay. Fernando de la Villa of the Spanish magazine PC Top Player lauded the sound effects, voice acting, and soundtrack, whereas Andreas Wallström of the Norwegian magazine Tekno felt that the soundtrack started off as boring before swinging for the better, as if the tracks were ordered by the date they were created. The humour has been characterised as tragicomedy and exemplifying the "superiority theory", where the humour is derived from the fact that inexperienced players often hurt their own worms unintentionally. Martin E. Cirulis of Computer Gaming World felt that the game could become boring if the player does not enjoy both the artillery genre and the game's humour. Critics universally agreed that Worms 2 is best played in multiplayer mode, rather than