Metal Arms: Glitch in the System

Moby ID: 11590

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Critic Reviews add missing review

Average score: 80% (based on 17 ratings)

Player Reviews

Average score: 4.5 out of 5 (based on 5 ratings with 1 reviews)

Well executed third person shooter with good AI and stealth/hacking

The Good
You can tell that the devs put some love into this game with some neat little touches such as a character that you only play during one of the 42 stages who holds shader-simulated liquid in his back cylinder that visibly empties out in relation to his flamethrower ammo.

Weapons are thoroughly gratifying to the gun fetishist. The weapons are nothing particularly innovative (shotgun, rockets, SMG, blades, sniper), but each one is given an interesting twist when you upgrade them. Reactions to these weapons is where the robot motif gets the most mileage. The robots come apart and actually suffer limb damage, reducing their offensive effectiveness in very localized ways before they eventually blow up into spectacular flinders. So being a robot buys an inherent explanation for localized limb damage that does not affect combat effectiveness in other ways, and it also buys visceral depictions of combat damage that parents might be willing to let their kids participate in. The blade weapons are somewhat innovative in that they cause little physical damage but lots of limb damage, so they are the equivalent of a mage's permanent cripple spell, which does make for some interesting fights... and yes, combined with a sniper scope, you can actually target specific limbs on your victim.

I can also tell that they had an ace programming team behind this project. With each NPC being potentially player controlled, they definitely must have abstracted character control from user input in a very clean and flexible way. The AI was also very well done, engaging in semi-realistic and obvious actions during combat, search, and patrol behaviors. The bot-hacking mechanics is an innovative complement to stealthy gameplay, as your reward for sneaking up on bots from behind is an opportunity to take over their CPU for 100% risk-free combat (your original body can't take damage while you're controlling a bot) with unlimited ammo. I only wish there was a nicer way to make your possessed bots self-destruct rather than stand next to a wall and commit suicide via missile splash damage.

They did an excellent job of forcing you to use your player tools. It wasn't until the second half of the game that I realized that this was a strategic shooter with its effort towards a realistic AI (susceptible to stealth) combined with a truly orthogonal tool set for the gun-based gameplay. There were some sections, where you can almost hear the designer nodding at you to use the hacking interface to sneak up behind and take over a bot.

The Bad
I got lost a lot in some levels, it was a long while before I realized that the pause menu had a second screen that displayed your objective. There were some unused buttons on my Xbox controller that could have been used to pop up objectives on an initial screen instead of bringing up the pause menu and using a trigger to scroll to the secondary screen. Generally, they really skimmed on player direction for those that don't read instruction manuals.

There was one spot where I was absolutely stuck and ended up just dying because I was not aware that the temporary character I was playing could do a triple jump. This character was a large heavy character that I was forced to play a level with and there was absolutely no clue whatsoever that he was capable of doing a triple-jump, which was needed to beat that level. As far as I know, this huge guy is the only character capable of performing this feat. What's more is that the triple jump needed to be performed by an unintuitive three rapid button presses in quick succession as opposed to just pressing the jump button at anytime while in-air. This absolutely sucked.

Boss fights are tough, and some of those boss fights were more frustrating than fun. For example, one boss expects you to throw a grenade (not shoot an RPG but specifically throw a grenade) into his mouth at a certain point during the fight, but accurate grenade throwing takes a lot of trial and error. I feel like luck played a factor in some of the boss fights more than my skill.

The weakest part of the game by far is the story and fictional framing. I found myself not caring about the hero's journey or the world around him as I just wanted to get through to the next challenge and engage in the fun combat. The supporting characters weren't particularly charismatic, nor was the protagonist somebody that I bonded with. I can see that this may have been sold to the publisher as "A bloodless tactical shooter with cute robots who fart." Really, the fiction didn't really go beyond that.

The Bottom Line
The game has a total of 42 levels with each level ranging from 2 minutes to 2 hours of play. It is very difficult on the normal setting. There were times when I just had to give up on certain boss fights towards the end and come back another day. At the end of the day, this was simply a well executed third person shooter with good AI and a decent stealth/hacking component. Because of the lack of any major draw for the box-readers and five-second-browsers of the world, this game would sadly be relegated to the status of "sleeper hit".

Xbox · by Kain Shin (28) · 2007

Contributors to this Entry

Critic reviews added by Flu, Cantillon, nyccrg, Evil Ryu, Parf, Patrick Bregger, Wizo, Jeanne, Tim Janssen.