Small Arms offers an entertaining, if slightly unoriginal, experience with a variety of weapons, characters and maps.
THE BAD: Camera glitches can mar gameplay slightly, XBL Search Glitch is very, very annoying when it happens.
It isn't often you hear me say that a game is the best I've ever played, and Small Arms isn't about to make me say that. Gears of War didn't even make me say that, although it came rather close. What Small Arms does offer, however, is an entertaining SSB clone for the XBL Arcade which is well worth your money and has good replay value.
The Small Arms gameplay is what you'd expect from this sort of SSB-style game - it's fast, furious and thoroughly enjoyable. There's eight playable characters right from the start, including amusing characters, weird characters, and just plain twisted characters (note the ex-wrestler Mexican chicken) and each one of these starts off with their own weapon of choice.
The weapons used in the game have lots of variety and each serves a different function - all also have a primary and secondary fire, the former of which is usually an automatic function, the latter of which is usually some power-attack which takes up more ammunition. It's Unreal Tournament-esque in its nature, and it works very well in my opinion. Unfortunately, I think a little more work could have gone into balance of the weapons. While some, like the Sniper Rifle (that "Mr. Truffles" starts off with) are balanced enough, being good at long range but terrible anywhere else, some weapons, like the Crossbow, are (I believe) rather imbalanced and are good at all ranges, hence why I always start with Lord Peet, the Crossbow character.
The controls are basically very intuitive. The Training Mode offers an achievement for completion, but you can really afford to skip it, because the controls handle in much the way you'd expect them to - the triggers control primary and secondary fire, the thumbsticks control movement and aim, and the A button is for jump, with the Y button being used for a "Dash" skill, to prevent you simply jumping off the edge of the map accidentally and not being able to squeeze your way back on.
The Single Player game is worth the admission fee alone in my eyes. The Mission Mode offers a 10-level 1v1 or 1v2 based campaign, which is quite difficult to start off with, until you get the hang of the game. The learning curve, in this respect, is pretty steep right at the start, and you may find yourself struggling for the first 5 or 10 minutes, but I managed to work strategies out and it got a fair amount easier.
Also offered is a Challenge Mode, where opponents are hurled at you - one, two or more at a time (haven't got past two at a time yet!) and you simply have to survive for as long as possible. As well as this is a Shooting Gallery, but other than for the achievement, this isn't really worth playing on that much, and is simply an add-on.
The Health and Ammunition system works rather well, but once you've run out of Ammunition, you need to pick more up, and it doesn't regenerate automatically, which may have been helpful. Because of this, you can simply camp the Ammo spots in a Multiplayer and wait for the opposition players' ammo to run out, then shoot them silly, and they can't do a whole lot about it. Health regeneration items can also be picked up, which works rather well, although as with Ammo, you can camp the spots where they spawn.
The Multiplayer is fantastic and is the best part of the game. As with any SSB game or SSB clone, the game will be multiplayer-orientated and this is what Small Arms really delivers on. The networking is fairly good, the lag is very low and I generally found that the multiplayer experience was a whole lot of fun. It works in much the same way as the single-player mission mode - you pick a character, get plonked on a map with 1-3 other players and health and ammo items, along with new weapons, spawn at regular intervals. Most of the map are pretty balanced, but some have spots which can be abused to the moon and back (eg. vertical tunnels which you can fire down to killsteal fighting players below).
The camera is ok, but does have its glitches. In multiplayer, I found that occasionally the camera will zoom in on an inanimate object, or other player, and you'll completely lose track of where you are, often having to wait for a while for the camera to zoom back out again. The glitch is annoying, but after the two times it happened in one game, I never saw it again and so I am led to believe that this is a rare occurence.
The XBL Search Glitch, however, is extremely, extremely annoying, and it remains to be seen whether it will be patched. Basically, you will occasionally be searching for a ranked match, and the Searching for Games message will suddenly, inexplicably flick back and forth across the screen, forcing you to return to the Dashboard (there's no way to return to the menu, and you are forced to restart the game). As I said, it remains to be seen whether it will be patched, but I think it probably will be at some point in the near future.
Finally, the graphics are bold and bright and colourful, and for an Arcade game are rather good, with certain effects done very nicely - however, if you walk into a hollow object, like a log, you can't actually see yourself. This is a slight problem and would have been solved simply by making the front of the hollow object translucent instead of opaque. Still, it doesn't detract too much from the overall look of the game.
Overall, Small Arms is definitely a game you should try, and definitely represents good value for the £7/$10-15 you will pay for it.