Xbox Live is getting an impressive variety of lower profile, smaller games that fit nearly every taste and genre. So, it’s no surprise that one of the bevy of indie games would take a shot at Nintendo’s battle royale, Super Smash Bros. Small Arms bears a strong resemblance to Super Smash Bros. at first glance.

Super Smashes Armed Brothers…?

For a mere 800 points, players all over the world can settle in for some old school four-way chaos, making Small Arms is a fun diversion. While Super Smash Bros. focuses on pure character appeal and frenetic button-bashing action, Small Arms doesn’t have the advantage of well-loved characters and franchises behind it. What Small Arms does have is unpolished frantic button-mashing action.

Small Arms focuses on the combat antics of a cartoonish array of bizarre characters including a battle robot, ninja girls, a feisty cat, a crazy chicken, a dinosaur, and mutant tree, among other strange warriors. The big-head-style cutsie graphics work in stark contrast to the otherwise explosive nature of the game. Much like the Worms series, you can’t help but laugh at these wacky creatures blowing each other up in horrible ways.

Live, Fighting Animals!

The main single player is standard stuff. You pick a character, and fight your way through the various stages to fight a big, bad boss. Most of the stages task you with fighting multiple opponents at once. Thankfully, they aren’t usually teaming up against you, since the focus is free-for-all carnage. There are also mini targeting games that feel oddly out of place. The challenge mode is the familiar survival mode in most fighting games, where you try to survive as long as possible against endless enemies.

Obviously, Small Arms is meant for Xbox Live play, and the single player games are really just practice modes. Feisty fighters will no doubt revel in the choices of ranked or player matches with up to three others. There are a couple noteworthy features in Xbox Live play, though. While the ranked matches are two minute fists of fury bouts, the player matches are much more configurable. Also, you can have a mix of local and Internet players in Xbox Live matches, so if you have friends over, you can all play against online players.

Frenetic Ammo Hunts

Although the gameplay is kept fairly basic, there are some significant issues with the overall feel of the game. The biggest problem is the reliance on gun and ammo hunts. Each character comes with their own weapon, each of which have two modes of fire. You’ll find machine guns, a sword, crossbow, ice gun, and other more fanciful weapons, but they run out of energy so frequently that players constantly have to rush around for more.

The game runs at a crazy pace, often on scrolling levels full of pitfalls, and even without ammunition problems, keeping track of your character can become a nightmare. At times, it’s actually too hard to keep up with all the action. It’s as if the whole game needs a Ritalin.

Small Arms is played entirely from an excellent 2D perspective, but all the levels and characters are nicely 3D rendered, with plenty of details. The 12 characters are chock full of sharp special effects, especially the furry ones. Admittedly, not much effort was put into making the characters feel very likable, and past their visual panache they aren’t too distinctive. The fighters don’t even offer much in the way of audio personality, as the game noticeably lacks voice samples. While there’s nothing particularly wrong with the effects or soundtrack, there’s nothing here to make it memorable either.

Armed and Furrious

Achievement hunters will dig the many opportunities for increasing their player ranking, as you’ll get points just through the normal course of playing the game. Small Arms is definitely a good fit for Xbox Live. As a full-priced retail game, it would have been a dismal failure, but it’s a fun, cheap download that offers plenty of on and offline opportunities to kill some time. It’s unfortunate that the pacing is so off, and the focus on ammo hunting hurts the combat, but for players looking for a chaotic fighter that’s entertaining in small doses, Small Arms hits the mark.

Article by: Jason D'Aprile