Custom Robo Review

Robot-on-robot violence seems to be at an all-time high these days, but the trend is nothing new. From 2D robot fighting like Cyborg Justice to 3D robot gunfights like Virtual On, robots have been beating the crap out of other robots for decades. Nintendo is contributing to this hot-button election year issue with Custom Robo, an action RPG of sorts that allows you to customize little robots and bring them into real-time battle. While the level of customization is nice, the RPG section of the game and the actual combat leave a lot to be desired.

Though you can dive right into the versus mode, the game won't be very exciting until you've played the RPG section of the game long enough to unlock enough parts to make for a varied battle. The single-player RPG puts you in the role of a teenage boy who is setting out to make his missing and assumed-deceased father proud by fulfilling his last wish--to become a commander, someone who is able to control custom robos. Custom robos, the highly customizable robot fighters, are only around 30 centimeters tall, but within the society found in the game they're used to solve conflicts and fight crime. You quickly join up with a bounty hunter outfit known as the Steel Hearts, and get right into the thick of things by stopping some crooks from stealing a new robo called Ray 01. From there you'll be sent around to several locations in the city, eventually uncovering a more insidious plot involving an autonomous robo that seems to be leaving a trail of bodies around the city.

More importantly than the silly short story found in the RPG, is that as you battle in this mode you'll be unlocking new robo parts and, eventually, new stand-alone modes and options. These things make the other parts of the game playable, because you can't really have interesting battles without a wide selection of parts to choose from, and the game won't let you play exhibition matches against computer players until you unlock that option from the RPG side of the game.

The real point of the game is to battle. Fighting is done in small, varied arenas. Your robo can be customized in five different areas, and the body type governs how a robo moves. Some types allow multiple air dashes, and others have different movement speed, different defensive capabilities, and so on. Each also has its own charge attack. You can select your main gun, which starts out as a simple blaster, but you'll quickly earn a three-way cannon, a flamethrower, and around 50 more weapons. Bombs tend to launch a large rocket up and over the arena--over 30 of these are found in the game, and they also have different attributes. Your final offensive ability is your shoulder-mounted pod weapon. The default pod is a slow-moving ground-based rocket, but you'll soon get faster pods as well as pods that are better suited for defensive maneuvers, such as the caboose pod, which fires two rockets behind you, covering a quick escape. The last custom part is a robo's legs. Different legs affect hover time and things of that nature.

Combat plays out in real time with up to four robots skittering around the small arenas, unloading their three different weapons as often as possible. When you have more than one available target, a wrestlinglike lock-on toggle lets you select at which robot you want your shots aimed. The main strategy is to split your time between hiding behind walls in the arena to dodging shots and popping up over the walls to fire at your enemies. Battles tend to be over fairly quickly, especially against the computer-controlled robots, once you've figured out how to properly dash in to attack and dash away to dodge enemy fire. All told, the combat feels a little shallow. Despite options like tag-team battles, four-way free-for-alls, and so on, there isn't much strategy to the game beyond making sure that you're firing as often as possible when you aren't hiding behind something.

Graphically, Custom Robo looks fair, at best. The battle arenas are small and, for the most part, nondescript. The robos themselves are designed reasonably well, and some configurations look pretty cool. But the game rarely gives you a clear view of your robo once the battle has already started, and you'll spend more time focusing on the health numbers and other status information that appears around each robo than anything else. The RPG section of the game looks OK, but the character design and various locations are pretty bland. The game's sound is similarly dull, and there is not much in the way of standout audio. The music is fairly boring, and the text in the game is accompanied by an annoying prattling noise that is meant to simulate human speech.

When you add it all up, Custom Robo for the GameCube doesn't really have enough to it to hold most players' interest for long. While you'll probably have some multiplayer fun with this one after you toil through the boring RPG section to unlock some parts, the payoff isn't really worth the effort. Fans of multiplayer combat may want to rent this one just to mess around with it, but it isn't worth too much more than that.

Small Arms is a four-player side-view combat game that puts a great deal of importance on collecting and using a bunch of heavy weaponry as often as possible. Or to put it in more common terms, Small Arms is Super Smash Bros. without the Nintendo characters and with a much heavier focus placed on weapons. The focus on weapons, which are constantly running out of ammo, makes the game feel quite different from Nintendo's Smash Bros. games. But it also means that you spend too much time hunting for new weapons and not enough time using them. The result is a neat, but flawed game.

The characters in the game cover a good deal of "cute little guy" territory, starting with the ever-scowling Marky Kat. There's also a ninja, a dinosaur, a robot, a chicken, an evil-looking mutant tree, and more. They're OK but don't really offer much personality, unless you count the sentence or two of descriptive text that each character gets for a background story. There are 12 characters to choose from, though four are locked when you first start playing. The difference among the characters is their starting weapon. Each weapon has two firing modes and can be aimed at any angle using the right analog stick. So Marky Kat's chaingun fires like a chaingun but also has a shotgun blast as an alternate fire. The crossbow can shoot exploding shots, the ice arm can shoot either machine gun-like shards or a freezing cloud, and so on. Though the weapons cover fairly standard territory, they're the most interesting part of Small Arms.

Unfortunately, you don't spend quite as much time shooting as you might like. The weapons all run on an energy meter that drains rapidly when you fire. So instead of focusing all your attention on the savage act of murdering your opponents, you also have to spend a lot of time looking around the level in search of batteries to recharge your current weapon or new weapons to grab. Because the melee attacks aren't very potent, remaining fully armed is really your only chance at survival. Your movement options include a double jump and a dash move that you can use for an extra vertical boost if needed. Some of the game's levels have tricky platforms that can be tough to reach if you aren't good at moving around. Additionally, a few of the levels feature forced scrolling. This gives you another thing to think about while immersed in a fight that's taking place on top of a fast-moving train.

The main mode has you go through a series of stages to fight against increasingly difficult foes, and you'll get a simple boss fight at the end. Challenge mode is a fighting game-style survival mode, where you have to face off against enemies over and over again until you finally fail. Shooting range lets you play a quick bonus game, where you have to shoot paper targets as they move by, but this one doesn't ever change and isn't much fun at all. As you might expect, the real action is in the battle mode, where you can play with up to four players either locally or over Xbox Live. Ranked games are limited to two minutes, but in player matches, you can configure more of the options for scoring and decide whether players can join in the middle of the match. You can also play any combination of local and Xbox Live players. So you can start a game with two other players locally, then invite a fourth from the Internet. That's pretty cool.

The setup for Small Arms and the options it gives make it sound like a great game, but unfortunately, the payoff isn't quite potent. The gameplay's focus on weapon hunting means that you have to be careful with your ammo, which isn't much fun at all and plays against the rest of the game's frantic action. The characters are small on the screen, which makes it easy to lose track of what's going on when two or three players get into a bunch. Also, when you're playing online, the camera sometimes focuses specifically on one of the other players and occasionally goes so far as to scroll you all the way off the screen. That's incredibly annoying.

Graphically, Small Arms has a good sense of futuristic-but-furry style to it, with some decent level designs to go with it. But the game is short on graphical effects and good weapon blasts, which brings it down a notch. The sound is also standard and devoid of personality. You don't get any voice clips from the characters. Instead, you get standard explosions and a decent soundtrack that is complete with a catchy, shuffling drumbeat to accompany the main menu.

The achievements in Small Arms are good, with many easy ones that you'll get for simply playing. But there are also plenty of tougher ones, like scoring five kills without losing a life. Small Arms also has a neat viral-style achievement that you get for playing online against someone who already has the achievement. The idea is that only members of the game's development team started out with this achievement, so it works its way through the Small Arms player base over time. But most people seem to already have it, making you wonder if it's not working properly or if there just aren't many people out there playing Small Arms. Either way, it's a zero-point achievement, which really neuters it.

When it doesn't strike out on its own in an interesting way or duplicate the game it's trying to clone more effectively, Small Arms has just enough Smash Bros. in it to disappoint you. While it does have some interesting online options, the gameplay doesn't hold up well enough to make it a worthwhile purchase for its midlevel $10 price tag.