I bought this game 2 1/2 years ago and am currently playing it again - about halfway through now.
Wow, what fun it still is! No game is perfect, but Metal Arms is a real bundle of fun.
First up is the humor. You have the bleeped-out, ornery sergeant-type for many of the cut scenes. There's the almost cruely comical way enemy soldiers suffer damage - running away, sometimes hiding, yelling "Ouch!", busted arms making them fire randomly into the air as they panic - it's a real laugh. Sometimes you get caught up in the action and don't notice; then you snipe a soldier through your scope, watch him hop around in a panic with a mangled, malfunctioning arm, and just have to giggle.
The environments are very well done and graphics still look good today. There's really no reason to criticize it from a looks standpoint unless you're one of those who recoils in horror because a character occastionally stands on empty air at the edge of a platform, rock, etc.
The variety of weapons is great (most weapons are analogous to real weapons - the mining laser is a, well, laser; the bolt gun is essentially a sniper rifle; core charges are grenades; etc.) and ammo is dropped by defeated enemies or available in crates with enough regularity that you almost never run dry of everything. Plus you can buy more (and upgrades) from the funny weapons dealers (the silent one is named Pockets, and the dealer introduces him with a comment about Pockets maybe going blind, hence the name, and another source of humor). My hands-down favorite is the Recruiter Grenade. Throw it at a big, mean, hard-to-kill enemy and he's instantly reprogrammed to be your personal slave robot, turning on his former alies and blowing everyone away for you (unless he gets whacked himself). The only problem here is that washers, your currency, don't exactly rain down on you and you never seem to have enough.
It lasts quite a while, too, so no 4-hours-and-done problems here, and you can take your time and look around for hidden items. There's not a lot of problem-solving beyond basically figuring out what's needed to get through a stage, and it's usually pretty easy to figure out, but you do have to think a little and look carefully.
Aiming is the only real flaw of this game. You have to fire with your right finger while aiming with your right thumb. This is hard for my brain to wire and even by the end of the game I find myself moving around to aim more than moving my targeting reticule.
I highly recommend this game. It's funny, the action is good, the graphics are good, the environments look cool, and it actually has a reasonable plot.
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