Metal Arms: Glitch in the System
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| Metal Arms: Glitch in the System | |
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| Developer(s) | Swingin' Ape Studios |
| Publisher(s) | Vivendi Universal |
| Platform(s) | GameCube, Xbox, PS2 |
| Release | November 18, 2003 |
| Genre(s) | Third-person shooter |
| Mode(s) | Single player, multiplayer |
Metal Arms: Glitch in the System is a third-person shooter developed by Swingin' Ape Studios. It was published by Vivendi Universal in November 2003 for the Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox.
Plot
Planet Iron Star. Thought to have built from debris by a spacecraft by a mysterious race called the Morbots. Little is known about them except they live in Iron Star's core, where they give off the energy consumed by the planet's inhabitants. None dare enter the Morbot lair, for fear of death. The inhabitants consumed the planet's plentiful ore and prospered.
Dr. Exavolt wanted to push droid technology further, but his experiment went terribly wrong, and a sadistic military bot named General Corrosive emmerged. He built a robotic race called the Mils and sent the droid's once peaceful nation into a tailspin of terror and chaos. Many droids were enslaved and those who resisted were immediately killed and recycled.
Until one day, a droid architect by the name of Colonel Alloy carved out one last vestige of hope and built Droid Town. Droid town was unknown to the Mils and is the center of the Droid Rebellion, calling on all willing and able droids, before It's too late.
Gameplay
Players played through the single player quest as "Glitch", a robot who was found in bad condition in the ruins of Iron Star. He was repaired and became a soldier in the resistance. Throughout the story, players fight against General Corrosive and his army. The single player mode is 42 missions long, most of which can take an hour to complete. Some (including replays because of game overs) can take several hours. The game features 17 weapons, a hacking ability that allows Glitch to take over enemy robots, 3 vehicles, 7 multiplayer modes, and in the Xbox version supports Dolby Digital, the GameCube version supports Dolby Pro Logic II and progressive scan. The game was heralded as one of the most underrated video games in recent memory by many in the gaming community.
Story
Template:Spoilers The game begins with players fighting through the Mil-controlled mine shafts to push back the Mil invasion of Droid Town. Following this, the player must force the Mils out of Droid Town itself, and then chase the escaping Mil soldier Vlax to prevent him from revealing the location of Droid Town to the whole Mil army. This chase takes the player through 14 levels (culminating in Vlax's demise in level 17) in which the player will pass through the Wastelands, the Mil trenches and canyons in order to catch up with him. The player then goes to Morbot land, home of the designers of the planet Iron Star, but the whole city has been overtaken by the Mils. In fact, there are no Morbots in the entire game, existing only through mention by other characters. It is of course likely that Glitch himself is a Morbot, as he can use Morbot artifacts to give him higher jumps, faster speed and temporary invincibility. By the end of the game (in which Dr. Exavolt, the evil designer of General Corrosive, escapes, as the General himself and his Mil forces are destroyed by Glitch), the player will have passed through the centre of Mil civilisation, Mil City, traveled through the ruins of Iron Star, and even infiltrated a Mil space station to rescue a robotic dog and shut down the Mil race. Other areas visited include the Mil spy factory (where Glitch must dismantle himself onto separate conveyor belts to infiltrate the factory) and the Colosseum (where Glitch and his fellow droids are forced to fight for the amusement of the Mils, following his capture in Droid Town).
Enemies
There are several enemies in the game, being either Mils, Junkbots, creatures, and in one case, a droid. All Mils will start carrying shields after the Morbot City levels, though not every single enemy unit will wear them. Most enemies have various types and will be discused at greater length below.
Grunt - The grunts are your most common enemy, and throughout the game wield every weapon that you do excluding the control teather, slingshot, scatter blaster, and ripper, along with all secondary weapons excluding the coring charge. To add even further to their variety, their weapons upgrade just like yours. The varieties are as follows: purple use mining laser, red (the most common of all) use the SPEW and later, the coring charge, ect. All portions of this mil may be shot off or disabled, a common strategy being that a player disables the coring charge hand (though not destroying it) and goading the grunt to throw a coring charge to its feet and destroying it and destroying or damaging nearby enemies.
Guard - Although the instruction booklet would have you believe that these are an offshoot of the Grunts, they bear no resemblance to them, an instead look, though not necessarily fight, much more like a Titan. Guards have a huge stamina, the first one ought possibly being a fully upgraded version to make it more like a boss battle, and are equal to if not more powerful than a Titan. They wield a halbierd that they swing in a constant back and forth motion if the player gets to close. Their other weapon is a shotgun laser mounted on top of the halbierd that it shoots while constantly running towards the closest target. There is a blind spot on its rampage path where it will swing its taff even while the player is too far away to hit though this is practically impossible to maintain seeing as how it rushes towards you at a speed greater than your own. Like a grunt the body parts can be diabled but require much skill to to do so.
Titan - The Titan is the commando of the Mils' army, using two arm attacthed, fully upgraded spews, a shoulder mounted rocket laucher that will eventually upgrade to shoot a rocket that splits into four, and a shockwave attack by stomping the ground. The best strategy while dealing with these guys is to try and disable or destroy the guns or rocket launcher and then either ignore it or destroy it fully. You can also destroy both legs and 'fuse' the top half of the Titan to the ground meaning that the Titan can essentially have all armaments removed without actually killing it. Although the Titans arm cannons overheat when controlled by the player, it seems that that is not the case as an enemy.
trooper - Though similar in health to a Grunt, the Scounts can provide to be diffiult targets as they fly through the air. They have three distict attacks, either slicing you with bayonets on their wrists, shooting you with explosive green plasma blasts from the ground or air, and while in the air dive bombing the player and attempting to slice the player in half for heavy dammage. The weapons have no noticeable changes making the upgrades it receives only enurance and attack power.
Predator and Snerq - There are two very different forms of this Mil, one a single piece flying robot that shoots lasers at you. The Snarq is a small quick machine making them somewhat hard to to shoot. The Predator is a four armed flying robot that can shoot either lasers or a barrage of orange explosive plasma. Both of them will shoot at you while hovering in one spot but periodically change locations, either the SPEW or fully upgraded scatter blaster are good weapons for the first ones, though any level of ripper can disable all arms of the second Predator making both potentially deadly enemies into scrap in a short amount of time.
Turrets - There are two types of turrets, large and small. The small ones cannot be boarded and must be destroyed like any other enemy. The second turret however can be very useful because although it is a powerful enemy, it can be converted to your side with use of the control teather or recruiter grenade. Instead, you can simply get on the back of it, similar to how you would a vehicle, and either control it manually, or get off of it and let the AI control it as an ally. Both kinds use machine gun fire, but the large kind also uses mortars, similar to rockets, but with a slight eliptical curve.
Multiplayer
Up to 4 players can compete in multiplayer mode in the Xbox and Gamecube versions of the game, but this number is limited to 2 in the PS2 version, even with a four-way controller adaptor. Because of this constriction, the PS2 version contains a couple of exclusive maps. There are seven modes of play: Bot Brawl (Deathmatch), Team Bot Brawl, Possession Melee (Where all players are given Recruiter Grenades and Control Tethers to possess other bots to fight for you), King Of THe Hill (Players fight for control of a specific point on the map), Moving Hill (Same as King Of The Hill, but the point moves), Tag (Played like a normal game of tag - to tag someone when you are tagged you kill them, tagging them and untagging you), and Reverse Tag (Where the objective is to become tagged and stay that way for as long as possible). You can also create new multiplayer modes and save them to your profile. AI-controlled bots can be optionally switched on or off, but these are not like normal players - they are merely enemies from single player placed in the map to create havoc - they do not have a kill total and players do not gain points for killing them. All weapons (excluding the spanner) and vehicles are available in Multiplayer. The game begins with 4 levels unlocked, with the rest unlocked by finding secret chips in the single player mode.
Weapons
The weapons in Metal Arms include a fairly standard set of gaming firearms, with the SPEW (Machine Gun), Scatter Blaster (Shotgun) and Barrage Cannon (Rocket Launcher) covering the main weaponry. Also available are the Toaster (Flamethrower), the Mining Laser (A very underpowered laser gun), the Slingshot (For firing secondary weapons) and many more available to create carnage with. Secondary weapons include Coring Charges (Grenades), EMP Grenades (Grenades that temporarily shut down opposition in the area) and Recruiter Grenades (Used to recruit enemy bots into follwing you and attacking your enemies). All the primary weapons (excluding the spanner) can be upgraded in three stages - Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3. The Scope, a secondary weapon for attaching to primary weapons to improve accuracy can also be upgraded to Level 3 (The player receives it at Level 2).it can also be gotten at level 1 in level 6( they live)
Humour
A large portion of Metal Arms' humour comes from either it's screaming Mil adversaries (when shot, the Mil Grunts often begin to scream and panic, running around shooting one another and shouting in high pitched voices) or it's deliberately immature swearing (which is somethimes censored - something which only serves to heighten the comedy aspect. "Of course I f**king fixed him! He was a huge pain in the f**king waste pan, because he's some sort of custom jobbie!" is one such line, delivered by a four armed robot called Krunk, who swears profusely in almost every scene he is in. Despite this, there are some clever pieces of humour, such as discussions overheard between Mil bots, and the classic Mil commander who has a very strong German accent: "I haf ten vashers on zis goofy lookin' von here!" Also notable are some of the background announcements made in some of the Mil facilities, such as: "All systems alerted, code red. All systems alerted, code red. Have a nice day." and "Will the party or parties responsible for releasing all of the experimental looney bots please return them to their pens? They are shooting the employees. Thank you." Both of these are probably inspired by the sarcastic humour found in the works of Douglas Adams.
Glitches
It is rather appropriate for a game called "Glitch in the System" to have a few glitches, and whilst the game is very solid, extensive playtesting means that two years on two interesting bugs stick out. The first is activated by one player climbing in the Loader vehicle, and picking another player up in the claws. If the player driving then shoots the player he is holding until he dies, but keeps the claws shut after the player has respawned, that player will act as if they are still in the loaders claws - as long as the loader is stationary, the player can move normally, but if the driver of the loader moves, the other player is moved to correspond, sending him through walls and off the edges of the level. The other glitch is more of a bug - if a player obtains Mil bots to help him in multiplayer by reaching the rank of Brawling Bot Supreme (5 kills without dying), and then does not go near a Mil who spawns near a vehicle, then the Mil will just stand there. However, if a different player approaches, the Mil's AI will work out that the vehicle is the best place to be, and will hop in to start shooting at the player. However, once the Mil is at the controls of the Loader/Sentinel Tank/RAT, it is no longer counted as being under the possession of any player, and so it can shoot and squash the player it was originally working for. Every time it does, that player will lose a point, which can be extremely annoying in tight multiplayer games. It is however useful if you want a wildcard AI drving around in a tank to lighten up your multiplayer games, though.