With fun, colourful characters, a unique hook and a smart approach to online play, ARMS is a breath of fresh air for casual fighting game fans. But unbalanced control schemes and an emphasis on fun over fairness may make it a hard sell for the hardcore competitive set.

After taking on the team-based shooter with Splatoon and the open-world role-playing game with Breath of the Wild, ARMS is another example of Nintendo's internal teams bringing a unique spin to a genre the company traditionally wouldn't touch. Like Splatoon, most of the familiar features of the genre are present and accounted for, but implemented in a visual, accessible way that anyone can understand and enjoy. 

Each of the 10 playable characters has long, springy appendages with fists at the end, so rather than a traditional close-quarters brawl the matches in ARMS can be fought at a distance, with players flinging and curving punches as they dodge and jump around a number of dynamic arenas. The action is silky smooth, with the variously goofy and badass characters dripping with style and humour (and the arenas are pretty slick too, with stage-specific hazards and gimmicks and fans dressed as their favourite combatants milling around the outsides).

A simple rock-paper-scissors system (blocks stop punches, grabs ignore blocks, punches cancel grabs) forms a solid basis for the combat, and means a match between players who know what they're doing is all about strategy and reading their opponent, not just about chucking as many punches as possible.

Extra touches add depth, like the ability to charge punches by blocking or jumping, or to disable an opponents arm with a precise attack. These states come with clear visual cues so the fighters (and viewers) can easily keep track of what's happening. A range of unlockable weapons (i.e. gloves) adds another degree of complexity as players can choose a different weapon for each hand prior to each round.

As with all good fighting games, each combatant has special abilities. But rather than letting you execute special moves with button combos like Street Fighter or Tekken, these abilities (there are two per fighter) are innate to the way the characters control and fight.

For example Spring Man gains a special aura around his body once he's charged a punch, and any hits sent towards him will bounce off allowing him to counter-attack with a fierce blow. His second ability kicks in automatically when his health drops below 25 per cent, charging all his punches. Most characters' two abilities work well together to open up unique strategies that only they can pull off, and when you consider that these need to be modified to account for your opponent's abilities and chosen strategies, matches between two players that understand all the characters well can get very exciting.

My early favourite character was Twintelle, who can charge her punches in mid air with the press of a button, and who also possesses some kind of time-manipulation ability that means punches coming towards her will slow down when her punches are charged. This meant an opponent trying to attack me mid-air could consistently be dodged and left helpless while their slow punches languished in the air, and I could go in to punish. Online players got wise to this very quickly however, and lately I've been favouring Ribbon Girl, whose double-jump and ability to drop instantly from air to ground achieves a similar thing but with more room for fake-outs.

In addition to one-on-one matches, ARMS contains a number there are a few quirky modes to keep things interesting. Two-on-two team fights and three-way brawls are the most straightforward, but there's also a twisted game of basketball and a mode which asks combatants to play volleyball with a bomb. A group of players can get into the game locally via split-screen or by linking Switch consoles wirelessly.

The biggest issue with ARMS is one of control. Nintendo pushes its motion controls, which let you physically throw and twist punches for some off-the-couch fun, but these can be imprecise. You can play with standard buttons too, but at the penalty of not being able to move and punch at the same time. Having abilities and control reliability split between players like this is toxic for a competitive game. Nobody likes to feel like a motion's lack of registering cost them a match, but similarly nobody using the standard pad wants to have to account for players punching and moving when they themselves can't.

This will be of most concern for players hoping to rise to the top in the online "ranked play" mode, but maybe less so for those in the other fun-focused online mode, called Party, which puts players in groups and rotates them around the various game modes. For my money, the party mode is where it's at in ARMS, and a similar offline mode lets you register a whole group of friends and rotates them around, perfect for a games night.

Since Nintendo has already committed to ongoing updates, new players, modes, stages and balance tweaks are all possible for ARMS going forward, but as it stands this is a beautiful, interesting fighter with a killer roster of characters (and an incredibly catchy soundtrack). The balance isn't precise enough to woo hardcore fighting game fanatics to its servers, but then that's perfectly OK if you're just in it for a good time.

ARMS is out now for Nintendo Switch.