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One thing I will say for this book is it has guns. Lots of guns. nearly 500 of them crammed on 160 pages. Most are illustrated and all possess basic statistics. That ends the good points.
On the downside, there are only basic statistics for the guns. No descriptions. With the lack of detail, the book is very bland, dull, and difficult to sit down with for very long. It's also full of esoteric weapons of strange and expensive calibers, too. And it's all Black & White line art in extreme "brown paper wrapper" plainness that became trade dress for Palladium in the 1980's. And let's not forget, it's the product of Palladium Books and it's draconic owners, meaning it's meant for Palladium's games only and heaven forbid you mention converting it to another game! And I really wish they would stop reprinting chunks of the palladium rules in every last book they publish. Another 8 pages wasted on yet another rehash of the same old tired weapons combat rules presented in virtually every other Palladium book published...
But the book is salvageable for other game systems, thanks to the inclusion of basic data from the real world, like caliber and muzzle velocity. It's easily possible to sit down for a couple weeks and convert it to another game system like D20. However, right now I'm playtesting a gun calculator program into which you can punch in all that real world data provided by Palladium, and it will spit out stats for a bunch of game systems in return. I converted the entire book in under a day when going by that route.
The book does have another huge plus for it, though. It isn't just guns. Before you even get to the firearms, you get to wade through body armor, riot control devices, and demolitions/ EOD equipment. You see your first gun almost 40 pages into the book.
It would have been nice if the folks at Palladium didn't have tunnel vision for their own game system. Had they bumped up the price to $24.95, bumped up the page count to 250 pages or so, tried to keep the palladium material separate from the basic gun data, and been a bit descriptive of the weapons, they would have had a wonderful generic sourcebook on contemporary weapons. Instead, it's just another dull palladium book.
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