Vital Stats

Genre: First Person Shooter
Players: 1
Online: None

Developer: Retro Studios
Publisher: Nintendo
ESRB Rating: T
Release Date: 8/27/07

Platforms

• Wii

The third Metroid Prime game falls off the ledge into cheesy drama where the second teetered on the edge. Fortunately, the mass of the game delivers the same mix of guided exploration and challenging combat that was so endearing about the first game.

The Galaxy is at Peace
Farmed out to a second party studio after its creator died, the Metroid series seemed adrift when the first of the Prime games was announced.

However, despite the enormous shift from platformer to first person shooter and despite the decade gap between games, Metroid Prime emerged to critical acclaim as modernizing the franchise without sacrificing the series feel. Subsequent games have strayed systematically farther from its core, gilding the lily with uninteresting plot elements, NPCs, and ad hoc backtracking, but they haven’t yet eclipsed the core gameplay that makes Metroid games fun.

Alone in the Dark
The Metroid Prime games fall into the FPS genre, with a little more emphasis on the first person than on the shooting. Samus Aran, bounty hunter and part-time Metroid exterminator, is typically deployed after a planet-scale disaster to investigate, find the problem, and kill it. For gameplay, this usually entails winding your way through silent civilizations, solving their puzzles and finding their secrets, some light combat with local fauna, and the occasional boss battle.

The series hallmark is exploration bottlenecked by the discovery of new abilities. That is, bombs remove barriers, protective gear lets you pass through dangerous areas, and so on. It’s not so different from lock-and-key gameplay, but it trades the rote memorization of location for something more rewarding. For example, if you see a stunning vista with a ledge hanging just out of reach, you’ll likely remember it when you gain the ability to jump higher (without any of that pesky green key/door nonsense).

Metroid Prime 3 takes this gameplay and moves it to the Wii, adding the obligatory gestural controls along the way. The game uses a Wii Remote + Nunchuck control scheme, with the Nunchuck for strafing and the remote for free aiming and turning. It doesn’t do much to remedy the complex control schemes from earlier games (there’s even still a lock-on mechanic), but it works pretty seamlessly. It’s unfortunate, though, that aiming the remote at the edge of the screen makes Samus turn. So you either keep the aiming reticle near the center of the screen, or the big mean bounty hunter does a little pirouette. It’s not really a problem per se, but it means that you have to make a choice between breaking the mood and muscle cramps.

Speaking of muscle cramps, the game’s bosses are bigger and meaner than ever. This makes for some truly epic conflicts, but it also means that these climactic battles stretch out for quite a long time. Since the camera and aiming reticle always decouple during boss battles (the camera locks on, the low-contrast reticle does not), this means that you’ll be carefully aiming the Wii Remote at smallish targets for long stretches. Anyone who’s ever been in marching band knows just how obnoxious it is to hold anything if you hold it long enough, and anyone who plays Metroid Prime 3 will learn.

That said, the gestural controls do have an upside. Operating switches and widgets in the game requires twisting, pulling, and swinging the Nunchuck and Remote in ways that mimic the onscreen action. Unlocking and retrieving a high-tech battery, for instance, involves rotating it like a doorknob and then pulling the remote to remove the object. It’s gimmicky, but once you have the hang of it, you’ll automatically perform the motions as easily as turning a doorknob. The consistency and ease of the interface ultimately makes the game more immersive.

Backtracking Through Molasses. Alien Molasses.
Nothing breaks immersion like gameplay kludge, though, and there’s a light sprinkling of it that hampers the otherwise excellent exploration gameplay. Principal among the offenders are the long load times between rooms. Blast doors (doors that must be blasted open, what did you think that meant?) separate most of the rooms in Metroid games. The trouble is that the time between the shot that signals the door to open and the blessed (and sometimes long anticipated) event of opening is spent loading the adjacent room. In cases of particularly large and detailed rooms, this process can take more than twenty seconds. So if you’re backtracking across old territory at a fair turn of speed, you can suddenly find yourself stuck between a petulant door and the murderous hordes you bypassed in a rush of misplaced mercy and laziness. The game is balanced enough that this rarely results in death, but the interruption of flow and the unexpected and sometimes crippling battles can take away from the fun.

Annoying as the unexpected layovers are, though, they probably wouldn’t happen without the game’s excellent map and well-placed directions. The map remains unchanged from previous games, but bears recognition as one of the best map systems outside the Nintendo DS (where you can actually write on them). Metroid’s maps rotate, scale, and zoom with a combination of precision control and flexibility that make for a powerful navigation tool. It’s an essential tool as well, since the game’s five worlds are filled with multiple exits and misleading paths. Game objectives are marked on this map, which manages to keep the game’s pace up without stifling the exploration that made the series successful. There’s no waypoint, but gamers looking for a lightning dash from A to B with frenetic action and lesser puzzle emphasis should probably be playing Halo.

Galactic Federation Imperialism
Actually, Bungee’s hugely successful FPS seems to have had some impact on Metrod Prime 3, because the series has become increasingly plot-heavy over time. While the first game only really allowed you to get a peripheral look at the worlds and their inhabitants by hacking computer terminals, the second introduced a handful of chatty NPCs and tacked a good vs. evil element onto the series radioactive MacGuffin: Phazon.

Now, finally at the end of the trilogy, the series is suffering from severe inflammation of the Halo. From a constipated Captain-Keyes-wannabe admiral to derivative defend-the-squad objectives, you can almost see the marketers leaning on the producer to ape the successful franchise. Unfortunately, Metroid makes a poor clone, and the lily has been gilded with fashionable gameplay elements and talky cinematics that add very little substance to the experience.

The story they deliver isn’t particularly good either. What used to be a reasonably sly homage to the Alien movies has been puffed up with evil twins, sentient goop, and planet-eating forces that would make The Spirits Within blush. It adds little and was largely unnecessary.

If you can power your way past the cut scenes, though, the game is lovely to look at and nicely scored. Metroid Prime 3 delivers a colorful, if familiar, selection of worlds that are delivered smoothly and crisply. About half the music is sampled from previous games, but the balance consists of new music that preserves the atmosphere and themes. The otherworldly mix of electronic noise and space orchestra is as good here as ever. However, it is marred a bit by some pitch-modulated vocal samples that fall somewhere in the aural equivalent of the uncanny valley (would it really have cost so much to hire someone to sing more than one note?).

Ridley is Dead. Long Live Ridley.
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is hard to recommend to casual gamers. The combination of complex controls and a reasonably steep difficulty curve aren’t sufficiently rewarded by the lackluster plot. However, hardcore gamers and genre fans will enjoy it for many of the same reasons, and the gestural controls do a good job of exploiting Wii hardware to make an old game seem new.

What It Costs: $50

What It’s Worth:

• To The Hardcore: $40 (buy)
• To The Genre Fan: $40 (buy)
• To The Casual: $10 (skip)