System: Wii
Rating: T (Probably because you shoot stuff. And that’s not ok, kids!)
Ah yes, Metroid Prime 3. Part of the Wii’s holy trimurti. One of the must-have titles for Wii owners. Or is it? I wanted to play this game quite badly. After all, anyone who doesn’t love Metroid is clearly an evil communist, right?
Gameplay: 6/10
Like its predecessors, MP3 plays like a first person shooter with heavy adventure elements, concentrated on exploration and item gathering, which grants the player the ability to progress and discover new things. The new thing that separates this from the other Primes, of course, is the fact that it’s on the Wii. I probably don’t need to tell you this, because it’s been heavily publicized, but you use the Wii remote’s motion sensing to aim and fire (and a few other things), while using the Nunchuk attachment to move (again, among other things). The back of the box hails it as “The best first person controls ever made.” I’m serious. It says that on the back of the box. Not exactly the most modest assertion, but is it true?
In a general sense, the Wii remote works quite well for aiming. It has quite a high precision that, while not quite reaching the perfection of the PC mouse, is much more precise than the classic dual analog stick method used in console FPS. However, all is not well with the Wii remote. If you play MP3 for a few hours you will quickly realize this. What happens after a few hours of MP3, you ask?
Massive hand cramps. This is more a fault of the hardware than the actual game, but it is something that just can’t be ignored. The Wii remote works wonderfully for grandma and her short bouts of Wii Sports, but when you try to apply it to serious games like MP3, its glaring flaws become apparent. The remote’s generally un-ergonomic design (with or without the remote jacket, it doesn’t matter) and odd button placement means that your hand will be crying for mercy after playing for some time. Having to press the awkwardly placed - and + buttons during heavy combat as well as the A and B is not cool. I imagine even if you didn’t have to press those two buttons, hand cramps would still persist. This is a very big problem, which leads me to believe that Nintendo either did not test the game, or are the only people in the entire world that take the health warnings in every manual seriously. “Avoid excessive play. Take a 10 to 15 minute break every hour.” I mean, who actually listens to those health warnings? No one, that’s who. I think we can all agree that you can’t tell a serious gamer to do something like that. Which means that the problems with the Wii remote cannot be ignored.
Another problem with the remote aiming, which is almost contradictory given what I’ve said about its precision, is that it is actually a bit difficult to aim in MP3. This is most likely due to the fact that Samus’s shots fly through the air slower than an intoxicated snail. With normal weapons, the bullets have such a high velocity that, when you aim at something and fire, chances are that you will hit it. With Samus’s gun, by the time the shot travels through the air, the target probably already moved. This is very easy to notice with small, fast moving targets. The good news is, this is rarely a problem because enemies don’t know how to dodge. The bad news is, this means enemy AI is retarded.
With that out of the way, let’s look at the actual gameplay, shall we? I have to put it bluntly: I was disappointed. Now, I’m not saying the gameplay in MP3 is bad. In fact, I’d daresay it’s good. But when you carry the title of Metroid, there are some things that are expected of you.
I must say that this game is not as good as either Metroid Prime 1 or 2. Of course, it’s not as good as Super Metroid either, but that goes without saying because Super Metroid is almost divine and possesses a quality that for some reason all of the ones after it cannot replicate. But I digress. The beauty of the Metroid series is that the games concentrate so much on the adventure and exploration aspect that one cannot call them shooters without vague feelings of being a filthy liar. However, MP3 commits the terrible sin of being too much like a FPS, too much for a game that bears the title of Metroid. Yes, it still seems to have the general feel of the Metroid gameplay, item collection, and exploration; but on closer inspection, the truth becomes more readily apparent.
First of all, MP3 is simply too linear. When you think about the fact that Metroid is almost synonymous with non-linear gameplay, this almost seems like a sad travesty. You have a computer telling you exactly where to go and what to do every step of the way. This is not welcome, but even if it wasn’t there, the game itself is designed in such a way that it is almost frustratingly linear.
While this sort of gameplay is fine for a FPS, it is not for a Metroid game. But that’s not where MP3 stops trying to butcher the Metroid formula. There is an inordinate amount of people, and worst of all, allies in this game. That doesn’t sound so bad, you say? Well, listen to this: MP3 even goes so far as to have an escort mission. Yes, you heard right. An escort mission in a Metroid game. Believe it or not, at one point you have to defend a group of marines from wave after wave of space pirates. This isn’t the only part of MP3 that tries to be too much like a classic FPS either. At some points of the game you can’t help but think “What is this, Halo?!”
All of this translates to gameplay that, while not bad in itself, is bad for a game called Metroid Prime 3. I downloaded Super Metroid on the Virtual Console and played it after this to get the bad taste out of my mouth, and when you play them so close to each other you get to see how maddeningly regressive MP3’s gameplay really is compared to the near perfection of Super Metroid.
Difficulty: 3/10
The truth is MP3 is quite laughably easy. I made the mistake of playing on the normal difficulty setting, and fights never posed any sort of challenge, including boss fights. Samus seems to be stronger than a tank, because attacks from bosses barely damage her. Thing is, her attacks either don’t damage bosses too much either, or the boss has some sort of mechanism that prevents it from being damaged a lot of the time. This means that fights, rather than actually being hard, are just long and tedious. Still, I would imagine a higher difficulty setting would only increase the enemies’ strength, making the fights last even longer.
However, the definitive gameplay element that makes MP3 a cakewalk is the addition of the new Hyper Mode; or, as I like to call it, the Instant Win Button. By pressing the + button and sacrificing a single energy tank, Samus uses the phazon energy in her corrupted body to enter a state known as Hyper Mode. This makes her completely invincible against all enemy attacks, while giving her the ability to shoot the hyper beam, which is capable of obliterating anything that isn’t a boss in a couple of seconds. And if it’s a boss, it still does considerable damage. Hyper Mode just makes the game unbelievably easy.
Moving away from the difficulty in battles, we come across another problem that can’t be fixed by difficulty modes. Basically, it’s discount energy tank and missile expansion clearance sale in MP3. It’s frustrating just how easy it is to find items in this game. After some time, you find something that makes the game even mark your map with all of the locations of the items you are missing, which means you don’t even have to look for them yourself. I’m not kidding. It’s that bad.
Missile expansions are particularly plentiful, and the terrible thing is, they are almost useless because the game is so easy and your beam is probably more effective.
Furthermore, remember when you had to scan things in the other Primes to achieve 100% completion? Yeah, welcome to Metroid Prime: Grandma Edition. Scans no longer affect your completion percentage. This means you can easily achieve 100% just by finding all the items. Oh wait, my bad! You don’t actually have to find the items because the game tells you exactly where everything is.
Story: 4/10
Boring. No one expected this game to have a good story though, so this is not unexpected. Some of the “story” is still conveyed through scans, but this game also has quite a heavy use of voice acting for a Metroid game. It is all still quite predictable and isn’t very compelling, though.
Graphics: 6/10
Hey, I remember when these graphics were state of the art! Yeah, that was six years ago, because MP3’s graphics are identical to the first Metroid Prime. Yeah, I know, this is a limitation of the hardware because the Wii is basically two GameCubes taped together with duct tape, we’ve heard it. Still doesn’t change the facts. The graphics look particularly bad to me because it seems like they try to look realistic, but what looked realistic six years ago doesn’t fly today. Still, while they are unimpressive and greatly outdated, you get used to them.
Music/Voice Acting: 4/10
The music is all right, but it is still probably the worst in the series. There is only one area with a tune that I kind of liked. The rest was pure meh. I guess I kind of liked the intro theme a little as well. The voice acting is also merely decent. It is acceptable, but nothing special.
Length: 8/10
It took me 20 hours to beat the game and complete it 100%. For this specific genre, that is both decent and acceptable.
Fun Factor!: 7/10
Overall, I would say that MP3 is indeed a fun game, as long as you look at it as an independent game without taking into consideration its pedigree. However, for me this is impossible. I was expecting a Metroid game. What I got was an FPS that merely resembles it while forgetting what makes a Metroid game great.
Ultimately, I had a good time with Metroid Prime 3. It’s not a bad game. I managed to enjoy it despite the disappointment it made me feel. I would only recommend it if you think you can get past its ill-conceived departures from the series’ established formula, which in my opinion, makes it the worst one.
Oh, and if you can endure the painful hand cramps you will get or don’t intend to play for extended periods of time like a real gamer.
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