Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii) Review
Posted by Damian Sarcuni on 10.13.2007
Video gaming’s true first lady of ass-kicking makes her triumphant return.
Innovation. It’s certainly an appealing word. When we hear the word innovation our minds are flooded with a plethora of synonyms and all of them are good things. Originality. Independence. New ideas shedding light and solving old problems. And most importantly, something innovative implies that everyone else will be able to get in on the fun too, not just the person who came up with it in the first place.
When Nintendo first announced the features on the Wii, they promised innovation. Nintendo was so sold on their belief of what the gaming public truly wanted, it was like they didn’t have time to think of much else. “Gamers don’t care about online play!” they told us, “That’s old news! Gamers are looking for a new way to experience their games entirely. They want interactivity!” And to an extent, Nintendo was absolutely right. Gamers WERE looking for a new way to play, but that didn’t necessarily mean that the Wii was the answer to their prayers.
At the same time Nintendo was getting ready to launch their interactive Frankenstein; another company by the name of Microsoft was doing quite well with its latest console, populating it with the most well known and best selling genre they were already too familiar with: first person shooters. Microsoft licensed FPS after FPS until the time came to release Halo 3 their ultimate FPS masterpiece. And while fans did gobble it up, many voices began to cry out over an empty feeling their shooters had left them with. Sure, these games were great and fun, but they all felt more or less the same. Most of the differences between these games were subtle ones, and a call for change began to ring out in several places.
Most notably, my email inbox.
I want to put this into perfect perspective for you. I am writing this at 2AM on what is now a Saturday morning. I’m very tired. There are four screens currently illuminating my room. One is a recently-used television. The other three are computer monitors, two of which are lined with emails from Angry Gaming readers and instant messages from Sean McCabe endlessly bitching about the lack of innovation and originality in the first person shooter genre. The third monitor is a list of reviews scheduled here at 411mania games, and near as I can tell Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is nowhere to be found on that list. The point of me saying all this is that I don’t HAVE to do this review, and I don’t particularly want to. But the simple fact is that Metroid Prime 3 is the game that Wii owners have been waiting on for months and FPS fans have been dreaming of for years now, and somebody has to spread the word.
Yeah, it’s that good.
In Metroid Prime 3, you are Samus Aran, the butt kicking intergalactic bounty hunter packing a pair of X chromosomes under your alien biotechnology suit. Unfortunately for the galaxy, space pirates have managed to put a nasty computer virus into the intergalactic federation’s communication network, crippling the defenses of all known good things in the universe. Your job is to bring the network back online while fighting your own dark side quite literally. And as anyone who has ever played Metroid can tell you, things are never that simple and those goals are just the beginning.
Graphics
Quite simply, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption has the best graphics seen on the Wii to date. While the details on character models, backdrops, weapons and scenery are not quite up to the level available on the best Xbox 360 games, they do come dangerously close. More importantly, Metroid’s character models move smoother and faster than any sci-fi game ever seen before. The game animates with the same smoothness of Wii Sports, which doesn’t sound like a big deal except when you consider that Wii Sports used bare minimum details both in characters and settings, not to mention having dozens fewer models on screen all at one time.
Personally I tend to be a doubter when someone tells me that an alien shoot ‘em up has the best graphics they’ve ever seen. I mean, sure all those futuristic structures might look trippy and colorful, but what’s the point if you can’t tell what they are? This is not the case in Metroid Prime 3. Interfaces, switches, doors, and character models all contrast nicely and put the player right into the virtual world. This is not to mention the great lighting and color effects for things like charged plasma shots, explosions, and other frills of the action genre.
It’s not perfect. There are far too many times when Samus’ targeting reticule completely blends in with the very spot on an enemy you are trying to shoot, resulting in a rather disappointing loss in accuracy. The speed of the game can also backfire as things tend to get frantic with too much going on during the middle of a battle. You’ll want to become very smooth with your Wiimote very soon too, because moving it around at the wrong time can result in some really confusing camera placement. Lastly, the mouth movement over vocal speech is far from accurate. Despite these flaws, Corruption’s graphics manage to pull off what even their betters cannot: they put you right into the feel of the game.
Gameplay
I’d rather get into the meat of the actual gameplay than list several adjectives about how good it is. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption basically uses the Wii’s controller scheme reinvent the way we think about first person shooters. Wii fans are already all too familiar with the system’s capability of point and click aiming, but Corruption takes it to a whole new level. To start with, Samus can now move and strafe around enemies while aiming and firing seamlessly. This is a major advantage over both other games in the FPS genre and previous Metroid Prime outings. More importantly, the Wii’s controller setup has allowed Nintendo to avoid the simple clichés of enemies who require dozens of hits to kill. Now things take a more intellectual turn, ala Brain Age but in the heat of battle. A good example of this are the wall enemies who form together like little magnemite pokemon and charge at Samus with shields in front of them. Your job is not to fire at their shields until they drop, but to pick off pieces of the wall one by one as their shields randomly drop temporarily. This is where FPS fans will really find something refreshing in terms of a battle system, though it does admittedly take some getting used to.
Not only do Corruption’s graphics immerse the player into Samus’ universe, but the gameplay does too. Little things like opening doors, piloting Samus’ ship, or using your grappling beam to rip off enemy shields lead to extensive Wiimote motions that make the game that much more appealing. These aren’t broken up in between battles either. You’ll be performing a lot of these actions while under pressure of enemy fire too. When Samus first locked an energy cell into an empty outlet to restore power to a room, pushing it in and turning it clockwise to lock it with the Wiimote, I almost cried. This is one of those things that you’ve seen in sci-fi flicks and always wanted to do yourself. Now you can.
Like most Nintendo-developed games, Metroid Prime 3 starts out a little too slowly and comes a bit easy for most tastes. Keep playing, this changes soon enough. When the real fights and stages begin, Samus Aran’s latest adventure takes FPS gameplay beyond anything we’ve seen before.
Sound
There is something weird about the music in Nintendo based games. It’s almost as if you can tell that they engineered it all in the same studio. That’s not to say that Corruption features the same bells and beeps as Super Mario Bros., far from it in fact. But the music does contain Nintendo’s signature style right from the menu selection screens onward. As for the tracks themselves, you simply cannot beat perfection. Metroid Prime 3’s music holds the perfect blend of orchestral and contemporary sounds that take a nice subtle backseat for most of the game and only call attention to themselves when they actually are supposed to. This is a rare thing for most games. Even Halo 3 seemed to stick a few intense moving pieces in odd moments, but this is not so in Corruption. Like everything else in the game, the music serves even more of a purpose to make you feel like you are really inside Samus’ varia suit, really doing battle with the space pirate baddies. And it definitely has its own emotionally gripping moments as well.
The sound effects in Metroid Prime 3 are a fun spin off of those used throughout the Metroid series. Missiles sound the same way they always have, but not quite. Doors opening sound as they always have too, but not quite. The volume for most of these effects has been toned down significantly, making it feel more realistic and far less campy. Actually, there’s quite a few fade out effects to be found here, and while that would normally be annoying it does work in the Metroid Prime world. The bane of sound in sci-fi games is that so many effects a reused and recycled, but Corruption sticks to its own library and gives it a fresh update that sounds great on the Wii.
There has been some debate over the quality of the voice acting in Metroid Prime 3. I thought it sounded fine, but as a reference point I also enjoyed the original voice acting in Enchanted Arms on the Xbox 360 whereas several others did not. There’s no accounting for taste, but on the whole Corruption sounds great and fans of the Metroid series will get everything they are looking for and more.
Lasting Appeal
Explaining this part is going to be interesting. Basically, the amount of suit upgrades you pick up in Corruption determines not which ending you get, but how much of the complete ending you get. It’s sort of like the ending sequence for Final Fantasy VIII, where certain conditions had to be met in order to keep the batteries running the camera to view the entire ending. It’s a similar deal here. Collecting all the suit upgrades gives players a good reason to go back and play through the game again, but it’s one of the oddest reasons ever.
Playing through the game unlocks higher difficulty levels, which is a good thing because normal difficulty is a little on the easy side. That’s not to say your first play through Corruption is going to be a cake walk, because the control scheme in the game does take getting used to, particularly in the heat of battle. Even long time Metroid Prime fans might want to take things slowly and go through the softer difficulties, if only to get their bearings using the Wiimote. Overall though, the gameplay in the single player experience Metroid Prime 3 is more than enough to keep players coming back for more.
Fun Factor
One of the most interesting things about the storyline in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is that it has ditched the isolated feel of “Samus VS Strange hostile alien planet” and added new characters. We don’t just hear about the galactic federation, we see it. We don’t get told about the great cities on each planet, we actually run through them. Although most of the new characters only make an appearance in cut scenes to further the storyline, this combined with the new locations and background battles gives the game entirely new feel never seen in the Metroid series before.
Strangely, Corruption doesn’t avoid all the sci-fi clichés either, but rather it embraces them. So many times have I played through a space shooter and said to myself, “Yawn…that’s from Star Wars, that’s from Alien…” whereas while playing through Corruption I found myself excited. “Hey! That’s from Star Wars! That’s from Alien!” Corruption takes the old sci-fi conventions and makes them its own. You won’t mind seeing the old movie clichés this time around, because you’ll actually be living through them rather than just viewing them.
When players do become skilled with the Wiimote (it happens quicker than you might think) Metroid Prime 3 moves at an absolutely great pace. There isn’t necessarily a need to charge up for every shot or select the perfect type of ammo for each enemy. You can have just as much fun running around; aiming and mashing the A button at everything you see. The battles just play well and the world itself is so immersive, it will really take you away.
The 411
I didn’t write this review because I was excited about Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (I’m not even a fan of the Prime series) or because I was forced into it. I simply had to respond to all the hardcore first person shooter fans out there that were looking for innovation in the long running genre. Corruption is the game FPS fans have been waiting for. It uses the Wii controls to immerse the player into an entirely new environment that will revolutionize the way we look at shooters in the future. What Nintendo has done here is brought new life to a genre that many thought had at last reached its peak. Metroid Prime 3 proves there are still miles to go in the FPS genre, and the game makes such an impression you’ll want to tell your friends. Don’t miss it.
