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Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Is Samus Aran's debut adventure on Wii her best yet? Find out inside.
September 4, 2007 | 1:57 PM PSTAMN's Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don't waste your time. This is why we've split our reviews into four sections: What the Game's About, What's Hot, What's Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.
What the Game's About
It was over five years ago that Retro Studios developed and Nintendo published the GameCube insta-masterpiece Metroid Prime. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is the third and final title in the Metroid Prime trilogy. All of the questions you have after playing through Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes will be answered – well, just about all of them. The game's story picks up shortly after the events that unfolded in Echoes, to be precise. If you haven't played both Prime and Prime 2, it might be difficult to follow along with what's going on in Corruption, although it's possible. Still, this is a sequel, and it constantly references events and information found in its predecessors.
What's Hot
Surprisingly, the first thing that stands out about Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is its storytelling. Retro has taken a much more cinematic and conventional approach to storytelling in the third Prime game, and it works every bit as well as you'd expect it would. This is the first Metroid game to feature full voice acting, and it's absolutely well done. Furthermore, Prime 3 is considerably more story-based than just about any other Metroid game before it. The larger amount of cut-scenes initially feels alien to the Metroid franchise, but Retro has done a top-notch job of trying to truly bring to life the Metroid universe in a fashion that's never been done before.
What makes Prime 3 a truly must-play experience isn't its storytelling, though. It's the thoughtful and intricate world – or universe, rather – design. Like previous Metroid Primes, everything is carefully tied together. The level and puzzle design often crisscrosses, and you'll find yourself journeying back and forth between explored and unexplored areas, employing newly found power-ups and abilities, which allow you to progress even deeper into the game's world.
Retro's incredibly smart design – both in regards to level design, puzzle design and the game's excellent pacing – is indeed what makes Prime 3 such a satisfyingly entertaining playthrough, but on the surface there's something that Corruption does that instantly catches your attention: its superb use of the Wii controller. While the button configuration is less intuitive than we like, the pointing controls eventually become second-nature and offer precision and ease of use that's on par with a keyboard/mouse setup. What's more, the gesture controls let you interact with the game's world in an unprecedented manner – on a level never experienced in any other game before, period.
Flying back and forth between different planets makes Prime 3's universe feel big. The interior of Samus' ship is rendered beautifully, and you feel like a real bounty hunter as you use the ship to navigate your way from alien planet to planet throughout the galaxy. The introduction of Samus' ship and the galaxy map means you don't spend quite as much time backtracking as you do in past Prime games, which is sure to be a plus to many (although there is still a great amount of backtracking and re-exploration, both of which are franchise roots and are sure to make hardcore fans happy).
There's another first for the Prime series, too: you don't lose all of your power-ups at the beginning of the adventure. Instead of re-collecting a bunch of power-ups we've all seen and used in both Prime and Prime 2, Retro instead showers you with a stream of never-before-seen abilities. This keeps the adventure feeling fresh and new throughout, as especially in the latter half of the game, you'll discover several unexpected power-ups.
Perhaps the biggest surprise Metroid Prime 3 brings to the table (we knew it'd play well, after all) is its visuals, which thanks to a creative art-direction, manage to blow you away over and over again. The world and areas in Prime 3 are varied, each featuring its own visual theme and style different from the last. Even room-to-room, Corruption manages to deliver a certain level of diversity that most games could only dream of. This is by far the best-looking Wii game yet, thanks to winning art-direction, extensive bloom lighting, overflowing detail and overall artistry that runs circles around even the best-looking Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 software.
What's Not
While playing, there are a few things that might annoy. For example, the control configuration is initially less intuitive than past Primes. There's definitely a learning curve with the new controls, too, but they do grow on you. As far as the button layout goes, pressing down on the D-pad to fire missiles never feels as satisfying as a conventional button press has in the past, and it's not ideal. Stranger, on the topic of controls, Corruption never tells you that you can morphball jump by motioning upwards with the Wii-mote, which is rather baffling considering it works so well.
What the Game's About
It was over five years ago that Retro Studios developed and Nintendo published the GameCube insta-masterpiece Metroid Prime. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is the third and final title in the Metroid Prime trilogy. All of the questions you have after playing through Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes will be answered – well, just about all of them. The game's story picks up shortly after the events that unfolded in Echoes, to be precise. If you haven't played both Prime and Prime 2, it might be difficult to follow along with what's going on in Corruption, although it's possible. Still, this is a sequel, and it constantly references events and information found in its predecessors.
What's Hot
Surprisingly, the first thing that stands out about Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is its storytelling. Retro has taken a much more cinematic and conventional approach to storytelling in the third Prime game, and it works every bit as well as you'd expect it would. This is the first Metroid game to feature full voice acting, and it's absolutely well done. Furthermore, Prime 3 is considerably more story-based than just about any other Metroid game before it. The larger amount of cut-scenes initially feels alien to the Metroid franchise, but Retro has done a top-notch job of trying to truly bring to life the Metroid universe in a fashion that's never been done before.
What makes Prime 3 a truly must-play experience isn't its storytelling, though. It's the thoughtful and intricate world – or universe, rather – design. Like previous Metroid Primes, everything is carefully tied together. The level and puzzle design often crisscrosses, and you'll find yourself journeying back and forth between explored and unexplored areas, employing newly found power-ups and abilities, which allow you to progress even deeper into the game's world.
Retro's incredibly smart design – both in regards to level design, puzzle design and the game's excellent pacing – is indeed what makes Prime 3 such a satisfyingly entertaining playthrough, but on the surface there's something that Corruption does that instantly catches your attention: its superb use of the Wii controller. While the button configuration is less intuitive than we like, the pointing controls eventually become second-nature and offer precision and ease of use that's on par with a keyboard/mouse setup. What's more, the gesture controls let you interact with the game's world in an unprecedented manner – on a level never experienced in any other game before, period.
Flying back and forth between different planets makes Prime 3's universe feel big. The interior of Samus' ship is rendered beautifully, and you feel like a real bounty hunter as you use the ship to navigate your way from alien planet to planet throughout the galaxy. The introduction of Samus' ship and the galaxy map means you don't spend quite as much time backtracking as you do in past Prime games, which is sure to be a plus to many (although there is still a great amount of backtracking and re-exploration, both of which are franchise roots and are sure to make hardcore fans happy).
There's another first for the Prime series, too: you don't lose all of your power-ups at the beginning of the adventure. Instead of re-collecting a bunch of power-ups we've all seen and used in both Prime and Prime 2, Retro instead showers you with a stream of never-before-seen abilities. This keeps the adventure feeling fresh and new throughout, as especially in the latter half of the game, you'll discover several unexpected power-ups.
Perhaps the biggest surprise Metroid Prime 3 brings to the table (we knew it'd play well, after all) is its visuals, which thanks to a creative art-direction, manage to blow you away over and over again. The world and areas in Prime 3 are varied, each featuring its own visual theme and style different from the last. Even room-to-room, Corruption manages to deliver a certain level of diversity that most games could only dream of. This is by far the best-looking Wii game yet, thanks to winning art-direction, extensive bloom lighting, overflowing detail and overall artistry that runs circles around even the best-looking Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 software.
What's Not
While playing, there are a few things that might annoy. For example, the control configuration is initially less intuitive than past Primes. There's definitely a learning curve with the new controls, too, but they do grow on you. As far as the button layout goes, pressing down on the D-pad to fire missiles never feels as satisfying as a conventional button press has in the past, and it's not ideal. Stranger, on the topic of controls, Corruption never tells you that you can morphball jump by motioning upwards with the Wii-mote, which is rather baffling considering it works so well.
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November 20, 2009
