It certainly is "Other".
Let me just start off by saying I love Metroid. Metroid, Super Metroid, the three Prime games, the GBA games, are all super in my book. Other M, however, is really not one of those games at all and while that maybe means it lives up to its sub title.
Controls are just plain weird and that doesn’t bode well for an action game. Some really unusual choices were made with this game as it uses the Wiimote minus nunchuk and motion plus, that’s right only the wiimote is used for the controls. That gives you the 8 directional dpad and 6 buttons with some extremely limited motion control. For about 10 seconds it feels like you are playing an updated version of Super Metroid for the SNES but then you realize this isn’t the 1990's and games just shouldn’t be played that way.
Other M’s controls are extremely unintuitive. The morph button is next to the dpad so you have to let off the movement controls to ball on the run and when you enter first person view by pointing the wiimote at the screen, which you do a lot of I.E. exploring, scanning and firing missiles, your legs become completely inoperable. Read this as you spend lots of time maneuvering Samus into a good spot or position to then enter first person view only to learn it wasn’t a good position and then back out and try again.
Acting and story are tied for first place as what really brings this game down. The voice acting is unbelievably bad, I had heard snippets about it being a little stiff from other reviews but I have to say those reviewers must have gotten paid well to say "stiff" and not "frozen" or just plain bad. Kids need a job? Take a few acting classes, a public speaking class and a few sessions with a voice coach, you could be the new Nolan North.
Story wise the premise of the game doesn’t feel like a fit in any way shape or form. It doesn’t feel like Samus and it doesn’t feel like Metroid. Being different isn’t inherently bad except for the fact that this game does star Samus and is a Metroid game and even if it didn’t it would still be very poor. Obviously there were a lot of liberties given with how to treat Samus as a person, and it just falls flat on its face. Samus comes of as a weak Barbie doll blonde.
Nice job team Ninja destroying the persona of one of the strongest women in video game history.
Graphics are good but everything feels tiny, the view outside of first person is so far back that it makes it really hard to discern what exactly is going on on-screen. Maybe if you have a 50+ inch TV its no so bad but a medium size set makes it feel like sitting right on top of the screen is the only choice but... its not. You cant sit close because then the sensor bar wont pick you up when you point at the screen so yeah, again its just not fun and feels like wow why the heck did they do that?
Depth perception feels awkward since the camera zoom is nearly constantly changing and that takes a lot of the fun out of jumping puzzles and new combat moves like jumping on an enemy for a blast to their noggin. It’s not really a control problem because the control for it works fine but the way the camera moves or even doesn’t move in some spots and Samus is so tiny on the screen means you'll be jumping around like a lost little bunny instead of a well trained experienced bounty hunter.
To sum it all up, it’s not a terrible game, but reviews in the 8-9 out of 10 or 4-5 star ranges seem insane or at least tilted. They just simply must be bias for Metroid. The game just has too much going against it to warrant a great game label. It’s a decent to good game, one that’s worth trying and if you can get past its many caveats then maybe it'll be good to you. Metroid game or not constant bad dialog by bad voice actors, weird controls and headache inducing graphics really suck a lot of energy out of this Other M.
