Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

The Good

• Epic boss fights
• Fabulous controls
• Great graphics artistically and technically
• Great story
• Some nice extra features and bonuses
• Backtracking is less of a pain
• Great puzzles

The Bad

• Door load times

The Review

The Metroid Prime trilogy is a first person adventure (FPA) series that deals with exploration and puzzle solving as well as combat. Some have classified the game as straight First Person Shooter (FPS) but it's really so much more.

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is the third and final entry into the Metroid Prime Trilogy and it's no disappointment. It starts off with a short but cinematic opening. Dark Samus is back and causing more havoc and corruption then ever. The game then takes you behind the visor of bounty hunter, Samus Aran in her familiar space ship, and soon enough it leads you through a tutorial level of sorts, although it's well integrated as part of the story.

The game's learning curve is extremely well done. By the end of the first area, you'll be completely comfortable with all the controls. This first area has two boss fights. The first one is with the colossal arch-rival Ridley. He ambushes you and you both fall through a very long tunnel. Your aerial distance with the ground is shown at the top of the screen and you must defeat Ridley before you reach the bottom. This time Samus isn't the only bounty hunter. Three other hunters are put up with the same task as you are. They act as friends and protect you and help you several times. These new bounty hunters are Rundas, Gandrayda, and Ghor. These three hunters each have a special ability. Rundas is able to ride on ice in mid-air and summon ice attacks, Gandrayda is able to turn shapeshift to appear as someone else, and Ghor is just a massive powerhouse. These three aren't playable characters but take a key role in the story.

This all seems a bit different than the other two Metroid Prime games. They both put you on an isolated planet and immerse you into a world that's fairly eerie. Metroid Prime 3 starts off differently but still stays true to the series. After the first area, you are sent to a planet where you must stop corruption from a large space object called a Leviathon that crashed into this planet. Your mission as Samus is to stop this corruption and learn the secrets behind it all. The plot is very well done and also fairly straightforward with some mild twists here and there.

The controls are one of the key points of this game. Your Wii remote acts as Samus' arm cannon. All you do is point and look around. You move by using the nunchuk control stick and you fire with the A button. The B button allows you to jump, the Z button on the nunchuk allow you to lock on to targets, and the C button lets you turn into the morph ball. Once you obtain the grapple hook, you are able to flick the nunchuk and use it to rip enemies shields off, break certain objects, and swing from certain areas. This is quite useful and is also used for puzzle solving as well.

  As you progress, you gain the ability to go into Hyper mode. Byu holding the plus (+) button on the Wii remote, you enter this state which allows you to deal heavy damage to enemies, but at a price. It requires a full tank of health to activate but how much of this tank you use is up to how much "Phazon" you fire.

Metroid games in general are noted for their epic and difficult boss fights. Metroid Prime 3 is no exception. The only difference is that there is a lot more boss fights (some of them are mini bosses). You'll fight giant monsters and creatures that aren't all about blasting away at them. They require you to think about what to do and how to go about doing it.

The audio part of this game is on-par with the rest of fabulous quality of this game. Some great music immerses you into the worlds you're wandering through and some more upbeat tunes are played when in combat with a room of enemies or a boss of some sort. The sounds like shooting or grapple beam use sound as it should, which is futuristic and sci-fi'ish. It's very well done.

After you have completed the game, you are rewarded with the ability to replay the game but on a new difficulty setting: Hyper mode. Obviously this mode is much more difficult which means enemies are stronger, take longer to kill, and hyper mode itself must be used much more often then in the other two difficulty settings. Expect to die a lot more in this setting and have a harder time taking care of simple enemies.

During the course of the adventure, you are awarded tokens for completing special events or tasks. This is similar to Microsoft's "achievement system". There are 4 different types of tokens and each are earned differently. One type of token can be earned by defeating boss monsters (mini bosses included) on different difficulty settings. So if you beat the game once on, say, normal difficulty, you cannot earn this type of token anymore. You must switch to hard or hyper mode. The second type of token is awarded for clearing special events. These vary and are hard to explain. You can also get this type of token by scanning lore across the worlds. The third type of token is earned by scanning items and enemies. The fourth type of token is earned by receiving it from friends via Wiiconnect24. You can also send "friend vouchers" as they are called to friends and when they reach your friends system, they are converted in tokens. These tokens can be used to purchase extra content such as artwork, music, and special in-game tools like the screen shot taker. This allows you to take screen shots during the game by simply pressing the up button the D-pad. These get posted onto your Wii message board and you can then send these to friends and share epic moments you had.

Visuals in Metroid Prime 3 are incredible. Textures are smooth and well done, the frame rate never dips, and the art style of this game is unbelievable. The main improvement though from the other two Metroid Primes, on a technical level, is the lighting and bloom effect. Metroid Prime 3 looks great but it's not as big a difference that it could be compared to the first two Metroid Prime games.

Also, a major problem is the door loading. Metroid Prime games are known to not have any loading screens. The first two Metroid Primes disguised their loading screens with doors. When you shoot doors to open them, it takes a moment to load the next area and it was never a major problem as it went quick and about 95% of the time was never noticeable. Unfortunately Metroid Prime 3 has some bad door loading times. It can take up to 10 seconds for a door to open. This is especially annoying when being shot at so you can't always make a quick escape. This game does have loading screens although they don't say "Loading" or show any progress bar. Instead it shows a short clip of, for example, your ship entering into a planets atmosphere. These disguised load screens are really no problem unlike the door loading times.

There's a lot to see in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. It might be familiar to some but it really isn't a problem. Overall, Metroid Prime 3 is a great game with lots of action, ingenious puzzles, and a great story and cinematic scenes to boot.