Metroid Prime 3: Corruption Review - Wii

9

Gameplay: 10
Graphics: 9
Audio: 8
Innovation: 7

Introduction

Creating a new console Metroid game to follow up the magnificent Super Metroid was a huge challenge, but somehow first-time developers Retro Studios pulled it off. A grandiose epic, Metroid Prime created a genre – the first-person adventure – and effortlessly brought an old-school classic into the twenty-first century. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes brought more of the classic abilities to the table and created a creepier, more alien landscape, but the addition of a light world/dark world dynamic brought the issue of backtracking to a head. And now, here comes the third and final game in the Metroid Prime saga, Corruption, but does it end with a bang or a whimper?

Gameplay

Let’s start with the story. In Metroid Prime, Samus encounters a mutagenic substance known as Phazon on the planet Tallon IV. As she infiltrates the space pirate mines that are harvesting the Phazon, she eventually encounters the titular character in a final face off, who steals her suit before self-destructing. In the second game, Metroid Prime has merged with the stolen suit to form Samus’ doppelganger, Dark Samus, who you face off against several times throughout the game. In Corruption, Samus arrives at a Galactic Federation home base, but is soon under attack from space pirates under the direction of a reformed Dark Samus, whose insatiable appetite for Phazon has lead to her trying to corrupt entire planets by launching huge Phazon ‘Leviathans’ into them. Making matters worse is that the galaxy’s defense system – a network of ‘Aurora Units’ – has now been corrupted by a virus and is vulnerable to attack. It’s a pretty epic saga, and the game ties up the story very well.

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption smoothly transfers the gameplay of the first two Gamecube titles to the Wii. The most notable change, and one that should be obvious as soon as you even link the words ‘Wii’ and ‘game’ in a sentence, is that the controls have had to be adapted for the brand new setup. The key feature is, of course, the IR control, which now allows pixelish perfect accuracy for all your shooting needs. You shoot with A, jump with B, change visors with the ‘-‘ button and enter Hyper Mode (more on that later) with the ‘+’ key. Naturally, you’ll need the nunchuk for movement, so that C button can be used to enter Samus’ patented morph ball, and the Z button lets you lock onto enemies or switches or what have you.

Thankfully, Retro understood that saw that some variation was needed with the various schemes, and so allowed you to fiddle with some aspects of the controls. For instance, you may find it perfectly comfortable to jump with the A button and shoot with the B trigger, but for me, honed on both the ‘A shoot/B jump’ configuration of the Gamecube days and the years of Mario Party A button mashing, I found the opposite to suit me better. You can also flip the operation of the ‘-‘ and ‘+’ keys, (continued next page)