Metroid Prime: Hunters – Second Play: Completed Single Player

The purple anesteel heels of his armor clicked audibly across the gleaming metal floor as he paced the slightly askew corridor, but he didn’t care. It didn’t much matter if she made his ambush anyway, God, after all, was on his side. Voxus’s mind surged alternately with confidence and rage. What right did Samus have to claim the Octoliths for her own? What breed of manifest destiny did she recite each night before sleep? He decided after some additional pacing that he didn’t much care about this either. It was irrelevant; justice would be served here, in the corridors of the Celestial Archives.

Meanwhile, Samus was eyeing a particularly large gap in the twisted remains of an external corridor. The computer had mentioned a hull breach in this section of the archives but this was madness. Only a few twisted pieces of metal and scaffolding remained between her boots and the vertigo-inducing spin of the Alimbic star field. She grimaced painfully, thinking about the return trip: alarms braying, rooms filled with hunters, and the clock slowly clicking down toward doom. It was going to be an interesting day.

Metroid Prime: Hunters has managed to do something that no other game has been able to for quite a while . . . get me to set down Guitar Hero. The adventure mode has remained totally engrossing despite several issues I’ve had. Also, the hand-numbing control scheme has also become easier to tolerate as I’ve progressed through the ten hour single player campaign. I’ve even managed a three hour session on one occasion.

The main issue I have with the game is the repeating content. It didn’t work with Halo 1 and oddly enough, it still doesn’t work here. Metroid Prime: Hunters has three bosses, two of which are repeated incessantly with steadily increasing difficulty. Certain corridors and rooms also show up a bit too often especially in the data sections of the Celestial Archive. Upon careful inspection, I even found a blank looking texture where the doors will appear when the room or corridor is used in a different configuration.

Also, the random encounters I’ve experienced often reset once I cross a loading barrier. This has lead to a situation several times, where I’ve passed a loading screen into an ambush, and gotten my bearings mixed up in the process of defeating my rival bounty hunter. I then proceeded to accidentally walk right back the way I came, only to find myself in the midst of another ambush (all the exit doors lock when you’re in an ambush). Frame-rate slow downs have also been rearing their ugly heads during certain multiple assailant ambushes. Overall, it’s a very frustrating experience which can only be resolved by carefully remembering the way you came in.

This leads me to another important point. Metroid Prime is a game of exploration and memorization. It does not function in the way a traditional PC FPS does, where you progress linearly from point A to point B. In this game I found myself memorizing various routes through each level. Escape routes are crucial because once I defeated a boss character, security protocols are activated, and I have to book it back to my ship. This is one of the main reasons I find Metroid games to be so addictive. This approach to level design leads to a much more RPG-like feel, rather than a more traditional gun-on-rails type of gameplay.

Aside from the repeating elements, the level design continues to rock my world. Poetically applied transparency effects are used to great effect throughout the game to create interesting corridors and machinery that would make Doom 3 blush. Sprite based partial effects waft through the hot lava areas. NST has pulled off an incredibly cohesive world at least rivaling that of the GameCube Metroid titles, and perhaps surpassing them in some areas. My favorite stages are the ones with severe structural damage, an effect that must have required careful tuning of the polygon counts to achieve the desired effect on such limited hardware.

Despite all the beauty and genius floating around in this title, I’ve had another issue with it. Metroid titles have traditionally been about gaining extraordinarily diverse new abilities. There have been extra jump boots, electric grappling hooks, amazing morph ball bombs, dash attacks that smash walls, missile upgrades, and even add-ons to Samus’s standard armor to allow her to move through lava or poison. Absolutely none of these kinds of innovative RPG-like elements have made it into Metroid Prime: Hunters. I found six alternate weapons for Samus’s suit and that’s it. This left certain sections of the game feeling a little too much like Doom 2’s annoying find red key for red door type of gameplay.

The endgame of Metroid Prime: Hunters is a lot of fun. The final boss character is well designed and has many alternate forms. The last level is also chock full of astonishing architecture. I do feel a bit of ambiguity about the whole game, which is a good thing. Samus seems determined to score all the Alimbic artifacts for herself, despite the constant warnings she receives from ghost-like Alimbic forms. She has no real betterment of humanity in mind here. This game isn’t about saving the universe; it’s more about an ordinary mission in the life of Samus Aran.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to access the online multiplayer yet on Metroid Prime: Hunters thanks to plenty of network issues. Hopefully, this is an issue related the recent launch of several new Nintendo online titles and will be worked out soon. Tune into my next rating to find out how well the online and offline multiplayer modes play.