It’s been some time coming but Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is the first Wii title to date to completely nail a First Person Shooter control scheme around the Wii remote. Early games like Red Steel were overly clunky, while the likes of Medal of Honor fared little better. Here however, moving, aiming and turning are made completely effortless. The pointer movement is smooth and precise allowing for a level of accuracy and speed Red Steel could only dream about. Turning and looking around is wonderfully fluid too, offering a far less restrictive alternative to the tight ‘bounding boxes’ of earlier Wii FPSes. The Wii remote is also used to pull open and twist switches thanks to the inbuilt motion sensor making dull button pressing a thing of the past.
The motion-sensing abilities of the nunchuck are also used to their fullest here too thanks to Samus’ grapple beam. Despite the free-look aiming the Wii remote provides, Corruption still allows you to lock-on to enemies by squeezing the Z trigger giving the whole control scheme a very familiar feel. From here you can flick the nunchuck to grab onto certain things that are highlighted with the grapple icon. Whether it’s a sheet of metal blocking the way or an enemy shield protecting it from your beam attacks, a flick of the nunchuck followed by a sharp tug back will remove the offending item. Jump and shoot can be assigned to either A or B button, depending on personal taste while shooting missiles via down on the d-pad is more comfortable than it sounds. Unlike the previous Prime games, there’s no beam switching here but they instead stack on top of one another like Super Metroid. Scanning returns along with a couple of other visor modes that are all easily activated by holding the minus button and flicking the remote in one of the three directions.
Using the grapple beam is essential for dealing with enemy shields.
One of these ‘other’ visor modes is one that lets you interact with Samus’ ship. It plays quite an active role throughout Corruption, initially just for offering air support during battles in some of the larger, more open environments, but later for puzzle solving. Whether its simply using its firepower to destroy something or its grappling hook to lift up large, heavy objects blocking the way, its nice to see it more involved in the game. Of course, Samus’ ship is also used for traveling. You see, Corruption actually takes place on several planets and locations, each with a handful of landing zones that conveniently reduce the amount of backtracking you will do. In Metroid Prime and Echoes you often had to go through an entire environment, sometimes two, in order to get to where you need to go next. With the ship traveling system and multiple landing zones in place here you’re never more than a few minutes from where you need to be.
The subtitle 'Corruption' stems from how Samus is corrupted by phazon during an attack by Dark Samus in the opening sections of the game. When Samus regains consciousness you discover you have been fitted with a new suit that not only controls your phazon corruption levels, but also allows you to use it as a weapon by going into 'Hyper Mode'. While activated you have a limited period of time to deal out as much phazon-based damage as you can. Its use can make certain sections easier than perhaps they should be but it does come at the expense of an ever draining health bar so balancing its use is essential, especially when coming up against fellow phazon-corrupted enemies.
With the GameCube iterations, the gameplay formula found in past Metroid games made an excellent translation into 3D, retaining everything that made the series one of Nintendo’s most respected. As well as providing you with a wealth of gadgets and weaponry to upgrade your suit with (we could go into detail here but would rather you just discover them for yourselves), Corruption once again tosses players into a massive world that is constructed in such a way that what at first seems overwhelming and confusing soon becomes a polished world that is streamed together with detail and care. With rarely an empty room to be found in the whole game, nothing is wasted. Whether it’s an item, a battle or a puzzle, there’s very little filler when it comes to Corruption’s design.
Graphically the game is much improved, sharper and cleaner, with a better draw distance. The artists have really gone to town on the aesthetics and the environments are soaked in intricate detail, be it wall decoration, plant life, insects, or even the subtle bloom lighting effects found here and there. Temples and bridges are weathered and crawling with vines, and some of the designs (such as the pulsing lights on the walls or the strange alien geometric patterns) are superb, really drawing the player into the world around them. Simple tunnels are superbly decorated with plant life and vegetation, open areas are full of large statues and gigantic alien structures.
Samus is never far away from a suit upgrade....
In fact, you would be hard pushed to find any game that looks this ‘alien’ such is the level of imagination and creativity that has been ploughed into Corruption’s game world. Most noticeable of this is when you’ll often activate a simple morph ball switch in a seemingly spare room only for the floor to open up, walls to fold in half and gigantic alien structures to unravel and form in front of your very eyes. It’s often like watching the Transformers movie the way some of these buildings reshape themselves after your interaction. Given the lack of power in the Wii compared to its fellow next-gen counterparts, it is simply a joy just wandering around just admiring how smooth and rounded everything is compared to the square, box shaped environments found in other Wii first person games. Rarely do you get a straight edge, everything offset at different angles which really make a difference and help set it above the rest in terms of art design and attempt to keep it on terms visually with games on other consoles.
Just as its predecessors did, Corruption gives the player some degree of freedom to decide how much they wish to pursue the storyline by making texts optional reading (only things that show as red in your scan visor are essential for progression). That said, Corruption is a more cinematic experience than either of the Prime games as there are far more cinematic cutscenes as well as voice acted segments for the first time in a Metroid game. The vocal work is merely passable and the camera direction of the cutscenes isn’t going to win any awards, but on the plus side the cutscenes still aren't anywhere near as frequent as in other games of this genre and rarely interrupt the game without reason.
Typically the soundtrack in Corruption is nothing short of stellar. From the moment the title music kicks in your ears are in for a treat. Mixing simple tunes that will get stuck in your head, intense battle themes and some of the most atmospheric scores you could hope for Retro have yet again produced a soundtrack close to perfection, especially as it throws in a track or two that Super Metroid veterans should instantly recognize. Weaponry sounds are powerful and appropriate, and shrieks from the planet’s local inhabitants are perfectly startling as there is nothing quite like the terrifying sound of a Metroid catching sight of you. Like most big name Wii games, the game supports Dolby Pro Logic II, so everything can be heard in rich surround sound if you’re suitably equipped.
All switch pulling is done via the Wii remote motion sensors.
In comparison to the previous Metroid Prime games there are a couple of areas in which it falls short on. Most glaringly are the standard of the boss encounters which are arguably the least impressive of the series. That’s not to say they are bad, far from it, but there really isn’t one that comes close to the best of what Metroid Prime 2 had to offer. Although Echoes wasn’t quite received in the same way as the original, there’s little argument that it contained the best boss battles. The giant moth ‘Chykka’, the ingenious morph ball-based ‘Spider Guardian’ battle and the screen filling ‘Quadraxis’ encounter set a standard that Corruption doesn’t quite meet.
Depending on what type of player you are will decide how much Corruption’s enforced linearity effects your enjoyment of the game. For those who have always found Metroid games to be a little overwhelming and lacking in direction will appreciate the increased amount of hints and map directions you’re given. On the flip side, for those who revel in not knowing anything and exploring things themselves may find Corruption’s ‘hand-holding’ disappointing. It’s not quite as strictly linear as say Metroid Fusion but it would have been nice to have been given the option to play without any hints whatsoever to keep the hardcore players happy. Strangely there’s an option to turn off hints in the options menu, but it seems to only reduce them rather than remove them completely.
Lets not end on a downer, though; this game is too good to let a couple of disappointing aspects prevent it from being an absolute must own game for the Wii. With its wonderful control, consistently superb level design, rewarding puzzles and gorgeous graphics it’s by far and away the best original Wii release since Zelda. At around 15-20 hours, its length is up there with the previous games (providing you keep away from the easiest setting which is stupidly easy, you have been warned), plus the ‘achievement’ style award system for unlocking bonus content means many will feel the need to return once Samus has finished her quest. With this rich, absorbing and rewarding world at our fingertips it’s game like Metroid Prime 3: Corruption that provide a fine example of why we play games in the first place.
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