Those crazy shooting stylus games...
Thanks to the touch screen, the DS has the potential to offer mouse-and-keyboard quality control setups. This is great news for fans of FPSers and strategy games - genres that traditionally require much more precise control than a conventional controller could ever offer.
The bad news is that with one hand tied up with using the touch screen to look and aim, there are only a limited number of physical buttons a developer has to work with to cover the vast array of other commands we demanding modern gamers expect from our FPS games. This being somewhere in the realm of impossible to achieve, DS FPS games are, by default, going to suffer from a lack of complexity. Not that this is the only weakness to be found with Metroid Prime: Hunters, but getting that out of the way early gives you an idea where this review is heading.
Doom never had morph balls... it just had everything else.
So, all the clichés (sorry -
traditions) we’ve come to expect, and apparently love in Metroid have made a return. There’s the morph ball, complete with psuedo-2D platforming sections where you have to bomb-blast yourself to higher ledges, only to slip off the other end of said platform and roll back to the start thanks to the fiddly D-pad control. There’s two visor-modes. One you use for shooting the brain-dead AI enemies, and the other you need to turn on to read computer terminals, and activate buttons. Apparently without her helmet, Samus is illiterate and can’t muster the physical strength to flick a switch, an interesting character development twist that I’m sure no one saw coming.
Then there’s the old time favourite trick of having passages blocking your progress until you’ve discovered the gun that allows you to shoot down the barrier. There’s nothing more fun than having to try and remember where an obscure passageway is, and having to backtrack through each and every planet/level to find it if you can’t. The reward at the end of that passageway? A weapon-key to unlock the next set of passages. Contain your excitement, folks—tedium is the new fashion.
The backtracking would almost be tolerable if the levels or enemies were interesting. Unfortunately, they’re not. The levels lack any kind of original design, and—aside from being able to return later to blast down a pretty barrier—far too linear for their own good. It’s impossible to get lost within a level in Metroid Prime: Hunters, partly because the levels are too small in size to get lost in the first place, and partly because the path to the level’s end goal is virtually highlighted with neon signs.
Keep that stylus steady, you noob.
The enemies are no better. Bosses follow highly predictable routines that most of us will already have memorized a hundred times over, basic enemies do little more than float or crawl around, and enemy hunters (supposedly the highlight of the game) don’t deviate from a simple routine of “charge straight at you firing wildly, then morph into some robotic critter and waltz around for a while”. Sure there’s the classical baddies present to make long-time series fans go all gooey, but frankly this form of fan service doesn’t do less fanatical gamers any favours.
Despite the idiotic AI, the game is challenging at times, but the challenge comes more from being killed by being overwhelmed by excessive numbers of increasingly-fast enemies, or being struck down by failing to dodge a missile that does excessive damage. Not only does this mean there’s no sense of fulfillment from completing the game, but it also means that the only time you’ll be surprised by the enemy A.I is when Samus is murdered by an enemy after you fall asleep from the monotony.
To top off the spectacular failure that is Metroid Prime: Hunter’s single player mode is a ridiculous rule that states “when Samus hath destroyed an enemy boss, a silly little timer will appear on screen, with the warning of 'systems failure'. Samus then hath that amount of time to race back through the level and fly away on her spaceship.” Not only is this gameplay gimmick an irritating and quite outdated way of adding challenge to a game, but to my great amusement, despite suffering such a catastrophe at the loss of its boss creature, when I returned to a planet-level after its “system failure“, I found it in the same state as before the big bad perished. Horrific danger indeed.
Samus scrubs up nicely, the lass does.
For all the gaping holes in the gameplay, the presentation of Metroid Prime: Hunters is as good as they come on the DS. While looking good won’t make up for the fact we’ve seen everything before, and while having atmospheric music and solid sound effects won’t relieve the boredom of actually exploring the planets and shooting the enemies, the effort that has been put into the game’s presentation does come into its own in the multiplayer.
And here’s the thing with Hunters: it’s actually well worth buying if you can go online through wi-fi or find just one friend with a DS. They don’t even need a copy of the game, as the download play on offer is good enough. The multiplayer of Metroid Prime: Hunters is fast, furious, smooth and in short, completely different to the solo-player game. While there are no computer controlled combatants on offer, and there’s only 4 players to a game (oversights to be remedied in a sequel, one hopes), the multiplayer game has the quality levels, the gameplay balance and the general atmosphere to make it the DS’s answer to the Unreal Tournaments and Quakes out in PC-world. Here, the simplicity of the game is easily overshadowed by its frenetic pace. Here, there is genuine challenge, and here some thought has clearly gone into the levels to create an interesting and engaging deathmatch experience.
Which raises the question - with such an incredible multiplayer game on offer, why did the developers not stick with what they could do well, and cut the solo-player mode out entirely? Deathmatch games often work well in single player, provided the AI is strong enough, as people will plug hours into the game as “training” for the real deal. Allowing more than 4 players per battle, and offering bots to fill out a lack in human ranks would have made for a much more attractive package than the weak, unenjoyable single player “quest” that’s been presented.
In reality, Metroid Prime: Hunters needs two scores. Two stars of shame for the single player quest, and the full Golden Five for the multiplayer. If you lack the capacity to play multiplayer DS, you’re far better advised to go with a Gamecube and either of the Metroid games on that console, as both of those provide far superior single player experiences. As a multiplayer package though, Hunters is easily the best the DS has offered thus far.
