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Reviews » Metroid Prime Hunters [DS]

Metroid Prime Hunters is just about the oldest DS game out there. It's so old that it was the demo everyone got with their original DS. It was pushed back no less than 34 times, but the guys at Nintendo said it was for good reasons, they were adding stuff, making it as good of a game as they could possibly make.

Here we are years later and while I agree the end result is a very good game, it seems they forgot to make it a Metroid game.

Let me explain.

Metroid is a series where over the past couple years we've had to come to terms with the fact that side-scrolling exploration shooters are on their way out, and that it's time for innovation or death. While the wildly successful GBA Castlevania games, Metroid Fusion and Metroid Zero Mission showed that this wasn't as true as Nintendo would have liked us to believe, Metroid made the transition to FPS amazingly well. So much so that Metroid Prime ended up being my second favorite Gamecube game, second only to Wind Waker. So what went wrong when the DS was brought into the equation?

Well, let's take into consideration the two very different Metroid games released so far for the DS: Metroid Prime Pinball and Metroid Prime Hunters. One of these games has familiar locales and remixes of classic Metroid background music. One has traditional Metroid features like weapon upgrades, and has you going from planet to planet to collect missiles and power bombs and the like. One has familiar Metroid critters like Space Pirates and actual Metroids, and has you encountering a wide variety of huge bosses. The surprise catch is that this game is Metroid Prime Pinball, not Hunters, and Hunters features none of these things, or has them so far changed that they're no longer recognizable.

So if those are all the things Metroid Prime Hunters lacks, then what does it have? If you've skipped this whole "DS" thing, and have thus never been exposed to MPH, here's the deal. Ages ago, Nintendo tasked the in-house dev team at Nintendo of America ( "Nintendo Software Technology", for those who care ) with creating a new flagship FPS title for the DS using the Metroid license. The first time we saw the game was the "First Hunt" demo that shipped with the DS, and from that short little first look, it was plain to see that this title would be different. The control scheme was the most obvious change, the demo featured three base control schemes, two of which had different modes for left or right-handed users.

These were later pared down to two different modes, stylus mode and dual mode. In stylus mode, movement is controlled on the dpad, shooting with the L-button, and the stylus effectively works like mouselook, with tapping acting as jumping. Dual mode moves mouselook over to A/B/X/Y and jump to the R-button, so good luck doing a quick 180 in Dual mode. Everyone I've talked to has had just about the same experience with these weird control schemes: they seem very hard to get used to. It's easy enough to play with, but it still feels awkward for a very long time. However, after time, you really can't imagine playing the game any other way, and it feels incredibly natural.

So that's how it's played, how about the actual content? Metroid Prime Hunters is the first game to diverge from the standard Metroid blueprint of "get stuck on a planet, collect your weapons, kill some space pirates, kill some metroids, win the game". In MPH Samus is doing what she apparently does for her day job. In-between destroying planets and furthering her campaign of metroid xenocide, Samus is a bounty hunter. So the story in MPH is that there's an ancient and long-extinct race out there known as the Alimbics. They ruled over a portion of a solar system ages ago known as the Alimbic Cluster, which has laid dormant for thousands upon thousands of years. But then, very recently, a telepathic message was sent from the Alimbic Cluster, stating "The secret to ultimate power lies in the Alimbic Cluster".

This message has drawn a large number of Bounty Hunters and other undesirables to the cluster, either looking for the ultimate power for themselves, or showing up just to kill some of the other hunters to prove that they're the baddest bad-ass in the galaxy. Samus was sent on order from the Galactic Federation, to sort out what exactly is going on in the Alimbic Cluster and that's where the game begins.

Rather than just dumping you right on a planet, you - for the first time - start off in your ship-of-the-week with a map of the presently-known locations of planets in the Alimbic Cluster. You locate the first planet, The Celestial Archives (which isn't really a planet, it's a space station, but whatever), and you get to land and take a look around. Thus begins a cycle you'll repeat eight times. Land, look around, find three shield keys to get three Alimbic Artifacts, use the Alimbic artifacts to open the Stronghold Portal, fight a boss, escape. Along the way you might find weapons, solve puzzles, or fight enemy hunters. But when it comes right down to it, Metroid has been reduced to a Doom-style key hunt. Sure, it looks like Metroid, but it doesn't feel like Metroid anymore.

As you're going through these different planets, four in total, you only ever really encounter six or so different base enemies. There are a couple classic critters, zoomers, war wasps and shriekbats. The main enemies you'll come across are assorted variations of Psycho Bits, Cretaphids and Turrets. Psycho Bits and Cretaphids are two robotic defenses found throughout the Alimbic Cluster. The difference between the two is that Psycho Bits are flying, while Cretaphids roll around. Both are mass produced, and originate from spawning locations in whatever room you find them in. If you don't destroy the source, they'll just keep coming out of the walls or floor. NST got a lot of mileage out of these two robots, they've got four versions of each of them, each one just a palette swap with a different elemental weapon.

The super-generic enemies are a major distraction during the game. It makes every level feel even more the same. The same thing happened with Metroid Prime Echoes, everywhere you went it was Ing-this and Ing-that, sometimes DARK-whatever or LIGHT-whatever. Metroid Prime did this right. Whenever you went to some new area, you'd have a whole set of new ice-themed critters or fire-themed guys, or a whole new set of space pirates to fight. In Hunters they did a decent job developing different-enough environments, but didnt follow through and differentiate their enemies enough.

Apart from critters, there's also hunters. There's six of them in the game, each equipped with a different primary weapon and a specialized secondary mode to replace Samus's morphball. There's also Alimbic Guardians, bipedal hunter-like defenses that tend to crawl out of the woodwork after you've beaten a boss. . . Which brings me to the bosses. There's two of them. Two. And they get palette-swapped and slighty altered into eight different versions. As far as Metroid bosses go, they're woefully uninspired. Both have two forms, and are only vulnerable during their second form. As you progress and grow more and more powerful, they gain mobility and different attack patterns, but it's all just the same two bosses.

The weapons you get in the game all feel super super generic. There's seven of them apart from power beam and missiles, and they all feel more like FPS weapons than Metroid weapons. There's a bouncy-beam ice weapon, two grenade launchers (one of which is fire-elemental), a thing that reminds me of Dark Forces repeaters, a straight-on clone of Quake's lightning-gun and a plain little sniper-rifle. What point does a sniper rifle have in Metroid? Seriously.

Now, despite these problems of repetition and lack of inspiration, the game still manages to be fun, it just isn't an incredibly Metroid-y kind of fun. It's fun and all, and I really enjoyed playing through the single player campaign, but I just kept thinking "Wow, it sure would be neat if I could get some standard Metroid upgrades, like space jump or power bombs or something. Hell, I'd even settle for super missiles, but no, you're not giving that to me." I don't really even feel like I was cheated out of a game, I just feel like this B-game could have been a Triple-A-game truly worthy of the Metroid name, had they just tried to include all the stuff that makes Metroid really Metroid.

So let's discuss what they supposedly spent most of their time working on for Metroid Prime Hunters, and what caused the game to be delayed the last time. Multiplayer. MPH has a wide variety of multiplayer options, First, the broad categories. Single-Card play works like most other Single-Card multiplayer modes, it's stripped down to straight deathmatch with only samus as an available character, with a short list of selectable levels. I haven't spent a lot of time in this mode.

For both multi-card and WFC multiplayer, there's a wide range of play modes. For each mode you'll first need to pick your player. There are two differences between hunters, first is affinity weapon. This only really matters if affinity weapons are turned on. Affinity weapons are an added bonus type of attack that's added when a certain hunter uses a certain weapon. Samus gets heat-seeking missiles, Sylux's shock coil leeches health from the target. Kanden's volt driver distorts the target's vision temporarily.

Sadly, my experiences with WFC pick-up games have been incredibly underwhelming. Unlike Tetris DS or Mario Kart, I've had a very hard time filling a 4-player pickup-game over WFC. Most of the time it'll take 3-5 minutes to find four players, then two will drop leaving me to go up against some idiot who's going to spend the entire time whoring out Sylux's shock coil while none of the stuff I use makes a dent whatsoever. You're also locked into DM here, it seems you can only start specific modes like capture the flag, king of the hill or team DM if you're doing a friends match or non-WFC multiplayer.

Friend-based multiplayer is slightly better. You get a game browser, can configure a wide variety of multiplayer options again, get voice chat, and can do a whole lot of great stuff. There's also a "Rivals Radar" where you can pick people to put on your very own shitlist, so if you want to hold some personal vendettas you can. Unfortunately, this only really works if you've got a bunch of friends playing the game, and sadly I don't. This leaves me with a very depressing multiplayer component. Had Nintendo made a server browser like . . oh . . every other FPS ever, with more available options to set and gameplay modes for non-friend games, it could have been great. But as-is it's just a huge disappointing mess.

Over the time playing MPH (and the time in-between playing MPH, which was largely taken up by playing Tetris DS) I've thought way too much about if the game was made better or worse by using the Metroid license. On one hand, the game really is good, and I don't think it would have gotten anywhere near the same level of exposure if it was based off a new license. The Metroid license also probably helps people get over the abnormally large learning curve for a first-party Nintendo game. I'm not sure I would have taken the time to get past that initial lengthy period where moving around just didn't feel fluid enough, and was even painful at times. But on the other hand, if you're going to make a Metroid game, you have some very dedicated fans who tend to have very specific views about what makes a Metroid game. If you don't include those things, it's disappointing. Retro Studios knew this, so when they made the switch from sidescroller to fps, they made sure to include all the other bits that make a game Metroid. With Hunters, NST kept the Metroid Prime look, but the change they made was to rip out all the gameplay aspects that make it Metroid. If you're going to take out what makes a game Metroid, then why use the license anymore?

I'm not really sure, but the end result was good, it just wasn't as amazing as I think it could have been.

Screenshots © Nintendo

Metroid Prime Hunters - DS

Presentation

Everything you've come to expect from a Metroid FPS. It's pretty, slick, great music, just not as varied as it could have been.

Gameplay

More Doom than Metroid, but still an overall enjoyable experience.

Replayability

Really depends on if you can build up a friends list of active players. Without it, multiplayer is repetitive and uninteresting.

Value

Again, depends on if you get a strong friends list going. Without it, the single player really isn't worth $35.

Overall

A good, worthwhile game, just not as good as it could have been.