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The Metroid Prime series continues the hunt on the Nintendo DS. Metroid Prime: Hunters has been heavily hyped ever since it was announced since it showed off the graphical prowess of the Nintendo DS. Although it saw its fair share of delays, the end result is a stunning game.
You’ll once again play as Samus Aran in Metroid Prime: Hunters. The game has Samus searching for a source of power in the cluster of planets known as the Alimbic Cluster. Before she can do this though, she’ll have to collect eight octolights. The hunts subtitle comes from the fact that there are other bounty hunters looking for these same octoliths and Samus has to outdo them to find them. She also has to beat them in battle to keep them since losing a fight means losing a hard-earned octolith, although you can later regain it by beating the other bounty hunter.
The singleplayer portion of Hunters is quite hefty. As you progress through the game’s many environments, you’ll unlock different beams including fire and ice. The game then lets you use these new beams to go back to previous areas and get into previously inaccessible locations. You’ll also have to use bombs to unlock some areas and use the morph ball to get into (or out of) tight spots. However, going through the game you may find that too much was stripped in the singleplayer portion. The puzzles aren’t particularly difficult and the level design can’t quite match the previous games. Thankfully, the gameplay mechanics are solid enough to put that worry to ease. The boss fights are quite interesting, but more so are the fights against the other bounty hunters.
Hunters makes great use of the touch pad on the Nintendo DS. The game lets you aim via the touch pad, shoot with the shoulder buttons and move around with the D pad. Although not initially intuitive, once you get some practice this setup is actually superior to just using the D pad and face buttons, although that option is available if you want. The touch pad lets Hunters recreate the sense of speed and urgency that PC shooters have much better than console titles. In addition to aiming, the touch pad lets you switch scan visors, morph into a ball and switch weapons. Although you rarely may accidentally hit the wrong option at times, it won’t want to make you switch control schemes.
The multiplayer portion of the game is possibly even better than the singleplayer portion, which is a shocker after Metroid Prime 2’s lackluster multiplayer mode. The game supports up to four players (even with one game card) offline and online. The multiplayer modes include prime hunter, last man standing, capture the octolith, and deathmatch, although only the last one is available for single-card gaming. Most are fairly straightforward as you can tell from the titles. In prime hunter, one player is selected to be the prime hunter and has to remain that hunter for the longest period of time, thus surviving the attacks from the other bounty hunters. You’ll want to unlock the additional bounty hunters since they have different abilities and tricks than Samus does. If you want to try multiplayer without other people, the game lets you add bots to play against and you can even fight against bots and friends. Online play works flawlessly and the game ranks you on kills and played matches and keeps track of a few other things like favorite weapon.
Visually, the game takes obvious cues from the Gamecube Metroid Prime series and manages to capture the art style of those games on significantly less advanced hardware. The game often tosses you in fairly large rooms and the DS engine manages to pull this off quite well. The character models, particularly the bosses and other bounty hunters, are excellent, all the way to the fluid animation. The game uses dual screens to produce cutscenes that pan across both screens, or sometimes show the same scene from two different angles.
In terms of audio, it’s hard to complain with the audio here. The background music sounds just like it did in the Metroid Prime games with the occasional nod to the classic Metroid titles. The sound effects are top-notch and match the visuals very well.
Metroid Prime: Hunters is excellent and shows that FPS can be well done on portables. If you were a fan of the Metroid Prime games or just looking for a solid FPS, Metroid Prime: Hunters is what you’re looking for. -- Jose Liz, PGNx Media
---- Aug 29, 2006
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