Metroid Prime 3: Corruption review

Five years after Samus made her 3D debut in Metroid Prime she returns to complete the trilogy in Metroid Prime 3: Corruptions, this time on the Wii.

Due to the GameCube pretty much being dead and buried before the Prime trilogy could be completed, Corruption was released on it's successor the Wii which meant new graphics, new sound and a whole new control scheme.

Six months after the end of Echoes Samus is called to the Federation for a meeting with the other bounty hunters first encountered in Metroid Prime Hunters. Here they are given orders to clear a virus from super computers called Aurora units. Obviously with this being Metroid it's easier said then done and when the hunters land on the planet Norion they learn that a Phazon asteroid will soon be colliding with the planet. Before they can do anything about it they are attacked by Dark Samus and knocked unconscious, well, all but Samus who just manages to activate the security defenses before the asteroid hits.

Cut to one month later with Samus regaining consciousness and finding that after the Phazon based attack by Dark Samus she has now been corrupted with Phazon which makes for an important aspect of the game as you have to control the Phazon that has corrupted Samus.

Controlling the Phazon is key to the game but I'll come back to that later.

What I'm going to get out of the way first is the graphics and sound. As per usual the sound is great with remixed and revised music from the first Prime game and the graphics are great to look at. Though the graphics did at the time push the capabilities of the Wii, the console isn't that much more powerful than the GameCube so whilst the graphics do look great there isn't really a vast difference between the Cube Prime games and this game.

Next, the controls. With Corruption being released on the Wii the by now familiar feel of the Cube pad has been replaced with the Wii remote and nunchuk which adds new experiences to the trilogy. First of all is the ability to use Samus's ship to do more than just save in. You can now enter codes into a keypad and activate the thrusters to fly between planets. Whilst it would have been great to take full control of the ship to fly around it is still a nice touch. Sections of the game also require you to move door controls which you can do by using pulling, twisting and pushing motions to activate the doors.

One small niggly thing that I found with the controls was when changing between visors you have to hold down a button to bring up the visor select screen and then flick the remote to select which one you require. It is simple enough but it would have been better to keep it the same as the first two games and use the d-pad on the remote which is redundant bar pressing down to fire missiles. Apart from that the controls are fine and easy to use.

Quickly touching on the visors, there are no new visors this time round with there also only being three available which are the command visor, the scan visor and the return of the X-Ray visor from the first Prime game. The scan visor has the new option of scanning certain points that will call for your ship where it will either drop missiles to destroy stuff or pick up and move certain items.

There is also a change to the beams where as in the first two Prime games you could select from four beams, now the beams are stacked like back in Super Metroid. Finally, a change has been made with the loss of Samus's weapons at the beginning of the game where she in fact does not lose the weapons at all. This time round Samus starts off with basic weapons and has to collect upgrades through out the game to be strong enough to destroy each of the bosses.

Another use of Samus's ship is the ability to fly between not only different planets but also different sections of the planet that you are currently on. This eliminates a lot of walking and backtracking and makes reaching places a lot easier. That's not to say that walking and back tracking has completely disappeared, it just means that you won't have to walk through the same spot god knows how many times.

So, going back to the Phazon that has corrupted Samus. This is an integral part of the game as it's a function that you use to become temporaryily invincible and boosts your attack to allow Samus to easily take out tougher enemies. This unfortunately does come with a price in that first of all to activate the hypermode an energy tank has to be injected meaning that for the time you are in hypermode your energy is quickly falling. The second catch is that if you don't exit or fire the phazon quick enough Samus will become corrupted and will die instantly. Therefore, at the beginning of the game especially, you have to be wise as to when best use the hypermode and be quick enough to exit before death occurs.

Overall with all the new additions of hyper mode, summoning Samus's ship, the extra waves and waves of enemies and the use of the Wii remote and nunchuk, Corruption feels like a new game instead of just feeling like the third game in a series. Bar the difficulty level being a lot easier than the previous games, Corruption is a worthy game to close the Prime trilogy and like the frist two games should definitely be in your collection.

Final score 8.5/10