An extremely solid game.

Level design is great, combat is good, there's few bangers in the soundtrack, the graphics have this really nice blur that I love.

They focus a little bit more on the cinematic side and storytelling in this game, which can be seen in the story of course but also in the game mechanics as interaction with the motion controls.

The primary focus is in the exploration just as in the previous game.

I hope this game will be released on Switch so more people can play it.

One of the few games to really justify the Wii's motion controls outside of minigame collections. The FPS aiming with the remote is genuinely pretty good. The game has a little bit more hand holding than the previous Prime games and everything is a little more segmented in an attempt to keep navigation from being too confusing.

If there's anything in this game I don't like it's the addition of the other bounty hunters and the couple of times you're just being talked at by Galactic Federation military dudes.

the intro being a watered down halo CE knockoff put a bad taste in my mouth and made me think this was gonna suck, but honestly I loved this game. I think I like it more than fusion, although I think I like fusion's tone more (this one kind of felt like an action movie, especially whenever the federation was on screen) but this game felt more free and explorable. It did at least something with having other characters, the other hunters had pretty cool designs and it was cool to see why samus is the best. I think another reason of why this one felt more free was because of the length. It's about 9 ish hours compared to fusion's 4, and if there was 30 minutes of dialogue in fusion and 30 minutes of dialogue in corruption, it feels less suffocating in corruption. Think of it like this. You get a 20 on a test. But the test is out of 20. That's 100%. but if the test is out of 100, that's a 20%. which is a failing grade in most countries.

This one's gonna be a bit of a shorter review cause I gotta step out for a smoke and mentally prepare for Other M. Few last things I wanna quickly touch on. One, I liked the hypermode in this. It makes this one a bit harder than echoes (thank god) because the enemies have to do damage balanced around your potential immortality. But it also helps you choose when you wanna clear the room of bulletsponge enemies. It was a cool addition. I just wish less upgrades were focused on it. I'm not gonna be in it all the time, and upgrades like the electric wave when ur in hyper boost ball feels gimmicky and designed only to add another puzzle type. Goes onto my next point. Something I love about the other prime games is how once you get a hold of the controls that's all there basically is. Every action you get is an extension of your base movement. There's no buttons to press because you scan with your lock on or jump into it with your morph ball. The grapple hook is also an extension of your lock on, your super missiles are an extension of your charge beam, etc etc. This game has button prompts to get awkward fallout 3 conversation cams with npc's, levers where you gotta pull the wiimote to pull the lever (i played on primehack kbm so all of those puzzles were replaced with the button W) or something. It just kind of breaks immersion when you try to open a door and you see a huge text popup saying MOVE THE WII REMOTE TO THE RIGHT TO OPEN THIS DOOR. Speaking of wii remote, the grapple hook in this game is front and center. You grapple to pull shielded enemies' shields off, you grapple random debris, you grapple everything. It unfortunately also feels kind of tacked on and not like the rest of sammy's natural movement. You see something glow yellow or an enemy pop up with a shield and think "oh yeah." Okay, last point is the scavenger hunt. There is one in the game. But I think they finally got it right? By the time I was ready to head into the endgame, I had all of the keys but three. And this game is pretty linear, one planet to the next, so I hadn't been to these places in a while. The whole point of the scavenger hunts in these games is to encourage the player to do one last sweep/victory lap around the world picking up spare e tanks and missile expanders before they can face the final boss. But in prime 1, it was kind of redundant because I'd been to all these areas over and over before and gotten all the shit and I was only there for the keys and in prime 2 it was annoying because the game sucked and I didn't wanna play anymore (im just playing. but the prime 2 one was a SLOG I legit almost abandoned right there.)

Anyways, yeah that's about all. Thanks for reading. Sorry I was so serious this time. I've been having a lot of problems with the wife. I'll be writing serious reviews with no jokes for the time being.

EDIT: i played metroid other m for 12 minutes and got to a part where it told me to turn my wiimote sideways. there is no way to play it with keyboard sooo i guess ill have to skip that one and move onto dread oh noooo oh nooo thats awful

First Metroid Prime game I ever played. I couldn't beat this game as a child but I came back a couple of years back and I played it from start to finish.

It's a damn good game from what I can remember, I'm not sure if it is better than Metroid Prime 1, and 2 I've never played so idk. I played it with motion controls and I didn't think they were that bad, then again, motion controls never bothered me that much in general.

Fully recommend it. 10 Wii Remotes out of 5.

(Metroid Prime Trilogy version played)

100%ed

2nd best in the trilogy, overall a more linear yet still open ended experience that doesn't make as many stupid mistakes as Echoes and does a better job with the ones it still insists of containing.

The controls are understandably divisive yet still razor sharp and pleasant to use in my opinion. The use of motion for certain out-of-combat actions is interesting and not overdone however the grapple lasso does feel a bit overused both during and not during combat. Some powerups were cool but overall didn't feel organic and more forced in for the need of a lock at a certain point which's key you don't get until later.

Corruption contains a far more cinematic and involved plot than Echoes and even more so Prime, in an engaging and well-built world, that helps frame the gameplay in an interesting way. This does, however, detract from the games sense of isolation and exploration, a key component in the atmosphere of Metroid Prime. Also taking away from this isolation is a fairly demanding hint system that, whilst implemented much more organically than the first 2 games, doesn't let you figure stuff out for yourself very often.

Whilst this game is excellent and enjoy it does unsurprisingly feel a little like Metroid Prime for the 3rd time. Hopefully 4 finds some way to keep things fresher

MILD SPOILER WARNING
At the end of the game you are greeted by an annoying sight of another fetch quest that bodes poorly at first but implemented much differently, I completed it and achieved an important item without even realizing it was a path of progression later on, in addition to the fact that you only need 5 out of 9 EASILY findable keys, this fetch quest comes across much more fluidly than Prime or Echoes.
SPOILERS OVER

Side note: The load times in this game were awful, way worse than 1 and 2, some doors took about 10 seconds to open after being shot, very annoying

9/10

I FUCKING HATE MOGENAR
Mogenar is a perfect encapsulation of why Retro's boss design is consistently dogshit.
"You are not allowed to damage me now"
"Risk a repetitive stress injury or I'll heal to full"
"Fuck you, you didn't fire fast enough and now I will heal to full"
"You are not allowed to damage me now"
My wrist is in pain from trying to down this fucker on Hypermode. I have no idea how I managed this a decade ago.
Mogenar is so deliriously overtuned that Helios and Omega Ridley both went down on my first attempts meanwhile I gave up against Mogenar after my fifth failed run and resorted to save-stating to preserve my sanity. That might not sound like a lot but these bosses have way too goddamn much HP on Hypermode and I had been blasting at Mogenar for longer than I had previously been playing the game. While I've never bothered to see this be performed, I've read that in speedruns the optimal strat is to glitch skip Mogenar until the end of the game with beam upgrades, because even on lower difficulties it still is harder then all the other bosses and still takes too fucking long.

Corruption has a suite of other problems, chiefly among them that the entire rest of the game's combat loop is entirely one-note and composed purely of: "Engage Hypermode" Phazon Overload" "Auto-Vent" "Engage Hypermode".
Prime 3 is designed to be much more of an accessible high octane shooting experience than to be an exploration game, yet it lacks any of the mechanical depth to support this decision.
As it turns out, a one weapon FPS is an idiotic idea. When your combat encounters in World-1 play out identically to encounters on World-3 except now with decreased difficulty due to resource accumulation, then your combat mechanics are broken. On Veteran P3 is thoroughly mediocre. On Hypermode the game is unchanged due to the degenerate damage output of literal hypermode until m o g e n a r. I'm demoting P3 down to Other M tier. The level design between them is earily similar too. Feeling like it's just hallways over and over.
This is a rancid end to the trilogy and I'm reminded of why I started to leave it out of my Metroid marathons beyond just not wanting to deal with Wii-motes.

If Metroid Prime 2 wanted to be a harder, more story-driven game than its predecessor, while maintaining an identity of its own, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption's goal is a lot clearer. It wants to be a big, bombastic finale to the Prime series, and it probably also wants to be Halo. This is pretty clear since moment one- where every other Prime game and most games in the franchise at the time had little on-screen story and dialogue, Corruption starts with a long tutorial delivered by friendly NPCs, and then follows that up with an action intro where you meet three fellow Bounty Hunters you'll be working with. It takes little time for things to go wrong, and while the four of you manage to avoid disaster, you are all knocked out for a month by the villain of the previous game, Dark Samus. When you wake up, you find out your suit has been modified to house Phazon, the all-consuming evil matter that the trilogy revolves around, and with Samus tasked to save two different planets from destruction at the hands of Phazon, the game finally starts proper.

Except, does it really? As I said, Corruption's goals are pretty different from the other games: it's clearly trying to be a more linear and narratively focused game first, and a metroidvania second. Action with a side of exploration, not exploration with a side of action, while still keeping the Metroid spirit. This is... fine, frankly. Fusion does something similar, and I quite it like that game. And Corruption's combat is... alright! It's the same basis as the rest of the series, with the removal of beams to switch between (not such a bad thing, in my personal opinion, but the loss of hidden weapons kinda sucks, especially in a game that has you do more shooting) and the addition of Hyper Mode, which a lot of the combat relies around- you sacrifice 99 hp, and get to briefly do a whole lot more damage. Even with what I'm about to say, this is definitely the Metroid Prime game I had the most fun fighting in, though mostly because of the bosses. The problem with the core combat is that Hyper Mode quickly stops being an emergency tool that you only use when needed, and eventually becomes the only thing you'll ever be doing. One health container quickly becomes a lot less of your overall HP pool, and when enemies get spongy enough to do more damage than that in half a second, you'll be popping it on every fight, multiple times. It's just too strong of a tool- you can hammer down on a Space Pirate for 20 seconds before taking them out, all the while their friends pelt you with bullets, or you can go Hyper Mode and wipe the entire squad in half that time. Luckily bosses need to be made vulnerable before you can deal damage to them, so that isn't a problem there. In fact, I must once again commend the overall design of some of these fights- they've got the puzzle element you'd expect from the series, requiring you to figure out the right combination of actions to make the boss vulnerable, but they don't let up on a mechanical level either, asking you to execute your strategy efficiently and quickly, all the while demanding some good aiming and dodging. Great stuff.

Something worth noting is that I played on Hard and at the beginning, I thought this game was going to be a real challenge- several fights in the end of the first area got me to struggle quite a lot, which I welcomed, but the difficulty loosened up pretty quickly, with the exception of the occasional boss encounter. Something else to note is I played this game on Dolphin, using PC FPS controls. It was a great experience, but it does prevent me from commenting on the game's use of motion controls, which are a very important element of it. Perhaps I'd have enjoyed combat more if I had to physically yank enemies' items and weapons away, rather than just pressing a button to do so. A thing that I can comment on, though, is Samus' Gunship, which is very weird- a whole Visor slot is sacrificed to being able to command it, and the first upgrade it gets is the ability to bomb enemies. This is really cool in theory, but completely pointless in practice. Even among the wide open areas where you'd expect this ability to be usable (which given this is still a Metroid game, are few and far between), the ship can only be used in a few of them, to the point that I don't think I actually ever remembered to use it on an enemy once. There's even ammo expansions for the missiles as pickups but I couldn't fathom ever using them often enough for those to matter. Feels like they had the idea but then never figured out how to implement it.

Where I think Corruption really falters, though, is the level design. Again, it's not a problem to make a game less open, but this is taking the worst of both worlds. First off, progression is not only 100% linear, but spelled out to you by some NPC over comms- there's an option to turn off hints, but bafflingly that only removes the marker over the area they tell you to go to, not the actual dialogue and cutscene that points you to that area. In Prime 1/2 you could choose to go in entirely unassisted, here you'll be babied no matter what. But that might be for the best, because frankly backtracking in this game sucks. A game like Super Metroid handles its world by having side rooms spin off a central, shorter path- you may want to explore every branch of this tall room in Brinstar once you first reach it, but when you're done with that you can just go through the center room any time you pass by. It's smart- it focuses a lot of content in side areas so backtracking is quicker. Corruption does the exact opposite to an infuriating degree. I mean look at this shit, it's literally a straight line from the beginning to the end, and you'll have to go through that a few times, especially if you backtrack for collectibles. Even just on the first time through, you'll need to go back through these levels on your way out, a lot of the time. And those collectibles are worthless, a lot of the time. Ship Ammo upgrades mean basically nothing, and missiles are nearly vestigial in this game- I think just mashing attack does more damage than them, by the endgame.

It just feels bad, especially with the long load times between rooms, and the game straight-up enjoys making backtracking miserable. When you've beaten a boss, areas will be repopulated by a very annoying enemy that requires Hyper Mode to kill, and demands your attention with long-ranged, fast attacks. The second and biggest area in the game, SkyTown, also makes you go through these railways which force you into quick aiming minigames and make you restart from the beginning if you get hit- they're extremely obnoxious. The map gets pretty hard to read too, oftentimes, and that sucks because rooms are somewhat hard to distinguish at times. Going through these levels the first time is great, they're gorgeous and full of interesting stuff, but backtracking is a thankless chore, and the game still requires it at time and encourages it at others. Something it deserves praise for though is how it handles the series' traditional endgame fetch quest- previous Metroid Prime games essentially locked most of its collecting until it told you to do so, but Corruption makes the area where you'll use these collectibles available early, and gives you goodies and directions for the macguffins, encouraging the hunt to happen a lot more gradually. It's great fun and definitely the best way they've done it. Something I don't like is how many power-ups are just given to you, I think about half the E-Tanks in the game are literally or nearly literally just put in the main path for you to bump into with zero effort- bit of a shame, after Echoes' elaborate puzzles (which this game does admittedly have a few of).

The last thing to touch upon is the story, so expect spoilers for the first act of the game, and maybe vague allusions to things that happen after. That said... come on, did anyone think the hunters were going to stick around? The intro takes such effort to introduce them all as quickly and as much as it can that it's basically spelled out to you that they'll all meet grisly ends, and indeed, by the time you're knocked out and wake up, they've all been corrupted by Dark Samus, and serve as antagonists, one per area. They're all pretty cool in concept but it all just happens so quickly that I can't help but not care. I'd have loved to see more of Gangrayda's envy of Samus, or Rundas' friendly rivalry with her, but they're all three gone so quickly, and when they're back they're just very very evil and die in the span of one scene. Even if you didn't figure out that something like this would happen, by the time you fight Rundas, the first of the three, it's pretty clear the other two are gone too, and the game never plays with this knowledge in any interesting way. It'd be great if one of the three managed to survive and help you, only to maybe fall to Phazon later, or if one overcame the Phazon corruption, or died but left you a message, I dunno. It'd be cool even if you could learn more of their pre-corruption exploits, but as it is, they're just mid-bosses with a lot of preamble, and that's kind of a shame, especially because Nintendo's previous attempt to introduce rival bounty hunters also flopped pretty hard.

The rest of the story is... fine? I think it straddles a good line, making Samus still very professional but giving us some insight on her feelings, unlike the previous two games where she was frankly just a player avatar most of the time. But, I dunno, it's just Samus fighting a big alien evil guy, no real interesting developments. I like the lore of the various planets, probably my favorite of the three games, despite Echoes' tough competition. I dunno. I'd like to say that Corruption is, in its own way, a worthy sequel to the previous two Metroid Prime games, but I don't really believe that it is. It has some good ideas, some bad ideas, and sort of fails to fall together into a product that's as cohesive and effective as them. It's not committed enough to being an action game to succeed in that regard, and it's not a good metroidvania, so it's sort of nothing at all. But hey, at least it's not Other M.

I managed to arrive at the Screw Attack to check how awesome it felt and, well, it was just like MP2. With no big surprises but it felt satisfying to get it still.

This said: I appreciated the Wii mote and Nunchuk gimmicks, I still remember back at E3 of 2007 how much they hyped for that.

It's also the reason why on Switch it seems hard to pull it off, or potentially any next console. Which is bad since the game is great. Not as awesome as MP1 but I was personally enjoying it slighly better than MP3.

It's a great game in its own right, but feels like a downgrade compared to its trilogymates just because the other two games are just that good. It introduces motion control aiming, which is great for having a mouse-and-keyboard-esque experience, and they have enemies that take advantage of having lock-on and actually aiming be separate actions now. I just think everything else they do with motion controls is annoying. There's several different types of interfaces throughout the game, all of which being a weird little motion-control input gimmick that feels like it's only there because Nintendo mandated showing off the motion controls. Gotta pump this thing or turn that thing or have Samus physically input a passcode. The only waggle gimmick that feels good is flicking the nunchuck for the Grapple Lasso/Beam, and then yanking it back to pull an enemy's shield off or pry something open.

I just wish the combat and map design didn't also go down with it too. It's a step down in difficulty from Prime 2, which is fine, but it gets even easier in light of the Hyper Mode feature, where you can chug an energy tank to infuse your beam with phazon for a bit, and doing so absolutely melts just about any enemies for comparatively little sacrifice, especially since you're effectively invincible in this state. And of course, to make up for Hyper Mode taking an energy tank off of you, it feels like enemies drop and obscene amount of energy, meaning you can afford to use it carelessly and still get your energy back.

The maps are far less organically connected, instead now having basically a level select screen to go to different sections of different planets from your ship, and because of that a lot of the areas, while being some of the most visually creative areas in the Prime trilogy, are comparably smaller and traversing them feels far less involved. Individual puzzles are still the Prime goodness, but globe-trotting is far less satisfying this time around.

The bosses in this one are a mixed bag. For every Rundus, Gandrayda, and Omega Ridley, there's a Helios, Security Drone, or Mogenar that feel like they go back to Prime 1's boss philosophy of spending long periods of time being invincible and multiple phases of the same thing happening, But More.

At the end of the day, it's still a Prime game, and comes with all the goodness that entails. It still has a lot of atmosphere and cool moments, and feels like a satisfying conclusion to the Phazon trilogy, but I'd still recommend 1 or 2 more.

Prime 3 in a lot of ways feels like a better version of Prime Hunters. The games are almost eerily connected, not just in tone and style but even in the structure of the games themselves, to the point where separating the Prime games into groups of 1 and 2 next to 3 and hunters almost makes more sense than seeing it as a trilogy with a spinoff. Beyond comparisons to a much much worse game however, Prime 3 has a lot to like. The new motion aiming is such a spectacular improvement to the game, and thanks to the trilogy releasing on Wii as well it was thankfully ported to 1 and 2, leaving next to 0 reason to play those games on the GameCube. It's genuinely baffling how much better the game feels compared to its predecessors. Unfortunately though, Prime 3 falls short in the departments of atmosphere and immersion that the first two games excelled in. The three major worlds tend to default to boring fiery red theme (Bryyo), another dreary reddish theme (Pirate Homeworld), and the Ancient Cistern from Skyward Sword (Elysia). While these are mostly fine, they don't compare to the bolder and more memorable environments of the first two games. Notably, this also extends to the soundtrack. Where the game truly excels is in its very first and very last missions. Ignoring the bloated opening, the missions of the first mini planet of Norion are genuinely engaging, and the finale on the last area Phaaze is top notch, rivalling the most creative areas of the first two games. One other thing to note is that a lot of people seem to see this as a more watered down experience in comparison to the first two games, as it has a less isolated atmosphere and focuses less on exploration than the other games. While that is true to an extent, a lot of emphasis being placed on tradition and not the merits of the game itself is backwards. Bottom line, this is a great game that absolutely deserves its spot as the definitive conclusion of this brilliant trilogy of games.

Metroid Prime 1 is among my favorite games of all-time. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is a game that I barely like. It's a bigger, more unwieldy and more frustrating version of its predecessor that does little to iterate on its foundations.

Metroid Prime 3, by contrast, is something different entirely.

From its earliest moments, Metroid Prime 3 is very much NOT like its predecessors. The game has a foregrounded, talkative narrative with the sort of cinematic presentation that's mostly anathema to Prime 1 design philosophy and the reputation the first game established. Interestingly, its narrative focus and linear progression feel very much in step with Metroid Fusion, another game I love.

And that's probably why I enjoy Corruption nearly as much as the untouchable Metroid Prime 1. In continuing to reject the conventions of its predecessors, Corruption is full of action set pieces. This is much closer to a conventional FPS than either of the games that came before (Echoes' multiplayer aside). I like that a lot.

The Metroidvania genre, on the whole, is one that I don't care that much for. The later Shantae games, Prince of Persia: The Last Crown, these are a few of the only non-Metroid Metroidvanias that I truly enjoy. I'm drawn to Metroid by its worldbuilding, art direction, and sense of place (and all the ways it's evoked).

I'm also massively drawn to Samus Aran: the badass intergalactic action hero.

This is the version of the character that childhood me was introduced to through Smash Bros., and the version of the character I found when I rented Prime 3 as my first Metroid title way back when. I was too young to understand the game and get past Norion. But it forged my connection to this character and world, a connection I'd later strengthen in high school when I truly got into the series.

Many people will claim that the Metroid series' pivot towards action began with Other M and then was followed through by MercurySteam, and while I agree that Other M turned the action dial to 10 before MS cranked it to 16, I truly believe that Corruption is where the 'modern' depiction of Samus was born. Think about the fight with Ridley on Norion, the huge battle alongside Galactic Federation Troopers on the Space Pirate home world. Samus builds and detonates a nuclear bomb and escapes from its blast after a massive point-defense firefight. Corruption brought Samus to an entirely new echelon of cool.

And the Wii brought Samus to a new level of realism. I totally appreciate that the motion-controlled keypads and locks and levers are a relic of 2007, but I really enjoy the life they imbue in the character. To me, they're an extension of seeing the rain fall on Samus' visor on Tallon IV. These choices were doubtlessly mandates to illustrate what the hardware was capable of back near launch, but I just don't mind.

It's very easy for me to look at Prime 3 and understand why it's not widely held in the regard that I hold it in. The game is very linear, many of its secrets are not hidden well or at all. It's bigger, louder, more cinematic and less archetypally Prime-like. But almost none of that matters to me because this feels like the massive action-packed Metroid spirit that defines most of my favorite games in the series, while retaining the immersive, inquisitive quality and attention to detail that define Prime 1 and 2.

So glad I finally saw this one all the way through.