With the DS's lifespan looming, I believe it's safe to say the Hunters earned the titled of best FPS on the DS.
That's saying something, too. I grew up through Halo 3, I've witnessed the rise of Call of Duty (and I believe the gaming community is on the eve of the fall of CoD. Just saying), living life and watching the gaming industry at the same time is remarkably fascinating to reflect on.
It's also a treat to reflect on my history with this game. As an offline gamer, I rarely had chances to play Hunters online. So, I was confined to a shoddy single player and a fantastic multiplayer suite (IT HAD BOTS!!!)
The mutliplayer in this game is the selling point. The single player fails to ensnare the player like the console version ever did, but it still managed to be fun.
Puzzles were pretty minimalistic, so a majority of the game was spent shooting things. Which actually wasn't very fun, given the breezy difficulty of the game.
The audio portions of the game helped keep the tedium low, and to be honest the universe created in this game is actually quite amusing and interesting, from a hardcore gamer perspective. The worlds to explorer where interesting, and the lore revealed a simple, yet intriguing back story.
The single player fails to capture audiences beyond the hardcore. It fails in this respect. Whenever it takes effort from a gamer's part to be immersed into a world of escapist fiction, the artist have failed. Take that as a note, all you game developer wannabes (FYI, ever game developer star was a wannabe at some point). An intriguing world should capture the player's interest immediately, without effort.
Anywho...
The multiplayer is the main draw here.
Whenever a Mutliplayer game succeeds, that is because the multiplayer offers something more than another mode. The multiplayer here wasn't just a mode, it was a realm all in it's own, a realm that players could strategically and skillfully learn, and through the effort players could compete.
The multiplayer wasn't completely balanced, and the old school formula of high health/high speed/ low damage weapons made me made at first, but through time I learned that jumping to evade enemy fire was a must, timing and map knowledge were crucial, and headshots was a must.
There are several characters in the game, all of which offer unique abilities and alt forms (which is an alternate form each character has that's usually small and speedy). Simple enough. There are some balance issues (Weavile sucks! And friggen Spire is sooo underpowered!), but skill could outweigh these issues. Whenever I had a chance to play online, I noticed that several characters were used frequently (Samus, Trace, Spire, Sylux, and I forget the ice dude's name). Balance isn't perfect. I can't say it enough.
There were some multiplayer bots to use when not going online, and I am still surprised by the bot's ability to respond and play. It's quite incredible, even if they do have some artificialities about them. They can evaluate threats, hit their targets, jump, evade, snatch the power ups, camp, no scope with the sniper, ambush, etc. It's a sight to behold.
The game played soooo well. It was smooth! A solid, consistent 30-40 Frames Per Second! You here me, N-Space!!! Fix the damn framerate issues with your shooters!!! Nobody likes to watch slide shows of the battlefield!!! Graphically, it wasn't the prettiest game, but the framerate looked silky smooth, like the fur of a baby seal.
The multiplayer suite offered a variety of genre standard modes, but the 7 modes, like CTF, a territory controlling variant, a mode inspired from Halo's Juggernaut, a King of the Hill variant, Death match, Team Death Match, and a free-for-all single flag mode.
All were fun, and all made use of the well designed maps.
Which brings me to an interesting point.
I don't know about the bulk of the gaming community, but I can tell when a map has received a lot of attention to detail. Have you ever played Halo? Any map in Halo received at least 50 hours of attention. HAHA, thinking about maps in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 really shocks me! The developers must have been drunk when making those maps! Seriously, look at those damn things! There was stuff everywhere! And, I'm not talking about enviromental eye candy, I'm talking about things players can use to there advantage, like windows, pathways, structures, cover, etc. It's chaotic. Are those maps balanced?
Metroid Prime Hunters is a bit minimalistic when it comes to maps. Given the ease of aiming a stylus, many of the maps employ lots of elevated terrain, vertical action, and crazy stuff like that. Very few maps where flat surfaces.
There were a few stinkers here, and a few maps where it was just a larger version of another, but, the quality maps are fine as is. The somehow offer a great amount of planning, strategy, and so forth. Cover isn't totally a necessity given the fact that only one weapon is a one-shot one-kill (the glorious sniper).
The multiplayer made good use of the touch screen layout, actually.
Switching weapons was breezy, going into alt mode was great, it was easy to avoid hitting the wrong buttons when using the stylus, and I love the auto-aim feature for the sniper. It offered ease of use, and removed the act of zooming in for the player. Less for me to do, which is nice, given that I'm constantly on the move, running and jumping.
I could go on with this game for hours, but for the sake of keeping things simple, lets just say that this is the best FPS the DS has. N-Space's CoD games where great to, but their problems set them back behind this release.
I've spent so much of my life with this game, it's crazy. Nintendo crafted a quality experience out of this game, and I derived so much enjoyment out of this game.