A game that would have had huge potential, but Nintendo goofed when it came to weapon balance, exploits, and a story.
Gameplay (single player) 5/10
The single player mode simply doesn't feel like a Metroid game of any sort, let alone a Metroid Prime game. Metroid games in the past have been about exploring a planet (or planets) and discovering a conflict among the region that you, Samus Aran, must resolve.
First of all, the story is what should introduce the player to what motivates them to do what and why. The story of single player mode should be a huge role.
Well in this case, the story feels boring in the end, and really doesn't make you feel 'into' the game or your surrounding (which is what it's supposed to do), and you can forget what you're doing or why you're doing it pretty easily in a matter of seconds of the game beginning. Also, it's short for a Metroid game. And it repeats itself over and over again.
The way the story is revealed by scanning floating-invisible "lore" packets that a once great civilization left behind and had scattered among their solar system as a way of saying "We're all dead. A big mean monster came and killed us all, so we sealed him away before we went extinct. Don't let him out, okay?"
You find these lore packets floating around invisibly, and the only way to see them is too 'scan' them. Kinda like what you did with things in the last Metroid game, only in this game, most of these things are hidden from you, so you have to wonder around huge out door areas (mostly filled with nothing, not even enemies, extra routes, expansions etc) in your scan-mode in order to find these 'lore packets' hovering about. Not that there's even any handy advice, or anything of interest that they reveal. Only if you can piece together about a million or so of these sentences will you get to understand one single pre-event that took place. Usually, these sentences just repeat each other, over and over again, each time using different words.
Sometimes they explain the lame enemies, or bosses (there's two, one which is very uncreative) you fight most the time. The enemies are, for the most part, just 'security devices' (robots) that were left behind after the extinction of the race.
There isn't much story to give away here, so I'll just say now that there's no plot twists (other than at the boss fight) and also that the millions of half-useless lore packets say just one thing: We're all dead, a huge unstoppable creature that almost killed us all was sealed away by us as a last resort.
And that's it.
Oh, and recently a telepathic message was broad casted to billions of races everywhere in trillions of languages that there is a source of ultimate power among this galaxy. Come and get it, boys!
So, you, Samus, and 6 other 'hunters' (who are assorted aliens with special powers, all which are very unbalanced, I'll get to that later) go to the galaxy to beat the crap out of each other and get the ultimate power (which turns out to be the very last 'weapon' you get in the game, and use for about 3 seconds and you're done).
It turns out that the huge evil creature beast sent this message as a way to get some idiots to come by to the galaxy and let him go free again to kill everybody.
He gets freedom once more at the end of the game after you sorta accidentally let him loose, but you end up killing him a second after that.
Okay, enough of lame story line, let's go to weapons and enemies!
The weapons (nope, you start the game with all your extra powers, like the morph ball, for instance) you get in the game are the 6 special weapons that all the other 'hunters' are specially assigned. You end up using the weapons in the game as a way of unlocking doors, and only doors, not getting across gaps or obstacles or anything else flashy or creative like in the last games.
The weapons have ammo too, sorta like the missle launcher. Only they all use the same ammo type, which is a little green ruby-like thing.
Anyways, the enemies are all the same; robots. All of them are about the size of your head and there's about several different kinds, all which look the same and are color coated (green, blue, red, orange, etc). A flying one that stays still most the time and fires a pee-shooter of a gun at you, one that rolls around on the ground (which also stays still most the time) and also shoots plastic projectiles, and a turret one. Enough said already.
The bosses in this game are pathetic. There's supposedly 8, but really only 2 kinds. One is an eye-ball, and the other is a pole. And they appear 4 times each, slightly stronger and a bit faster than the last time you encountered them. All of them go down pretty easily if you're a guy who's a seasoned FPS player, since they have only about 2 attacks, both which aren't that devastating, and are only annoying like the grunt enemies.
Oh yeah, and there's 2 mini bosses in the game. A 'fire-spawn' and an 'ice-spawn'. Both are pretty much the same and don't require clever tactics to take down.
Enough of the abysmal story mode, let's move onto the multiplayer.
Multiplayer 3/10
WHAT!? Three out of ten? Are you joking!?
Nope!
The multiplayer, is infact, the main section of the game. A big difference for a metroid game, making this sort of a spin-off. The multiplayer mode would have been a huge success if only Nintendo would have thought ahead, or maybe play-tested the game with different people a little more.
Well, there are 7 different game modes and 7 different characters to select from in multiplayer. You can play online with random battles (which is a terrible, terrible idea) or, you can play with 'friends'. Of course, Nintendo had to bring in its crappy 'friend code' system here too. Maybe for a good reason... Or maybe not. It's an entirely differnt debate.
The gamemodes are Battle (death match), Capture (capture the flag), Survival (elimination), Prime Hunter (which is cool, and sorta cheap at the same time, long story), Defender, Nodes (which are both basically the same thing), and Bounty (like Capture the Flag only with 1 flag and optionally no teams).
So you can tell there's plenty of gameplay options to choose from. Well, sadly, you can only play these lovable game modes only in multi-card play, and online-friend play. Now it's pretty rare that you'll ever meat another decent player who owns the game in real life, so the only way you can play multi-card play is with bots, who will last you about a week or two. But when you play 'random' matches online, you only get to play 'Battle' mode, which is deathmatch mode. And you can't customize the settings, and you have to vote for which map you play on (all of which will get old, as most are the exact same rooms from the single player mode, and you can't customize your own maps).
Now here's where the killer of multiplayer comes in: The character balance.
Since each character (hunter) has their own special weapon and 'alt-mode' (aka, morph ball version of themselves), most other companies that make first person shooters much more can recognize the faults pretty easily in this choice. Starting with the Sniper rifle-like weapon.
The sniper rifle weapon is named the 'Imperialist'. Short term used on forums is 'imp'. This weapon is considered cheapest weapon of all, for a good reason too. Like all sniper rifle-like weapons, it should fire slowely, accurately, and a single shot to the head should instantly kill the victim.
Nintendo, for the most part, tried to follow most of these rules, but in the end the weapon came out overpowering and completely wrong. The hitboxes in this game for a 'headshot' are absolutely huge, making the Imp EASY to use, and instantly win a match in no time. You can shoot somebody near the chest and get a HEADSHOT!!! You can shoot their shoulder and get HEADSHOT!!! You can even shoot their heads, or their shoulders, and get (you guessed it) HEADSHOT!!! Another problem with this weapon? You can get headshots easy, even at medium, sometimes even short ranges away from your enemy. And also, even though it fires a bit slow, it's a bit too fast. And you can stay zoomed in between skull-breaking shots, making it easily the best weapon (and most commonly used) in the game. So therefore, it depends on who is best with the Imp, or who can reach the weapons spawn spot in the map fastest.
And also, the other weapons for other characters can be absolutely useless in most cases or very hard to use.
Also, 'alt forms' were a BIG mistake.
People using Samus can go into alt mode, boost around the map and poop bombs like crazy, and win. Usually in about 2 or 3 minutes. And both the bombs and the boost mode (which you can do rapidily) do devastating amounts of damage with no consequence, and are easy to use with no skill involved. Some people just play Samus, pick up the Imp, and just run away from you in their Morph Ball mode boosting away, and then take out the Imp and boom, you're dead. If you catch them in close encounters they simply boost around you in lightning speed circles, planting bombs that will explode almost immediately and on contact and at least bring you down to a fraction of health. Only one more second and boom, you're dead.
You can still play the game without using the Alt modes or the other cheep weapons, but you need to organize it with somebody on a forum, or in real life (and there is a very low chance of meeting somebody with this game in real life who is also skilled).
Also, there are big exploits in weapons. The Judicator for instance, a weapon that freezes your opponent, can be exploited so that they can freeze somebody from a mile away (and the weapon is supposed to only freeze at close encounters).
Speaking of exploits, what about map exploits? Plenty of them, about one or two of them in every other map. The big problem there is, also, is that Nintendo can't update or patch the game. So if there's a wall you can jump inside at a certain angle, or a weapon that is too overpowering, or a little glitch that can be used to somebody else's advantage, Nintendo has no way of releasing a patch or an update to fix this. You'll just have to live with it.
Same goes for people who hack and cheat in the game, and there are plenty of people like that to go around in every other round. I don't really have to say anymore, but for the sake of this review, I will. Players who hack and cheat in this game (use infinite health or ammo, float around the map, etc) during an online match, cannot be banned for it. At all. You can disconnect from the game, but them Nintendo has to step in and reduce your 'rank'. And your rank is basically the major flaw of online play in this game. It is why people will ditch the game when you are about to win, or cheat, or play with Samus, or some other cheep tactic that they can use to easily win, just so they can keep their precious rank score at a perfect 5-star...
Whoops, I'm forgetting the rest of the review here...
Sound 10/10
With so much content packet into this game (most of it, sadly to waste), it is a big surprise to see how well the sound quality is. Not that any of the sounds don't get annoying, but sometimes it's like a unique orchestra of weapon fire is playing during a good match...
Music 6/10
Some of the music in story mode sets good mood, other times, it's just aweful and annoying because it's a small loop and you hear it about a million times.
Controls 7/10
Very clever! Use the stylus to move your cross hair, and the D-Pad buttons to move. Press L to shoot. You see the game on the top screen (from first person, duh) along with your health, and the other half of the HUD displays on the bottom screen, like your radar, the weapon selection icons, etc.
But there are still some things, like how you zoom your Imp, and other things like that, which seem that they could use a fine tune for easier use. But as there are different HUDs for different 'hunters' (characters) there also comes how easy it is to aim with each of their cross hairs, and also how easy it is to read your health on-the-fly.
Graphics 10/10
Almost forgot!
The graphics... SWEET! Best thing about the game. I've never seen such detail put into a FPS on the DS. Your arm-cannon as you view it in 3D on the top screen looks great. When hunters change from to their alt-mode and back, the animation looks smooth and cool for the most part.
But with that, there's also the problem of the hitboxes. Some hunters models are better aligned with their skeleton movement, therefore predicting where a headshot could be (for any weapon) can be like shooting straight through their bodies.
In the end, the game appears to me as all flash, no substance. The graphics and controls don't get beyond the terrible gameplay that lies past this game.
Final Score 4.5/10
Maybe try it, but don't buy it.