Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

If you're a fan of Metroid, then this should be the easiest decision in the world to make. Buy this game and savor every last drop.

Now that Prime 3 is at our disposal, it is quite safe to say that Wii has an official flagship title that was built from the ground up to take advantage of the Wii’s control scheme and graphical capabilities.

It makes the strongest argument yet for bringing over this style of gameplay to the motion control set up, and does a good job of washing out the horrible taste that titles like Red Steel and Far Cry might have left for early Wii adopters.

The streamlined, pin-point accurate controls set a new precedent for first-person games on the Wii, and the game itself will keep you busy for more than a few weekends with its excellent achievement-like reward system and lengthy quest that easily took us 20 hours to collect every item, scan every object and obtain the best ending.

Even with its great new controls, decent story and amazing visuals, there are some annoyances that have bled through from the other games...The biggest offender is the way the game streams new levels.

Even with a low difficulty level, lackluster story and flawed unlockables, Metroid Prime 3 is certainly a must-play for Wii owners.

The controls are heavenly but the game isn’t.

Honestly, I love this game a lot, it doesn;t quite hit the atmosphere of the first 2 games, but it is definitely the most enjoyable to play. I can't quite sit down and play this game in one sitting like I can with Prime 1, but I think the level design, story with the other bounty hunters, and general vibes are fantastic.

A lot to say about this one. In the beginning, Prime 1 massively took from Super Metroid, watering down some aspects, but increasing the immersion, and integrating many fantastic new ideas in its place to create something new, as the jump to 3D should. Prime 2, an iterative sequel, increased the puzzles, the quality, the bosses, and the immersion. Prime 3 however, improved most of the visuals and not much else. Enemy design was far worse, level design much the same, and many new gimmicks implemented that did nothing for the formula or overall game design, instead butchering what had defined Metroid at its core. Interplanetary and Fast travel that broke the seamless transitions between areas, NPCs that talk at you without your consent (both of which crippled any atmosphere and immersion), motion control gimmicks that were never fun, weapon restrictions in lieu of a single weapon that the game had to be redesigned around (to poor execution), bland story, typical console-generation-7 scripted set-pieces, a mostly horrendous soundtrack (did Yamamoto get bored of this series, too?), flat environment design, aaaand so on... The fact people hold this game in reverance and remember it as fondly as its predecessors absolutely baffles me to this day. It bewilders me moreso that Prime 4 somehow ended up 3 times worse.

Metroid Prime 3 takes the franchise in some bad directions and not only includes much more character interaction but makes the dialogue infantile and stupid. I can see how 3 might be seen as paving the way for Other M. But it's still worth a play for Metroid fans. (copied from my trilogy review)

A potentially great game, ruined with terrible controls and gimmicks. The Wiimote was always a terrible controller for traditional video games and that’s especially true in the case of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. The motion control pointer aiming seems like it’s really cool at first, but it doesn’t take long to discover that it’s both too laggy and too spastic for anything approaching the degree of precision the game will eventually require. The greatest enemy you’ll face in Corruption is the controller in your hand. Even when the controls aren’t giving you a hard time in-game, the controller itself still presents a challenge. The button layout simply wasn’t intended for a game this complicated and demanding, it seems. After all, that’s why Nintendo released the Classic Controller for Wii. The controls, at best, are cumbersome and unintuitive. At worst, they’re aggravating enough to warrant shutting the game off, rather than continuing the frustration of nothing working the way you want it to. You should be able to forget about the controller you’re holding when you’re playing an action-adventure game- that’s what immersion IS, in video games. Prime 3 fails at this, possibility more than any game I’ve ever played.

Slightly better than the atrocity that is MP2, but not very good. Puzzles have taken a step back from MP2 thank heavens, but at least one very frustrating puzzle remains. The obligatory fetch quest at the end of MP2 was the worst, but somehow they decided to keep it in this one, although not as extremely frustrating and cryptic (minus one of them as mentioned). The gimicky Wii motion controls are not very good, but not as bad as they could've been, also interesting that the controls in MP4 are not much better. The game is a lot more linear than MP2 which is a good thing. All in all I think this one just doesn't improve or try to do much different than the first game which doesn't really warrant its existence. The best thing anyone can do is play through Metroid Prime 1 which is a great Metroid game, and just not bother with the rest, including part 4. There is a really cool sequence in the beginning with a returning boss which I loved, certainly the high point of the game, but also a sequence that has little to do with Metroid as it was mostly an action set piece.