Samus is faster, stronger, and much sexier then she has ever been, but does that make it better?
So lets get the whole control thing out of the way. To be honest I thought they were rather good, rather weird to get used to but they did the job. You hold the wii remote on its side similar to that of a NES controller and move around the 3d environment, using the D-pad to run around these environments isn't to bad but an analog stick would have been preferred.
So anyway, to go into your first person perspective you point the wii remote at the screen and aim, the aiming works well and if you hold down the B button you lock onto things and are able to fire missiles. When in first person though you can't move, at all.
Finally to recharge your ammo and health, you hold the wii remote straight up and hold A.
These controls do work but here are some issues I had with them. Sometimes the wii has a hard time registering were exactly you are pointing the remote. sometimes it thinks you are in the vertical position so you will just stop moving. Other times you will point and it will delay going into first person. Another thing you have to pay attention to is were Samus is pointing when you go into first person. If you enter it and shes pointed the other way you will enter first person that way and be totally vulnerable. Finally sometimes you will go to recharge mode and instead go into morph ball.
Positives about the controls though is that the first person works very well, and thanks to how the camera works, when you go down curving corridors the camera will shift and Samus will to, this means you don't have to zig zag the D-pad to go down the corridors. The dodge system works very well also, if you are holding the D-pad in any direction when an enemy attacks, Samus will dodge that way and aim directly at the enemy who attacks, allowing for a nice clean attack. Finally the lethal shots are just plain awesome. At any time you can jump on the bigger enemies, hold down the fire button and unleash a one hit kill one them, its really useful and always fun to use.
Now onto the story, if your a huge Metroid fan like I am, you just might not like it. Its corny, cheesy, and quite cliché. Samus finally has a voice and, well its not so good, its flat and really doesn't sound like a tough independent bounty hunter, instead she sounds depressed beyond all belief, it really is bad. As for the secondary cast, well they are all very very stereotypical army guys. All in all the whole backstory thing isn't very good, but thankfully the story about the crisis itself is a bit better, still kind of not so great.
Anyways our bounty hunter Samus receives a distress call from a ship known as the BOTTLE SHIP. Once on the ship she catches up with some old army buddies and decides to work with them. They find out that the ship is trying to create bio weaponry and trying to imitate the environment of the planet Zebes.
Since Samus is now working with the army you are given objectives by the leader Adam, so now there is absolutely no sense of isolation, or exploration as you play in a very linear fashion, you are given the objective and you have to go there, mainly because every other door is locked. There are hidden missile packs, energy tanks, and the new accel charges and E charges. Accel charges allow Samus to charge up her things faster, and E charges allow her to charge more health when she needs to. Unfortunately all these power ups are incredibly easy to find, when you clear the room of enemies, they show up right on your map, and getting to them is simple as anything.
So once you get to the objective point you fight a boss and get a new power up, well you get authorization for another one. You don't find power ups you get authorization for them. Adam basically says, you are now authorized to use _____. This is dumb, its not nearly as satisfying as finding them, and it makes no sense. For example, at one point your at the fire sector and you are forced to run as fast as you can through a section so you don't die of heat, after you do this Adam calls you and authorizes the Varia suit. Why wouldn't Samus just use it anyways?
As for the bottle ship itself, the map is very uninteresting and bland. The map itself is even hard to read at times, the maps you see on your radar are different then the maps in your map screen, and on the map screen it doesn't indicate what levels they are on. So when rooms overlap each other you can't tell which ones are on top of each other.
The graphics in Other M are a two sided coin, on the ones side you have some amazing CG graphics, and the other side you have graphics worthy of early game cube games. In gameplay from a distance they are fine, but as soon as you go into first person they show, and they are not pretty. They are blotchy, pix elated, and just all around the worse looking 3D Metroid game (not including the DS) its clear that the creators intended to have these graphics be seen from a distance, but once your in that first person mode, the crap begins to show.
The biggest problem out of everything with Other M though is how incredibly short it is. I beat the entire game, 100%, in a little under 11 hours. This is incredibly short, and there is no incentive to play again. you unlock everything after one run through.
All in all, what team ninja and Nintendo have done is made a very simple action game, and slapped the Metroid name on it. This is a very good game and I would recommend renting it, but when placed in comparison with every other amazing Metroid game, Other M just can't handle its own.