I am probably the biggest Metroid fan around, so coming in I had extremely high expectations for Prime 3, and I can say with confidence the game met my expectations with ease. Prime 3 wasted no time putting Samus in action, starting with some gameplay that seemed right out of Halo, which was nice for a little bit, but I for one love Prime games for the exploration based gameplay, and sure enough once I was about 45 minutes in to the story the pacing seemed much more like previous Prime games. Since the new controls make combat a little bit easier than previous primes, Retro made sure to put a lot more enemies into the game to even out the difficulty, which keeps things interesting while searching around. Samus is thrown into an abundance of environments, some new and others similar to previous Prime's. Regardless of their originality, each environment was visually stunning look at, making each area a pleasure to explore (minus this one crashed ship you have to explore, but not because of its visuals, i only didn't like exploring it because it is considerably scarier and harder than any other of the areas in the game, and there are not any savepoints that can conveniently be reached, essentially going to that ship is the equivalent to going into the dark world in echoes). Like every other Metroid game, Samus essentially starts at zero in terms of weaponry, but sure enough as she advances she finds new advancements that help her reach previously in-explorable areas. The biggest upgrade you get is the Phazon enhancement device, which you get about 15 minutes into the game. Unfortunately this makes her varia suit look a little bit uglier than in previous games, but what it's most useful for is entering hyper mode, which allows you to shoot phazon at enemies, which does considerably more damage than her normal weaponry. However it does drain a little bit of energy to stay in hyper mode for too long, but regardless I usually found myself staying in it for a while anyways just cause it's so much fun to shoot phazon at people. I don't want to spoil all the upgrades, but I will mention unlike the other two Primes, the beam system is stackable, as opposed to being able to use any of the beams with the flick of the c stick. Fortunately you never lose the ability of a previous beam when you get a new one, so the new system was fine by me.
Control-wise, the wii's motion sensing controls as a whole work brilliantly. I started right off in advanced controls, which is definitely the way to go. What that does is you can press z to lock on to an enemy in the screen, and then with the motion sensing you can target specific areas of the enemy, and that system for fighting works great. In games like Halo I was always fumbling with the dual analog stick control, so for me, I really loved the motion sensing controls. Unfortunately they were not perfect though. It kind of takes a while to do a 180 spin, so while you don't need to do one that often, when I did I often ended up taking some damage cause she was a little slow getting around. Also the game has many interactive controls such as grappling and pressing buttons or operating levers. While around 95 percent of the time I could get the motion right no problem, that other 5 Samus wasn't quite making the motions as smoothly as I felt she should have. My final gripe about the controls deals with the morph jump. While in the morph ball mode, you can jump by either dropping a morph bomb and jumping that way, or you can flick the remote up which serves the same purpose. Unfortunately this motion is usually only picked up about 75 percent of the time, so while still faster than dropping a morph ball, it was a little aggravating some time.
Overall, Prime 3 is still easily one of the greatest games I have ever played. I know it seemed like I brought a lot of flaws with the game (I actually have two more, some times the doors take a long time to open which is annoying, and also by no means easy, the game's difficulty definitely dropped in relation to the previous two games, especially echoes), but all of them are incredibly insignificant in comparison to the great highs of the game, which include beautiful visuals, outstanding controls and gameplay, unbelievable boss-fights, good pacing, and sound that does an excellent job of wrapping you into the environment. So while not perfect, Prime 3 is an outstanding game that will go down as one of the defining games of its genre.
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