Fun play style, but quickly becomes boring from lazy level design that leaves your wrists aching.
This is absolutely ridiculous. Plus, after each fight you have the same "you have 5 minutes to get back to your ship without saving" EVERY TIME. It's annoying. The first few times it's ok, then it get's old fast.
None of the typical metroid stuff is really there either. You shoot doors open. Most of the time you shoot them and kind of have to back up a little before they realize you're there though. It's like those "senso doors" in supermarket. You have to go back and forth a bit til it realizes you're there and opens. The doors only open with certain weapons. There are different colored weapons. They all kind of suck. They all supposedly do different kinds of damage. There are different colored monsters. I guess there is some kind of coordination here. Shoot the right colored monster with the right colored weapon and you do more damage. But there wasn't much intelligence. It felt like you could be randomly generating this stuff. You walk into a room and it locks you in before generating 2-5 of these bots to fight. They sometimes come back. There are also these bosses that represent each color. They kind of randomly appear on plants. You can kill them a million times, they show up again. There isn't any "intention" to any of this. You just go around, and this world kind of happens semi-autonomously. It's like instead of actually designing levels, they just made some simple maps and a few rules and let the DS to their designing. This works for the sims and it works for Diablo, but only because they spent a lot more time with those games and made a game that makes SENSE with that kind of design. This game, is just boring. After a few crystals, you just want it all to end. And it's not just your eyes and your patience being worn, this game is painful. The control scheme is clever, and I would be lying if I said it didn't have a certain fun factor, but I really don't think got created DS's to be used for first person games. There were a few boss fights where I had to stop cause my hand got sweaty and the pen kept slipping. At the end, my wrist actually ached a little bit. This type of game just isn't that worth while in the long run.
And that really sums things up for this game actually. It is a fascinating idea. The did well creating the interface. It works. It's interesting. But it gets old WAY too fast, and the level design, plot, and action to not ramp up well enough to keep you interested. The puzzles are pretty boring too. Most of it is just timed obstacle course stuff. There are a few intriguing places where you have to get into a ball and everything goes all 2D on you, but they were rare, and the fact that they WERE 2D really felt odd. It really felt out of place. This is my first Metroid 3D adventure, but I kept really wishing it was more like Metroid: Fusion. Maybe metroid just isn't meant for 3D? I can't say not to get this. There is definitely some interesting game play here, it just doesn't last. I'm betting there is a lot of replay available in the multi-player too. I just don't go for that so much. (And nobody here wants to play with me. Oh well.) As a stand alone game, especially when compared with the metroid franchise as a whole, this game just doesn't measure up. It's lazy, and just doesn't exhibit the same level of quality in play and design that I have come to expect from the Metroid franchise.