Metroid Prime Review

[Professor Q]

The Metroidvania Review

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How Metroidvania is it?
Medium Fit – It’s Metroid but in first person. It’s that first person part that may be a sticking point for some.

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Full Review

I played Metroid Prime via the Metroid Prime Trilogy obtained from the Nintendo eShop on the Wii U

I originally played Metroid Prime sixteen years ago when it first came out, and at that time, from a presentation standpoint, it awed me. It seemed like first person games were just barely becoming a popular genre on consoles at that point with the advent of Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, and even Halo: Combat Evolved from the year before Prime’s release. I personally played none of those games in single player, but in my mind none of them looked even half as good as Metroid Prime. Between Samus’ visor fogging up from the environment, seeing her bones when she put her hand in front of her face while the X-Ray visor was on, and the static feedback you got from electric attacks - Metroid Prime was a game about truly immersing yourself as the legendary bounty hunter. Cut to 2019 and I find myself chuckling softly when the first boss – the Parasite Queen – just sort of explodes with a transparent polygonal burst once defeated. Having been so long since the last time I played it, in many ways this was like a first-time playthrough, and it was interesting comparing my raw nostalgic memories to the reality of what I was experiencing once again. Without the advantage of being at the cutting edge of technology – judging the game solely on gameplay and its more timeless presentation elements like its story – Metroid Prime definitely still holds up and is a very good game. I just personally have a few gripes that keep it from being included with the absolute best Metroidvania games available – admittedly some of them being based on some preferential biases rather than any actual flaw with the game.

Once you get past the game’s tutorial space station, Metroid Prime starts out like a safe experimental take on Super Metroid. Stripped of your power-ups you need to find the Morph Ball, Bomb Power Up, and etc. to move forward. At first, it almost felt like a cookie cutter imitation, kind of like those Unreal Engine remakes of old Nintendo games you see on YouTube all the time. It’s fun, but doing it all in first person wouldn’t be much more than a novelty if they didn’t do more with it. Eventually though you start getting some unique power-ups which while you could do them in 2D, they really take advantage of the 3D environment and first person perspective. My favorite of these is the boost ball that let’s you use half-pipes to sling your ball form up into higher areas. The usage of this power up is probably the cleverest of the bunch, since it requires the player to pay attention to sloped surfaces when you enter rooms – adding to that “aha” feeling as you explore around. You also have the various visor upgrades that let you see things you couldn’t before, which is also a really clever way to take advantage of the perspective – although I feel like the X-Ray visor was a bit underutilized.

One of the things I find disappointing about the implementation of these powers is how in the critical path they’re mostly used as Zelda-like puzzle solutions rather than exploration tools. Past that early power collecting portion, this “puzzle” focus gives the game more of an Ocarina of Time feel rather than a Super Metroid feel. Once you’ve been through an area you can generally pass by with no problem, but as soon as you start hitting new areas you’re usually stopped by a room-by-room gauntlet of “find the button” puzzles. I imagine that it was expensive to create 3D environments back then, and even today it’d certainly be more expensive than the likes of Super Metroid, so I can certainly understand the desire to lengthen the gameplay with these kind of activities. But they come off as more of a padding tool rather than an engaging gameplay element – at least for me. In Super Metroid, and in many games in the Metroidvania Genre in general, the gameplay is usually focused entirely on exploring and discovering, and these puzzle rooms sort of put the brakes on that flow for a majority of the game. It’s not that this is a bad design choice – some of my favorite Metroidvania games of the modern era like Iconoclasts and La-Mulana basically have you doing the same things. It’s that Metroid Prime never really moves beyond the idea of the player being the missing cogwheel in an already set-up Rube Golberg machine to something that provides an interesting challenge – although frankly making the puzzles more involved would probably exacerbate my feeling that this isn’t really what I want from a Metroid Series game. Later on this room-by-room puzzle focus is replaced with enemy gauntlets, but I’ll talk about the combat a little bit later.

Where Metroid Prime excels is with the various items hidden throughout the world. Once you’ve dug through each room and removed their locks, you’re free to wander around and look for missile upgrades and energy tanks – and just about every room has a secret in it. I find this aspect of the game so enjoyable that I am actually kind of happy that doing it is basically the game’s final challenge when you have to collect Chozo Artifacts (although I understand why some people might hate that part of the game.) Every power-up makes this loud “wumming” sound when you’re nearby, which is a clever way of making it less frustrating to identify the location of every item without using a guide. Some of the game’s most interesting challenges are found in unlocking these power-ups, and true to the Metroid form, some of them have some pretty tough requirements to get to. The hardest ones, at least for me, are the ones that require you to chain together bomb explosions while in ball form to boost yourself vertically and get to high up areas within tunnels – it almost makes you feel like a clever cheater when you finally figure it out.

While it’s not necessary to get every power-up to beat the game (even on Veteran Mode), it’s still a lot of fun, and there are even some optional missile weapon powers that make it even more rewarding. These powers let you combo a charged laser with and consume extra missiles for a massive attack. My favorite of the bunch is the Ghostbusters-style energy laser that just cuts through everything, but each one is very useful. All of these special powers use a ton of missiles however, so it really makes finding missile upgrades important if you want to use them. These missile powers are one of the few things add real excitement to combat, so it’s unfortunate that getting a full refill on your missiles is pretty hard to come by – I kind of wish each ammo increase gave you a full refill.

Combat has never been the strongest part of any Metroid game, but in Prime I feel like it’s at its blandest in spite of all of its potential. When you’re locked on to enemies, you strafe jump left or right to dodge, and this is a great idea in concept. In execution though most enemies just can’t handle you circle strafing around them once you get that lock on, and it’s frustrating if you’re having a hard time locking on since without the dodge avoiding damage is almost a matter of luck. Within these limitations the game is handicapped to an uninteresting method of scaling difficulty, since smarter AI or more complex enemy problems would be beyond the player’s ability to handle. Later in the game enemies simply become color coded to match whatever weapon you’re supposed to kill them with, which has two effects – first it eliminates the player’s creativity in dispatching them, and second it requires the weapons to be sort of samey since their function is about matching weaknesses rather than applying strategy. Even if color coding weren’t a thing though, two of your weapons stun/freeze enemies making 1v1 scenarios rather trivial, and thus there would be some dominant strategies if they didn’t force you to use other options.

Besides the weapon issues, enemies and bosses employ a lot of moments where they just can’t take any damage, meaning the only option in most cases is to just wait. The two bosses leading up to the final boss are the worst offenders, which is too bad since the second to last boss is actually pretty fun until he hits his second phase. Part of my issue here is that I made the mistake of playing on Veteran Mode, which appears to do little more than to give enemies more HP and make Samus take more damage – in other words it just made everything that much longer. Metroid Prime may be a pioneer when it comes to Metroid entering the first person perspective, but there were numerous FPS games leading up to it that might have provided some inspiration as to how to make it better. I suspect part of the handicap is working with the Gamecube Controller and NOT using a Dual Analog setup. The Wii Controls could have potentially made it more interesting, but of course that’s a shoe-horned feature into a game that wasn’t really designed for it. I feel like of all the things that could be improved for the upcoming Metroid Prime 4, making the combat more dynamic is the greatest opportunity. Of course, I’ve yet to see how things are changed in the next two sequels. I do think it's worth mentioning, I really liked the final boss; I thought it was an excellent way to wrap things up and utilize all of your abilities.

In summary, Metroid Prime offers a unique first person Metroidvania exploration experience that is stunted by some boring “puzzles” bogging down the flow and mostly uninteresting combat that lasts just a bit longer than I’d like. In spite of these gripes though, Metroid Prime is still a gem of a game, and I think it’s still worth playing today even if the only reason is to experience a milestone in the development of game design. I think there’s a lot of untapped potential for the “Metroidvania in 3D”, and it’s really a shame that more games haven’t looked to Metroid Prime as inspiration. Hopefully Nintendo will keep the legacy alive by porting the trilogy over to the Switch and continually forward into the future.

I’m pretty excited to see how Retro Games tries to improve the formula in Metroid Prime 2.

3.5 out of 5