Reviews// Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

Graphics-wise this game is sure to impress anyone who has yet to purchase a PS3 or 360, or upgrade their PC since the turn of the century. For the rest of us however there is very little “Wow!” in the technical achievements here. On the upside, however, is the amazing art direction that has made the series a stand-out from the beginning.

One of the most difficult tasks placed in front of Retro from the outset was recreating Nintendo’s 3D pixels (more than a decade old now) without over-complicating them or making them look too goofy. Finding the right blend of realism while keeping the fantasticality of the original games was paramount and something the developers have excelled at.

For those who have played either (or both) of the previous games, the latest incarnation will not startle so much as it will provoke happy grins. Although I can’t recall being blown away at any point, at the same time there is almost no reason for complaint. Barring the occasional painfully low-res texture the game just looks good. It’s almost refreshing, having spent so much time over the past two years looking at so many sub-par normal maps, to see good quality texture work and an artful use of bloom lighting. In the setting of the Metroid world, the ghostly glows work absolutely perfectly and are never overdone.

One of the few complaints I can level at it includes the poor choice of how to best use system resources some times. Another is that I occasionally found very little quality was put into the sky texture. While this isn’t an issue for large portions of your play time (after all, you can’t look straight up even if you wanted to), it does annoy when – for example - your ship takes off. In this case, and several other cut-scenes, the camera is left hanging on the pixilated blobs in the sky a bit longer than it should be.

Another small issue is the load screen hiders so often used through out the game. Rather than popping up an actual “Loading…” screen, the designers always have some simple animation playing to mask it. Whether this a shot of your gunship flying or Samus standing on an elevator or cable car, they are all intended to keep you in the game. However, there are some - like the aforementioned flying shots - that look so canned, repetitive and unnecessary that they don’t so much hide the loading as they highlight it - perhaps just a tiny bit more variety would have made it really work.

The most common of the “hiders” are the doors that connect every room in the game. These work just as they have since the original NES game except for the fact that they don’t load nearly as fast as all their cartridge-based ancestors. A fair percentage open almost instantly but a large number take more than a few seconds, some upwards of ten, to open. Without being too rude, this can be quite bothersome. I found that if you shoot the doors from further across the room as you approach them it seems to get the loading a bit faster and helps to smooth it out – however, I can’t be sure if it’s not just in my head.