G4TV

If you’ve somehow skipped the last four or five year’s worth of first-person shooters on consoles, and your most recent experience is, say, GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64, then Metroid Prime: Hunters is gonna knock your socks off. The controls are just even better now, thanks to the relatively more-precise touch-screen setup, and the graphics are top notch.

If you’re in the other camp…well, this is probably the best we could expect from Metroid on the Nintendo DS.

Out of Control

Fans of the Prime series will immediately take issue with Hunters’ control setup. The digital pad and touch-screen are combined to form a pseudo mouse-and-keyboard scheme, making the game feel more like a PC first-person shooter in a lot of ways. Gone is the lock-on mechanic that Prime perfected on the GameCube.

Unfortunately, the platforming element remains, despite this new control setup being way too clunky for any sort of precision jumping action. Double-tapping the touch-screen (or even just using the right shoulder button, depending on your settings) and moving with the d-pad is clumsy at best.

In fact, let’s just get this out of the way: controlling Metroid Prime: Hunters with either the touch-screen setting or the old face button setup (each button makes Samus turn in that direction) is downright infuriating most of the time. The face button thing feels archaic and imprecise because, quite frankly, it is. While the touch-screen setup leads to a lot of random jumping when the action heats up, not to mention causes more hand cramps than an evening surfing naughty websites. Playing for more than 10 minutes will have your wrists crackin’ like never before.

Good to Play Together

The single-player campaign in Hunters feels like an afterthought. Each new world plays very similarly to the last one, and none of it manages to recapture the atmosphere or action of the two latest GameCube installments. It’s not so much the graphics – which look like a very nice Nintendo 64 game – but more to do with boring level design, frequently re-used rooms, and, again, bad controls.

The multiplayer aspect is quite obviously the game’s focal point, and what you get is pretty nice. All the various game modes are here, and you get to play as a collection of different races, each with their own abilities and special weapons. While some are very easy to exploit, in general the game feels fairly well balanced.

Of course, the controls end up being an issue here, as well. Maintaining a sense of your surroundings and the position of your enemies – not to mention turning quickly to face a predator – are made all the more difficult by the clunky interface. 

Why-Fi?

If you’re absolutely dying for a new Metroid on any system, you’re going to have to play this game. But when it comes right down to it, this feels like yet another genre shoehorned poorly onto hardware that just isn’t equipped to handle it. Hunters is a valiant effort, but the DS and its user-base would have been better served with something more along the lines of the Game Boy Advance titles instead.