![]() Things do become less punishing toward the end of the game, as Samus finds tools to help mitigate the effects of shifting universes, but the journey to reaching that point is so exhausting most players never get there. Venturing into the dark world drains Samus’ energy, and certain creatures within each realm can only be destroyed with specific expendable ammunition. Here, players have to navigate a world divided into dark and light zones, a concept that defines every last inch of the game. The original Prime suffered from what were ultimately fairly forgivable issues, but Echoes exacerbated all of those issues and threw in problems of its own making on top.Įchoes revolves around a duality-based gimmick that might work on paper but falls flat in practice. Samus’ second outing in 3D abandons much of the cohesion and sense of purpose that drove its predecessor. Flawed but fun, Federation Force feels like it could have led to better things if Nintendo had targeted it a bit more carefully. Its biggest shortcomings come from the fact that its difficulty and design don’t scale based on the number of active players, and from that its big end-game twist revolves around an extraordinarily dopey plot development involving Samus. Yet weird and misguided as its basic pretext for existence may be, Federation Force isn’t bad! It looks great considering the platform, and it offers a variety of mission objectives along with some excellent first-person team-based combat. Nintendo presumably hoped to draw in a younger audience, but the end result was a game that spoke to no one. It also has a somewhat goofy visual style that speaks to a younger audience than the hardened veterans who love Metroid most. Rather than further the tale of Samus Aran in a sprawling solo adventure, it instead centered on a team of generic space marines in a mission-based multiplayer shooter. But Federation Force absolutely wasn’t that redeemer. Metroid fans were desperate for a new game in 2016, having gone six years without a follow-up to rectify the wrongs of Other M. Much like Metroid: Other M, Federation Force represents above all else a tremendous failure by Nintendo to read the proverbial room. Metroid Prime: Federation Force (Nintendo 3DS, 2016) ![]() Metroid Prime: Federation Force Nintendo 11. Points for prescience, then, but none for giving players a proper, classic Metroid game for DS. Hunters is basically a smartphone spinoff that shipped several years before such things even existed. ![]() However, “what it is” turned out to be a generic multiplayer shooter wearing Metroid clothing, running on a woefully underpowered handheld system, centered around the use of a clumsy virtual touch-screen control pad. Players take control of Samus in a single-player campaign or play as one of several different bounty hunters in a head-to-head competitive mode, running around claustrophobic alien environments and attempting to gun down as many other rivals as possible. Hunters, on the other hand, was precisely the kind of game that everyone expected the Prime titles to be before they played them. Nintendo made a big deal about Metroid Prime not being a “first-person shooter.” This was partially to assuage the fears of fans who assumed the series was going to transforms into a mindless run-and-gun game, and partially because, well, Prime actually didn’t focus much on shooting. Metroid Prime Hunters (Nintendo DS, 2006) Other M turned out to be such a massive misfire and a flop with fans that it practically killed the series: Nintendo’s only Metroid output in the decade since has been a single spinoff and a lone remake. It casually reduces heroine Samus Aran from the stoic, hyper-competent warrior fans love to a bratty, timid girl-child. As an action game built around quick reflexes and evasion, the game has its charms, yet the story is irredeemable. There’s no looking to the plotline to redeem the game, either. Other M transforms Metroid into a highly linear, fast-paced shooter with few opportunities for real exploration, no sense of freedom, and a painfully contrived character progression gimmick. But as an attempt to revitalize a beloved franchise, it demonstrated a shocking failure to capture what actually draws fans to the series. “ Robo-Lady’s Surly Shooting Adventure in Space”), it would have been fine. Had Nintendo shipped this under an unrelated title (something like. It’s not actually a bad game, but it’s a devastatingly awful excuse for a Metroid sequel. Scraping the dead-last barrel-bottom of the Metroid franchise, we have the massively disappointing Metroid: Other M.
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