Metroid Prime Hunters: Hands-On

Our impressions of Samus' DS outing from our most recent hands-on with the game.

Back at this year's E3, we came away after hands-on with Metroid Prime: Hunters with a single thought in my mind: this game needs online play. At a show where Nintendo's biggest showcase was the DS's new online functionality, we found the omission of online play in 'Hunters rather baffling. It's your basic arena deathmatch -ame - surely the perfect title to launch the DS's new online system? Fortunately, it appears Nintendo has heard my cries and announced just a few weeks ago that Metroid Prime: Hunters would have full online play. I couldn't be happier - Online play will make this game.

The majority of DS owners will already be familiar with Metroid Prime: Hunters as initial systems shipped with a demo of the game. It's basically a re-imagining of Metroid Prime on the small-screen, and initial impressions show that the transition of the first-person adventure onto the handheld has worked rather well. The stylus is used in conjunction with the d-pad to fire, aim and move Samus around in a first-person environment. Whilst at first I thought this could be hindering and tricky to master, it quickly becomes second-nature and fast-paced deathmatch scenarios like in the E3 demo are completely possible.

With graphics reminiscent of the veteran PC FPS Jedi Knight, the deathmatch mode has four bounty hunter characters to select each with their own strengths and weaknesses. For example one of the characters, a space pirate assassin, can damage enemies whilst in ball form by rolling into them and slashing them with his claw. Another, a large rock-like creature called Spire, can climb up walls whilst in ball form using the spikes on his back. All of these unique character abilities will make for some interesting deathmatch games.

The arena we waged war in was full of many familiar and unfamiliar weapons for us to commandeer. As expected missiles were scattered around the arena for us the pick-up, weapons such as the Ice Beam and Plasma Beam were also laid-out to be found. However, one of my weapons of choice was an unfamiliar one to the Metroid universe - a shotgun.

From my brief time with the multiplayer mode of Metroid Prime: Hunters I am at least assured that there is reason to look forward to the game, even if the single player mode doesn't turn out to be quite as stellar as it's Gamecube counterparts. Thankfully, this isn't necessarily the case either as newly released footage of the single player mode looks very promising, and indeed not a world away from the Gamecube Metroid instalments.

Metroid Prime: Hunters is due for release early next year, look out for it - it could well be one of your most played online games of the 2006.

Andy Robinson
Staff Writer, Kikizo Games