When this game was originally released on the Nintendo GameCube way back in 2002, I was… well, I was about as good at this as you would expect a 12 year old to be.
To be fair to tween-age me, being bad at it wasn’t entirely my fault. The game notoriously had difficult to use controls; the gaming industry still hadn’t figured out the familiar, twin-stick, first-person mechanics familiar to pretty much every game sold today.
But, being bad at it, I was mortified. This was a super cool, spacey-wacey puzzle and combat game. I wanted to be good at it and I wanted to love it.
So I persevered for a little bit longer. A very little bit, because I then encountered my first “war wasp” and hard noped out. (I hate wasps at the best of times and these ones were the size of a baby and flying at me aggressively).
So there ended my Metroid Prime excursion; at the time, anyway. Luckily, 35 year old me is marginally more tolerant of wasps and exceedingly more capable at video games.
With Metroid Prime 4: Beyond coming out in just a few days time, I have a brilliant excuse to revisit this game and try again.
It is a masterpiece.
It’s atmospheric. The music is brilliant. The environmental story telling – where you mostly learn about this strange new world through scanning objects in the world – is intriguing.
It’s challenging. The enemies are varied and interesting. The puzzles are fun. Whilst you go backtracking through the game a lot (by design) every area feels new every time you revisit a room; and just a little bit scary that a new, stronger enemy might have appeared.
I can’t believe I didn’t play this more when I was a lot younger. It’s brilliant.