A good game, a nice conclusion to the Prime Trilogy yet the weakest of the three Prime games for me by quite a large margin.
Prime 2 felt like a sequel made for the fans of Prime 1, more complex, more crafty and tougher, it turned some away with these decisions but for me it was the right direction to take.
Meanwhile Prime 3 was the sequel made to try and appeal to a wider audience complete with a host of decisions that put a damper on the experience.
First of which is an increased focus on combat with Space Pirates, they turn up all over the place now in greater numbers with higher defence, problem is even with the pointer control Prime was never designed to be heavy on combat, you can't make headshots, the beam blasts aren't that fast to hit swifter targets, rapid fire is piss weak and so on, shootouts in Prime just aren't that satisfying and should be used more sparingly.
And then this leads onto the next mistake, Hypermode.
Hypermode is a botched concept in my eyes, Samus gains the ability to enter a massively powered up state at the expense of an energy tank, you can either gain some energy back by dispatching of foes quickly and shutting it off or you can let the Phazon start to take over risking the phazon bar filling up and instant death for an extended time period as a borderline invincible force of destruction. On paper this sounds interesting yet in execution it's flawed, enemies also enter hypermode and take an absolute age to defeat unless you jump in and fight fire with fire, a space pirate crab walking turret thing goes down in one half charged beam blast normally yet if it goes hyper then it'll take like 10 or more fully charged shots unless you go into hypermode and hit it once, as you can see there's quite the shift in power and defence levels here. As such most Space Pirate battles become a to and fro of hypermode antics disrupting the combat pacing , you get other abilities to use in hypermode but the Default Phazon Beam is all you actually need.
Oh but it gets better, Seed Bosses require hypermode to actually hurt leading to two levels of problems. First is that being low on health isn't just detrimental to your chances of survival, it also means you can't hit the bosses weakpoints without hypermode. So bosses have to give you health effectively meaning that sometimes you'll be jumping around waiting for that one projectile attack you can counteract to gain some health or else you're buggered, fortunately this isn't so much of an issue outside the hardest difficulty. In which case otherwise you kick a boss' backside and you get health while doing it.
Last big flaw is related to the game structure, segmented and separate worlds linked through ship travel. The process of moving from one planet to another is way too long, not even factoring in the loading you have the whole entering ship, bringing up the map and takeoff/landing scenes which can be mercifully skipped after being seen once. The areas themselves being more sectioned off loses part of that Metroid appeal not being a fully linked world, exploration never feels quite as strong.
Last gripes, Ship missiles are pointless, Phaaze was not a good finale for me at all and I swear Prime 2 actually looked nicer on the whole.
Okay I'm done ragging on the bad, Prime 3 is at its strongest in Elysia/Skytown.
More than any other area in the game Skytown catches that Prime feel. Combat is mostly on the backburner outside some satisfyingly obliterated pots and pans steam bots, it's all about traversing a mysterious location that's unique among the areas in the Prime trilogy for its sky based structure that also works alongside Prime 3's own more isolated map areas focus. You get exploration, just enough Pirate encounters, a Metroid "horror" section, a set piece with the dropping of the bomb and abilities like the spider ball and screw attack get a good work out. It has a bit of everything really.
Runner up to the Valhalla, for a small side area it brings plenty of atmosphere and was an interesting take on the item hunt.
Control wise I always enjoyed the grapple lasso, could do without those finicky switches where you pull the level up and down as some wii remote gestures seem to be better or worse than others as far as reliability goes, otherwise the Wii Remote worked well for this game. Hunter Bosses were great fun, Rundas and Gandryada especially, sometimes it's nice to fight something more your size than giant behemoths.
