New ‘Metroid’ game offers adventures

McClatchy Newspapers

“Metroid: Other M” is the game some “Metroid” fans complained the first-person “Metroid Prime” wasn’t when it came out nearly eight years ago: a 3-D “Metroid” that plays a lot like the 2-D installments of the series.

In this adventure for teens, bounty hunter Samus Aran tracks a distress call to the Bottle Ship, a giant space installation that includes a variety of habitats and specimens of many hostile alien creatures. The interior shows signs of damage, and dead researchers are found — something has gone wrong here.

Samus encounters a squad of Galactic Federation soldiers and decides to work with them, taking orders from their commander, Adam Malkovich, who tells her where to go, what to do and even which of her weapons she can use — mostly series standards such as missiles, supermissiles, power bombs and ice beams. The Diffusion Beam is new, and it scatters a charged shot over a large area. Samus has had objectives assigned to her before, but it’s strange to see this usually independent character taking direct orders.

Items and power-ups are hidden in walls and floors or behind obstacles that can be defeated only with the right equipment. The game includes some new moves for the bounty hunter — she can dodge incoming attacks.