Metroid: Other M

Even before things get going, Team Ninja is making its presence felt. Samus spends a lot of time wandering around in her glossy, skin-tight Zero Suit in the opening moments, and the camera never misses a chance to linger on her backside.

On top of that, the cut-scenes themselves stretch off into the distance, filled with charmingly terrible dialogue and some brilliantly uncharismatic performances. Samus, in particular, sounds like she gets through the daily grind of being a mercenary by snacking on Diazepam at every available opportunity: based on her unwavering monotone delivery, you almost expect to see her walking into doors.

The story barrage is probably restrained by the team's usual standards, but it's still something of a departure for a series that generally left players to their own devices, plonking them down into the clammy darkness, and letting them explore. An early introduction to the combat, however, suggests that the developer may actually be an inspired match, despite its wilful eccentricities.

Moving around and killing things in Other M is, frankly, a bit brilliant. Most of the action is viewed from a controlled-perspective third-person viewpoint. As with something like Shadow Complex, Team Ninja frames the action as it sees best, often turning the game into a side-scroller, albeit a three dimensional one with no fixed plane of movement - but the developer's just as willing to have the camera spin round, seeing you running into or out of the screen.

From these angles, moving through the flickering hallways of the bottle ship while the mini-map steadily takes shape in the top-left corner, it feels just like 1994 again, particularly since the game has bravely ditched the nunchuk and relies on the remote alone, held in classic controller formation.

There's a handy auto-targeting whenever the regular slithery, spiny, spiky monsters make their appearances, clinging to the walls and ceilings or popping from vents, and the controls snap nicely from one nasty to the next. Early on, a spray of disco flies erupts from a nearby pipe, and while they flap around you in a bewildering manner, it's a pleasure to pick them off one at a time before moving on.

For bigger baddies, you'll need rockets, which are handled slightly differently. Pointing the remote towards the screen switches you to first-person, allowing you to lock on to targets before blasting away at them with the big guns.

The same mode is used for scanning, incidentally, and while you can't move around when in first-person, it's a simple business to snap back to the standard perspective, and Team Ninja, being Team Ninja, has given Samus a handful of nice kung-fu melee moves, performed with simple button presses, to take down any fools who get in close. There's even a dodge roll and some simple counters.