For those of you who have yet to pick up a Metroid title the premise is simple: Samus Aran is a bounty hunter that always seems to pick the wrong bad guy to hunt down, and without fail she always seems to lose all of her power suit's technology, and it's up to you as the player to get her special abilities back while delving deep into whatever story the developers have thought up this time, ultimately leading you to go head to head with Ridley (the Metroid equivalent of Ganon) and into completing the game.

The GameCube's delve into the franchise brought with it a whole new level of interaction which saw players finally manoeuvre Miss Aran through 3D space and seeing the world as she herself does: through her visor. And it's with this visor that players could scan important items to progress the story, lock onto items for puzzles or enemies for her missiles as well as using a number of other special visor abilities. Save points, downloading maps from specific rooms, elevators from surface to underground to ice areas and the ever addictive boss battles all made the Metroid franchise bigger and better than it had ever been, and the handheld games even tried to mimick some of the sounds/visuals to make a better experience.

This is where Hunters comes in. Samus Aran has been called by the Galactic Federation to help discover the truth of a message it received from what was believed to be a deserted galaxy. It turns out the same message had been sent to a thousand different worlds in a thousand different languages and now Samus and six other bounty hunters are on their way to discover to secrets of the Octoliths. What makes the beginning of this title a little different to most of the others is that Samus doesn't lose any of her abilities and this in itself may feel a little alien to gamers. With no abilities lost, does that mean half of the fun of the game was also lost? A lot of the fun from previous versions was getting your hands on a new ability - double jump, grapple beam, etc - and using them to access previously inaccessible areas. Instead, you are out to hunt down all of the Octoliths with the possibility of losing them to other hunters.

Every planet you land on sees you go head to head with one of Samus' opponents, and should you lose against them they will take away your Octoliths, meaning you have to track them down and beat them to get them all back. This can be frustrating, especially as the battles against them feel more like a death match against a bot than a decently planned out boss battle. Another let down in single player mode is that enemies simply respawn and there seems to be such a lack in detail in the enemies that you normally have very little idea what you are blasting away at.

Puzzles come in the form of timing jumps and finding the right kind of beam for your gun to get through specifically locked doors. What might frustrate many gamers is that it isn't uncommon to get two of the three artifacts needed to obtain an Octolith, only to find a door you can't get through and that the weapon to get through the door isn't on any of the planets you have been to yet.