Alright, I've finished the game and will now offer my opinion.
Controls are generally great. After about an hour, I had mastered the controls and things flowed well. The grapple lasso, and the gestured controls in general, worked fairly well but often I needed to slow down my gestures in order for them to register correctly.
The difficulty curve was very good. I guess the reviewers who deemed this game too easy played on Normal (essentially a euphemism for Easy mode, considering there are 3 modes). I had some trouble with many of the bosses and died on several of them, yet the game was never too difficult. I felt it was just right.
The boss battles in this game were outstanding. I died once on most of them, and they all took different ways to defeat. Their was somewhat of an epic feel to each of them too. The Gandrayda fight was quite a surprise to me, the Rundus fight had great music, and the Seed bosses all were fun. My only beef is with the relatively easy final boss which did not match the difficulty curve at all.
The E-cell quest wasn't too big of a distraction like the keys in Echoes, as 6 of them I found on my way. One of them, however - the Bryyo one where you need to find a ship grapple piece and put it in a room, took me a while to solve, which hampered the overall experience a little.
Another frustrating part was when I assumed I needed the Plasma Beam to progress through Bryyo Fire, but I eventually figured out that only the charge beam was needed. I (like Matt Cassamasina) couldn't find the Energy Cell data until I randomly found it under Samus' status screen, which is not where the game told me it was! I was also slightly disappointed that the Valhalla looked like a skin of the first GF ship, and that all the Seed areas looked the same, but those are minor gripes.
Environmental puzzles were in full force in this game. There seemed to be far more of these than in previous Prime games, and they were generally satisfying to solve but sometimes messed with the pacing a bit if I was eager to reach the next objective. Also, combat in general was more prevalent in this game, which I enjoyed, but some of the endless enemy rooms were frustratingly difficult (in particular, the one where you must grapple levers to disable the cannon on Bryyo while Flying Pirates pull them back).
The graphics were great, even with the Wii's limited abilities. The lighting and particle effects were really good, and helped create certain moods for certain areas (menacing in Valhalla, calm in Bryyo Ice, etc).
All things considered, it was a great game and certainly better than Echoes, perhaps on par with the original. This game definitely deserved the 9.5 it got from IGN, which is about where I'd put it.
EDIT: Forgot to mention something. The ship missile expansions seemed utterly unnecessary, and I rarely used the bombing runs. Hyper Ball and Hyper Grapple were only used in puzzle solving and never against enemies for me, while the mapping of missiles to Dpad down seemed unintuitive. I was also disappointed not to find a seeker-missile requiring boss.
Controls are generally great. After about an hour, I had mastered the controls and things flowed well. The grapple lasso, and the gestured controls in general, worked fairly well but often I needed to slow down my gestures in order for them to register correctly.
The difficulty curve was very good. I guess the reviewers who deemed this game too easy played on Normal (essentially a euphemism for Easy mode, considering there are 3 modes). I had some trouble with many of the bosses and died on several of them, yet the game was never too difficult. I felt it was just right.
The boss battles in this game were outstanding. I died once on most of them, and they all took different ways to defeat. Their was somewhat of an epic feel to each of them too. The Gandrayda fight was quite a surprise to me, the Rundus fight had great music, and the Seed bosses all were fun. My only beef is with the relatively easy final boss which did not match the difficulty curve at all.
The E-cell quest wasn't too big of a distraction like the keys in Echoes, as 6 of them I found on my way. One of them, however - the Bryyo one where you need to find a ship grapple piece and put it in a room, took me a while to solve, which hampered the overall experience a little.
Another frustrating part was when I assumed I needed the Plasma Beam to progress through Bryyo Fire, but I eventually figured out that only the charge beam was needed. I (like Matt Cassamasina) couldn't find the Energy Cell data until I randomly found it under Samus' status screen, which is not where the game told me it was! I was also slightly disappointed that the Valhalla looked like a skin of the first GF ship, and that all the Seed areas looked the same, but those are minor gripes.
Environmental puzzles were in full force in this game. There seemed to be far more of these than in previous Prime games, and they were generally satisfying to solve but sometimes messed with the pacing a bit if I was eager to reach the next objective. Also, combat in general was more prevalent in this game, which I enjoyed, but some of the endless enemy rooms were frustratingly difficult (in particular, the one where you must grapple levers to disable the cannon on Bryyo while Flying Pirates pull them back).
The graphics were great, even with the Wii's limited abilities. The lighting and particle effects were really good, and helped create certain moods for certain areas (menacing in Valhalla, calm in Bryyo Ice, etc).
All things considered, it was a great game and certainly better than Echoes, perhaps on par with the original. This game definitely deserved the 9.5 it got from IGN, which is about where I'd put it.
EDIT: Forgot to mention something. The ship missile expansions seemed utterly unnecessary, and I rarely used the bombing runs. Hyper Ball and Hyper Grapple were only used in puzzle solving and never against enemies for me, while the mapping of missiles to Dpad down seemed unintuitive. I was also disappointed not to find a seeker-missile requiring boss.