MAGICI've only put in a few hours so far and I can only say this game is phenomenal so far. If there was any reason own a Wii, this is absolutely it. After only a couple of real highlights since launch, I was beginning to question whether or not picking up the system then was the best idea... thought perhaps curiosity got the best of me.
Zelda was great, but I could have gotten a decent version for the GameCube. Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition was mega awesome, despite being a last-gen port and coming out a whole 7 months after launch. Metroid Prime 3 was a pretty good entry into the Prime series, despite it probably being my least favorite of the trilogy (controls were amazing, but exploration felt gimped and took a backseat to combat). But now, Galaxy is finally here, and is so far, it's so good that it's rejuvenating my interest in the Wii.
I was never a huge fan of 3D Mario games. As much as I wanted to like it, Mario 64 frustrated me in places and just made me not want to play it anymore. Sunshine simply bored me after a few levels. But Galaxy is just like... wow. 1080.
There's just something so amazing about flying to the planetoids, and the way the gravity works in this game. It's so surreal... the game really has a dream-like quality to it.
The controls are fabulous. This game's impossible to do with a standard controller, especially the pointer functions. Using the pointer you can shoot stars at enemies to stun them, by pointing at them and pressing the fire button. You can also gather those shooting on the playing field by merely moving the cursor over them. It's really neat.
One thing I'm really appreciating is that the levels overall are very linear. Everything is so much more streamlined in this manner. And another is that, aside from the whole 120 stars dealie, there doesn't seem to be any real collect-a-thon crap going on! Thank goodness, that stuff's getting really old. It's great-- start at point A, go to point B and collect your star... the level's over! Although levels are "recycled" for different stars, it's different in this game. In fact, only beginning of the level seems recycled, and from then, chasing after different stars sends you off onto a different path to get it. So it's a lot less repetitive than say, Mario 64.
The visuals are simply unparalleled on the platform. In fact after playing, I'm not even sure how a more powerful platform could significantly improve them (aside from rendering them in a higher resolution). The art direction is ace. The lighting is fantastic. And the game even has glare effects that I never thought were even possible with this kind of hardware. I swear they're every bit as good as the glare effects in BioShock. On top of all that, the game has plenty of bump mapping, the textures are very clean, and I really can't say I've seen much that would benefit from more polygons. And the best part? It all runs a glorious, rock-solid 60 frames per second. I'd even go so far to say this game looks better than any that I've played on the 360 so far.
I'm beginning to wonder if this will manage to surpass RE4 for me... I wasn't expecting it.
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