Metroid: Other M

And it's not all combat, thankfully. Even in the game's early stages there's plenty of exploration to be done amidst creepy, derelict environments, with dozens of dead ends that will presumably only be traversable at a later date. Within minutes of loading up, in fact, I was pleasantly lost, wall-jumping this way and that, morph-balling through little gaps to see if I could find any secrets, and meeting up with a few new friends.

This, perhaps, is the element of Other M that is hardest to judge at the moment. In its commitment to telling a deeper, more involving story on this outing, Team Ninja has thrown Samus together with a gaggle of futuristic soldiers who have come to investigate the same distress call. One of them, their leader by the looks of it, is someone that Samus once had a bit of a thing with back when she was in the army, too. Crikey.

That doesn't mean you're suddenly controlling a squad, but it does indicate that the lonely exploration which makes the series so satisfying is likely to be broken up with fairly regular moments when you huddle with the gang and try to work out what to do next - an early cut-scene even has the soldiers dispatched all around the space station, suggesting they're the girders in a far more rigid level system.

Often, it has to be said, it works - the game's first real boss battle, against a writhing purple beast built from hundreds of tiny bugs, sees your allies freezing chunks of his body while you then blast them apart with rockets - but it's going to be interesting to see how much your new chums change the essence of the game.

Your old boyfriend, for starters, replaces the time-honoured system of finding your own kit upgrades as you go, by telling you instead, often rather curtly, when you're authorised to use each of your existing weapons.

While it leads to classic character-revealing lines like, "We currently have no plans to authorise the use of Power Bombs," - that one's straight out of the West Wing - and it's actually little more than a new coat of paint for the same old mechanic, it feels slightly less fulfilling. Instead of heading out on your own and stumbling across useful gadgets, you're being told when and where you can play with your own toys. Samus is being kept down by The Man.

For the most part, though, the kinks in the ancient template are characterful and interesting, while to see a game returning to its roots with so many new ideas is extremely exciting. Glossy and glittering, Metroid: Other M is one of the prettiest Wii games you'll probably ever see; from what Nintendo's revealed so far, it looks like it could be one of the most satisfying - and, in its clash of design cultures, the most fascinating - as well.