You are Jenosa Arma, a female bounty hunter who is infected with a virus on a space station. Your computer assistant will give you vital information on your surroundings and intermittently update your map with new locations. You fight bugs in space stations and on a planet. The comparisons roll down and out through the length of the game. Now that we've established that Fusion and Scurge are very similar, let's talk about Scurge.

Played in an isometric view (that's a ¾ top-down view --I had to look it up myself), Jenosa will be moving in all 8 directions which the plane offers. This is the major separation between Scurge and Metroid, although it still works well in it's own merit. Scurge is actually a port of the same Game Boy Advance title, which means that the controls may or may not be as useful as they once were. The DS Lite's D-pad has such a large dead zone that navigating Jenosa creates somewhat of an awkward learning curve as the player will need to get used to finding the sweet spots where horizontal directions work. This isn't as much of an issue on the old DS, but the problem still exists.

An exploration-based action game, the isometric view makes the first half hour or so a little tedious and hectic as you explore your space station. Within this time, Jenosa is infected with a strange virus. Due to the infection, you are pressed along throughout the game to find decontamination platforms, which put your infection level at 0% and save the game. Major areas are opened by collecting enough cards to unlock doors judging by their associated number. Also, you have a really cool grappling hook, which you'll use to drag items around and solve puzzles. Hey, Metroid Prime had one of those! Between finding cards and backtracking to save points, the rest of your time will be spent killing hoards and hoards of enemies.

This isn't too bad though, because eventually you will receive upgrades which exploit enemies' weaknesses and make your job easier. These upgrades come in the form of gauntlets which are really just energy beam gun… things, of which can exploit or exacerbate a situation. For instance, an electrical Gauntlet which is capable of taking out robots in one or two shots may raise the attack power of biological enemies when fired at them. You'll get used to switching between weapons, and if you ever find yourself in a corner you can just jump up and down like mad --most enemies are too slow or don't even have the ability to fire up and down.

The graphics haven't taken much of a leap from what the GBA game looked like, although Orbital tries their hardest to make the touch screen feel involved. The most it will ever do is display a few menus and your map. Use of the touch screen includes such features as dragging the map around and selecting options in a menu screen, yay! Still, the benefit of having a game that looked gorgeous on the GBA means that it still looks great as a DS game, and aspects such as great-looking environments with neat day/night cycles or detailed animations will still keep your eyes glued for the duration of the title.

Scurge lasts long enough and provides a strong challenge to suit any Metroid fan or gamer looking for a good action title. Although its frustrations lie within some game design, and then translate through hardware (such as the D-pad), it's still very playable and very fun. The biggest drawback would be the push to find decontamination platforms, whereas you rapidly lose health once your contamination level hits 100% and the game decidedly kills you with its masses of enemies that respawn once you re-enter a room. The combat varies between fun and getting out before you're dead. Although this issue and others are minor complaints, they don't hamper the gameplay nearly enough to take away from making it a solid purchase. Oh, it's also going to make you play any Metroid game whenever you put Scurge down.