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Not the best Metroid, but a good installment in the series...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: September 07, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Simply put, the game is just way too similar to the first Metroid Prime. Unfortunately this immediately makes Echoes feel inferior. So if you're looking for a brand new innovative game, you will be disappointed.

However, as a Metroid game, it's just as engrossing and enveloping as the rest. Storywise, this one is much darker and much more surreal. The puzzles and the tasks that Samus must go through are MUCH more involved...sometimes to the point of frustration. The bosses are tricky, but not unbeatable. It'll sometimes take a few tries. However, save points are much more scarce, which makes dying more of an inconvenience since you'll likely have to traverse a long way (solving the same puzzles) in order to try again.

This game introduces having ammo for your beam weapons. Big, big hinderance. There seems to be no point in having this on there. Also, the light world/dark world plotline is straight out of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, so in that respect it seems unoriginal. And speaking of unoriginality, having Samus start fully-equipped only to "accidentally" lose all the powerups is repetitive and farfetched.

Controlwise, it's identical to Metroid Prime. Graphically, it's identical to Metroid Prime. So unfortunately, this game doesn't bring a lot of new elements to the table. I'm playing through it to see what happens before I start Metroid Prime 3 (now THAT'S a revolutionary game!), but I probably won't touch Echoes again after I beat it.

Unwelcome elements and mediocrity overshadow positives to make final result a hollow sequel

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 09, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Anyone who has played Metroid Prime but not yet Metroid Prime 2 Echoes has probably heard mixed things about the game and wonders what to believe. For anyone wondering if it's as good as the original or not, as the title of this review implies, it is not. The main two ways I evaluate a Metroid game are through the power-ups and the environments. Metroid Prime 2 Echoes is largely inferior to the original in both these areas.

With the exception of the Sanctuary Fortress, I do not know how some reviews say that the environments in Echoes are more varied than in the first game. Some may have more visual detail with the game being made two years later, but I found there to be very little variety for a good part of the game. The landing area in Echoes is called the Temple Grounds, and three main areas branch off from it. The first of those areas is the Agon Wastes, and I found it to look very much like the Temple Grounds, both of which looked unimpressive. They both have sand-colored ground, which is understandable since the Agon Wastes is supposed to be a desert area, but there are nearly no other defining environmental traits. The two areas look very bland, employing few more colors than brown, gray, and the sand color. Not even the immediate area around Samus's ship is interesting, a departure from previous games. In Super Metroid the ship was in the wide open with mountains in the background, and you as the player could take advantage of the space to fool around with the power-ups and abilities. In Metroid Prime the landing site was a lush plain which had very similar freedom to the landing site in Super Metroid. Echoes's landing site is a small, covered, closed-in room right before a weed-filled tunnel. Frankly it resembles a hl.hole when compared to the previous landing sites. This created a feeling of emptiness. The only environment in the entire game that really stood out was the Light World part of the Sanctuary Fortress near the end. Its mechanical and futuristic look superbly depicts it as a momentous place of high importance. Especially the views on the outside parts are stunning. It is scandalous that the Sanctuary Fortress alone is not enough to salvage the rest of the game.

Most likely everyone knows about the Light World-Dark World feature, and when referring to the environments in Echoes, naturally the Dark World must be mentioned. Think of the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and a pretty good idea of how Echoes is set up should come to mind. The Dark World is mostly purplish, and it has a poisonous atmosphere that incessantly causes damage anywhere outside of protective light emitted by scattered crystals. I will concede that the makers did a good job, at least initially, of making the Dark World eerie and unsettling. The first time I went to the Dark World, I was tense, and the initial music fit the mood perfectly. Unfortunately the welcoming feeling wore off quickly. Not being able to freely explore kept the Dark World's appeal brief, and I felt that its presence hindered keeping track of places. In the first game I still remember where many of the power-ups are, having tracked down most of them without help. As soon as I started getting a good feel of one world in Echoes, I just found going to another world a distraction that made it easier to lose my sense of direction.

With very few exceptions, most of the power-ups in Metroid Prime 2 Echoes are unimpressive or nothing significantly different from the first game. The new beams are mediocre at best. Samus's arm cannon took slightly different shapes in Metroid Prime depending on the weapon equipped. For Echoes the makers did not employ different shapes for the Light Beam, Dark Beam, and according to the manual photo, not the Annihilator Beam either. Having the Light Beam equipped looks almost exactly like having the Wave Beam from the first game equipped. Having the Dark Beam equipped is just like having the Ice Beam equipped except instead of Ice Blue on Samus's arm there's purple and black. When the Light Beam fires it looks just like the Plasma Beam except that it's white instead of orange, and not nearly as destructive or fun to use. It's even lamer charged up. The Dark Beam had some potential, but any fun that might have resulted from the beams was nearly wiped out by the despicable ammo system. Yes, in case anyone did not know, now the special beams have limited ammo, just like the missiles. Of course there are ammo expansions just like missile expansions, but the whole ammo system was an idea that accomplished very little except making the game less fun to play. If they were just trying an "innovation," this was a very lame one that will hopefully never return.

Beams are not the only power-ups that are inferior to their counterparts in the original. Echoes replaces the Gravity Suit with the Gravity Boost, a rocket-like device wrapped around Samus's back. In addition to the other normal functions of the Gravity Suit, it basically allows for a third jump under water, but despite this new function, I'd trade the Gravity Boost to have the Gravity Suit back. Yes the game is first-person instead of third; obviously meaning that Samus is not shown from the back much, yet when she is I find the rocket to just look stupid and out of place on her. I also wondered why it wasn't made to allow for a triple jump above water as well as under, and unlike the Gravity Suit, it does not change Samus's visor color. It was really neat how the Gravity Suit in the first game changed Samus's visor to the aqua color and how the inventory explained that the suit offered a visor upgrade to improve underwater vision. The Gravity Boost also improves underwater vision, but no explanation as to how it does so appears in the inventory. How does a rocket pack have anything to do with vision? The answer remains elusive. The Gravity Boost also means that Samus's suit looks the same for much of the game. The Dark Suit comes at the end of the Agon Wastes, and afterward it is not until extremely late in the game when another one comes. This means she's stuck with the Dark Suit for most of the game, a suit which not only fails to completely protect her from the poison of Dark Aether's atmosphere, but also if you ask me looks like a weak version of the Phazon Suit.

The inferiority of the power-ups does not end with the suits either. Echoes replaces the Thermal Visor and X-Ray visor with the Dark Visor and the Echo Visor. The Dark Visor essentially combines the purposes of both the visors from the first game, but is not nearly as interesting. Both the visors from the first game made interesting sounds whenever activated. The Dark Visor makes close to no sound, if any at all. I still can't tell even with the volume high on the TV, which means it probably makes no sound. It is also limited in ways that its predecessors were not. It has a red focus area with two circles inside, but the problem is that this focus area only takes up about two thirds of the horizontal length and vertical width of the screen, and invisible objects and enemies only show up in that point! This limitation leaves an awful lot of space where things don't show up, and therefore where the visor is useless. The X-Ray visor showed everything at any point on the screen, but for some mysterious reason that was too much to ask this time around. The Thermal and X-Ray Visors were also much more detailed on the sides of the screen. They had sophisticated features with numbers and parts that recorded position, angles, and other precisions. The Dark Visor does not have any such detail. All it does is change things to gray and put the red focal point in the middle of the screen.

Moving on from the visors, some people may have heard about the Screw Attack coming back in Echoes and gotten excited after having missed it in the first game. The sad truth is that the makers probably would have been better off designing the game in a way that the Screw Attack wouldn't have been needed. It's nothing like what it was in Super Metroid. It adds on five or six more jumps to the space jump and still retains the attack function, but it is much more for jumping purposes than attacking purposes. It is much more awkward to use for many reasons. It will not activate unless there is sufficient space for multiple jumps, and until a double jump is performed, so forget about instantly jumping right into enemies for an easy kill. You can't even change jumping directions once you start either except to almost unnoticeably veer left or right, so you'll rarely ever hit enemies with it, but even if you do, it's not always a one-hit-kill. If you hit a wall in the course of your jumps, you bounce off and fall. The Screw Attack feels more like a wasted effort than a good addition.

I can only point to two bright spots with the power-ups. One of them is with the Spider Ball, but even that is not without flaws. Players might remember that getting the Spider Ball in the first game put a neat design on the sides of the morph ball, but not this time around. If anything, the Spider Ball makes the morph ball look even less varied, but at least in this case there's some compensation. The makers incorporated the boost ball function into the Spider Ball puzzles, adding the ability to boost from one magnetic rail to another. This idea gave a whole new dimension to the Spider Ball puzzles. Unlike the ammo system, combining the Boost Ball with the Spider Ball puzzles was a really good innovation. There are a couple of bosses/sub bosses that have to be fought entirely in the morph ball mode from Spider tracks, and they can be just as interesting as some of the normal boss fights. I absolutely point to the Spider Ball puzzles as one of Metroid Prime 2 Echoes's highest strengths. The other bright spot with the power-ups is the Echo Visor. It is absolutely mesmerizing, and unlike the Dark Visor, it has a sound of its own. It's just about the only new power-up from the game that I might not mind seeing return sometime.

After environments and power-ups, other little things about Echoes are also inferior to the original. What kind of little things? Little things that when all added up make a difference. The inventory in Echoes was not nearly as well set up. All the words overlapping one another got to be quite annoying, and the more the logbook filled, the harder it was to distinguish between what I had already read and what I had not. Another little thing involved the elevators. In the first game, whenever Samus descends or ascends to a different area, her arms are raised above waist level, as if she's ready to shoot should anything suddenly attack. Her eyes are also shown, and she's looking around cautiously, observant and prepared for anything. When Samus is on an elevator in Echoes, her arms are simply down at her sides. Even the save points seem to function faster and more efficiently in the first game.

So what are the only real positives about Metroid Prime 2 Echoes? First to be as fair as possible I have to say that it's in a tough position: any sequel to Metroid Prime would have a tough time measuring up because the game is nearly impeccable. Echoes is not a horrible game, but it pales miserably to its predecessor, and it's not very fun to play. It's littered with too many negatives that far outweigh the positives. It has stunning scenery in the Sanctuary Fortress, but not much elsewhere. The Spider Ball puzzles are amazing, but the rest of the game just did not have nearly as much appeal as the original. The ammo system, the rather bland environments before the Sanctuary Fortress, the limitations for much of the game in the Dark World, and other factors just render Metroid Prime 2 Echoes not nearly as fun to play as the original. I can not understand why some people say that Echoes is just like the original because some of its flaws are about as far from Metroid as anything could possibly be. I never really got frustrated playing the first game, but I'm not even sure if I'll ever finish playing Echoes. I've gotten the Screw Attack, so I've seen all the power-ups except the Annihilator Beam, but since according to my knowledge it also uses ammo, I'm not too interested. I watched the best ending on youtube, which clearly shows my lack of interest in actually finishing out the game myself. I'm very glad that I only borrowed the game instead of buying it. I can only hope that Metroid Prime 3 builds on Echoes's strengths while not repeating its many weaknesses.

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