Metroid Prime 2 reviewed

In 2002, Metroid took a radical direction with Metroid Prime. It was in the first-person breaking away from the third-person views of the previous games and people were up-in-arms. Thankfully, the people shut up when Metroid Prime proved to be awesome and people were eagerly awaiting the next chapter. Instead we get Metroid Prime 2: Echoes where it starts off fine but then gets more and more frustrating.

Like the first game, Echoes has one hell of a first chapter. Samus is looking for Marines and finds the crash site on planet Aether. During landing her ship gets damaged and now she has no choice but to investigate. The site paints a horrible bleak picture of the Marines last days....and then a few of them turn into ZOMBIES THAT YOU HAVE TO KILL! Then you meet yourself but DARK! Then you find out there's another dimension to Aether called dark AETHER! Then all you gear gets STOLEN! Then this thing that isn't a Chozo tells you the plot and now you have to go save AETHER! But the main thing is that there's actually a story to this and most of the items have logical reasons for you to get them. You have to kill a lot of things to get your stuff back instead of stealing from Chozo statues or just being lucky which is a nice change of pace.

The gameplay is pretty much the same as the first Metroid Prime. You have the same systems, the same HUD and the same graphical tricks on the visor like the last one. But considering how well it worked in the first game, why break it? But there is something that they did break, the logbook/pause menu. It may have been a good idea to make it more organized but the spider-system it uses is not the way to do it. It's too cluttered and moving it is a pain cause then it just clutters it up some more before you just give up and start selecting whatever hoping that it's the entry you want to read. And another thing, in a couple places in the Torvus Bog area, you have to fight a couple Space Pirate Commandos which pretty much takes a lot of your ammo. And you have to fight them cause the doors are locked. But then if you wait a few minutes they leave, leaving you with less health and less ammo but hey, you can leave the room now. I mean come on!

But it's fatal flaw is that it's way to laborous to go from place-to-place and dimension-to-dimension. You will be back-tracking a lot and unlike the first Metroid Prime, it's not fun. It's boring, it's monotous and if you're at Torvus Bog, be prepared to cry when you meet the Space Pirate Commandos cause you will meet them...a lot. This game just wants to frustrate you and there's little you can do cause you just want to finish it. Sure the game starts off incredibly well but the more you play the worse it gets. But even at it's worst, it's still competent and you will keep playing even if you are cursing at the game while you do.

7/10