All in all Echoes accommodates everything you'd want for a sequel to a game as brilliant as Metroid Prime.
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes sticks close to its predecessor. It's pretty much the sequel you'd have expected. It plays the exact same as the original Prime game, the control of Samus is the same and they way you use your arsenal of weapons remains unchanged to, so it's fair to say Echoes doesn't really advance the features of Metroid Prime at all. But regardless of that fact Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is still a great game.
The game starts out with our heroine Samus Aran heading to the planet Aether to investigate the disappearance of some Galactic Federation troopers. They lost contact with their main HQ and Samus was hired to investigate. When she enters the planets atmosphere her ship is caught up in a huge atmospheric storm (which she later learns is caused by the planets instability) and her ship gets badly damaged. After working out that the storms actually act as a barrier stopping signals she realises it was the storms that made the GF troops lose contact with their HQ. But as she works her way to their ship she sees them all dead, killed by what she believes to be Splinters. But as she travels further she comes across a Phazon clone of herself (and if you got the 100% ending to the original Metroid Prime you'll know that the clone of Samus is actually Metroid Prime); and it's here when Samus gets attacked by some creatures known as the Ing under the control of her alter ego, who steal all her abilities. After the attack Samus wanders across a creature called A-Mos who is the last remaining survivor of the Luminoth race. A-Mos tells Samus that a meteor carrying Phazon crashed in to the planet, causing the planet to split in to two parts, Light and Dark Aether, with the dark side home to the Ing and the light side home to the Luminoth. Then A-Mos asks for Samus' help to restore Light Aether to its former self by ridding the planet of its dark side, and so Samus accepts.
The biggest thing between Prime and Echoes is that Echoes is much more story driven. You can actually talk to things in Echoes which you couldn't in Prime (although you still don't talk a lot), and while some feel this'll be better I actually found it sucked a lot of the atmosphere Prime had out of the game.
Another big thing is that because of the presence of two parallel worlds Samus can explore both of Light and Dark Aether. Now this works similarly to the Light and Dark Worlds from A Link To The Past, and it's not a surprise really because when designing Dark Aether Retro Studios got in some of the Zelda team developers who worked on A Link To The Past to help with the design. Structurally there no difference between the two worlds really, just the occasional difference here and there. And again just like the Zelda title jumping between both worlds is also a part of Echoes.
Samus' arsenal of weapons in Echoes is as good as it's ever been. Samus still acquires three new beam guns in the game to go alongside her trusty Power Beam. She gets the Dark Beam which is strong when used in Light Aether, the Light Beam which is stronger in Dark Aether and the Annihilator Beam which is good against all foes. But the biggest thing added to Echoes is an ammo feature. Each gun has ammo now. The Light Beam uses light ammo, Dark Beam uses dark ammo and the Annihilator Beam uses both light and dark ammo. Each of the Light and Dark Beam only start with a capacity of 50 shots, but you can acquire Ammo upgrades throughout the game, with the main capacity of each gun been 250 shots. Now I liked the ammo system as I found it made you use your guns more conservatively, but in a way it was kind of a pointless addition as an ammo system wasn't needed in the first Prime so it wasn't really needed here either.
And again Samus has four different visors for you to use. You again start with the Combat and Scan Visors, so scanning is another must in Echoes but Samus gains two new visors. She first gains the Dark Visor, which enables her to see things other wise invisible, and the Echo Visor which enables her to track sound waves to find her foes. And again like in Metroid Prime the visors all work well and all serve a good purpose. And again in true Metroid fashion Samus can still use her trusty missiles and can still turn in to her Morph Ball.
The biggest complaint I have though with Echoes is that I never really liked Dark Aether. I think the reason I didn't like it was because I just found it to be a bit boring, and I'm not sure why I did. I mean it's not like it's not designed well because it is, I just found it a bit laborious hopping the Dark to Light Aether, and well, that's probably why I found it boring. There are set portals throughout the game that let you swap between the two and I think that was probably the down side for me, I'd rather have had an item that let you swap whenever you wanted to like in A Link To The Past.
And like I said earlier there isn't as much of an atmosphere in Echoes as there was in Prime and I thought this was a bit of a disappointment too.
But despite the few problems I have with the game Echoes it does play identically to Metroid Prime so you can expect Samus to again handle like a dream. Again she is limited to movement through one analogue stick but it still works great and again it's done to occupy her to have a lot of weapons (you still select visors using the D-Pad and beam guns using the 'C' stick), and Samus again has the ability to lock-on to her targets. And Echoes has a lot of jumping sequences like Prime too, and again the jumping aspect of the game is flawless. Actually Echoes does include the Screw Attack technique (something taken out of the original Prime for time constraints) and this adds new techniques to the jumping sequences.
All in all Metroid Prime 2: Echoes accommodates everything you'd want for a sequel to a game as brilliant as Metroid Prime. Yes it's fair to say that Echoes comes nowhere near to surpassing it brethren, nor does it advance its mechanics, but it still gives you a deep and challenging experience none-of-the-less.
Review by: James Widdowson
Score: 9.2/10