Too few Save Stations and too much Dark Aether.
Story goes that a squad of space troopers have gone missing in planet Aether and our interstellar bounty hunter Samus Aran gets the mission to go and look for them. For some reason it’s just her. Soon she gets nearly all of her equipment stolen and finds that she’s in the middle of a war between Luminoth and Ing. On top of all that the whole world of Aether has been divided in two parts: Light and Dark. Samus is of course for the Light and goes on a quest to save Luminoth from the evil Ing.
Graphics and sound are just as good as they were in the original, but you will have to compare both games side by side to really notice those graphical upgrades. On the other hand in terms of artistic design and environments Echoes looks better than the original, but now I mean mostly only Light Aether side of the gameworld. In a word this game looks awesome and the same goes to sound effects excluding voice acting. For some reason there is rarely any voice work in Nintendo’s games in general and besides some random growls there is no voice acting in Metroid Prime 2 Echoes. There is a lot more story-telling than in the original, but the story is told by text and this is really disappointing. All this sci-fi atmosphere and cool hi-tech weapons and no voice acting! Still the chosen text based story-telling works just fine.
Gameplay is very similar to the original game, but now the puzzles are more challenging, because you will have take into account both the Light and Dark Aether. This can be a pain, because in Metroid style the enemies will always re-spawn when you move from one area to the next and back again. There are even fewer Save Stations this time around than last time did, so you can easily spend more than half an hour just looking for a Save Station when you need it. One time I played for over two hours and suddenly found myself in the middle of a boss fight… and died. Nearly three hours of gameplay and it was all in vain. This was EXTREMELY frustrating and I haven’t even touched the game since then.
You spend a lot of time in Dark Aether, which is an unpleasant place to be in: it’s mostly just dark and bland compared to Light Aether. Personally I didn’t like Dark Aether at all and because it’s so big part of Metroid Prime 2 Echoes I didn’t enjoy the whole gaming experience nearly as much as I did in the original Metroid Prime.
Multiplayer is really an odd addition to a franchise that is so heavily single player oriented. It’s nothing to tell home about, but it doesn’t hurt the overall package either.
Metroid Prime 2 Echoes is a harder game than its predecessor (because of the lack of Save Stations) and I hated Dark Either so personally this game was a big disappointment.