At the beginning of Echoes, Samus responds to a distress signal sent out from a Federation ship. It turns out the ship crash landed on the planet Aether while chasing after some Space Pirates. When Samus arrives to investigate, she begins to unravel the mysteries surrounding the planet. It turns out the planet is in a dimensional flux, with the Light side and the Dark side battling it out for supremacy. The Luminoth inhabit the Light planet and the Ing are from the Dark planet. The Ing have the power to possess and take over other creatures and eventually began to overtake the Luminoth. Samus become entrenched in the battles against the Ing when her weapons systems are stolen near the beginning of the game.

The game plays identical to the first Metroid Prime. Labeled by Retro and Nintendo as a First Person Adventure (instead of Shooter), your view is through Samus’s visor. Different visors will be acquired throughout the game, but you will start out with the Combat Visor and the Scan Visor, which allows you to identify important items and to read logs of fallen soldiers to help fill in the story. As you progress through the game you will come to realize that the world is huge. You’ll eventually travel freely between the 2 worlds and many puzzle elements will require you to activate something in one area to get to the next. Although not story driven like some games, Echoes does utilize a lot of short cinema scenes to convey Samus’s reactions to events that happen throughout the game.

New to the game are the Light and Dark Beams. Unlike previous Metroid games these weapons have limited ammo that must be replenished. When enemies perish via the Dark Beam, they’ll leave Light Beam ammo, and vice versa, so there will be some strategies involved to keep ammo levels full. New armor, more visors, and new special moves (like the screw attack) will keep the game fresh and action-packed. Fans of Metroid Prime and the rest of the series are in for a real treat with the sequel. It’s full of “Wow! Look at that!” moments and scenery that simply engulfs the senses. The boss battles are even more difficult, giving you a real sense of accomplishment when they finally fall. The puzzles are more cleverly designed and there are a lot more instances where the morph ball will be needed, especially in boss battles.

Echoes improves upon Metroid Prime’s graphics by infusing more detail into the backgrounds and awesome special effects throughout the terrain. The different areas of the game are even more intricately detailed than the first game. Each room is unique and the different machinery located throughout the game looks legitimate. In other words, the mechanisms and pipes and whatnot look like they serve a real purpose in the world and weren’t just thrown in for good measure. The movement is still silky smooth and the controls are spot-on, although identical to those in the first game. If you hated the controls before, there’s no change here. The music impresses and has a similar composition to that heard in the last game. There are some tracks from older Metroid games, but much of the music is brand new.

New to the game is a 4 player multiplayer option. This is a tacked-on feature that adds replay to the game and it works quite well. Some of my friends prefer this multiplayer mode to that seen in Metroid Prime Hunters on the Nintendo DS. Traditional power-ups are in the game, as are special enhancements like invulnerability, invisibility, and unlimited missile ammo (all of which are timed). Lock-on targeting is still part of the game, but it’s easy to get out of the lock by rolling into a ball and rolling away. Drop a few bombs along the way to make sure your opponents don’t follow you and you’re usually good to go. Different levels have secret areas to hide out in and special items to locate. You can set parameters like kill count, time limits, and others, but it’s not as detailed as you’d see in a game like Timesplitters. I can see many gamers out there really liking the multiplayer mode, but it’s difficult to say if it will catch on as much as a traditional shooting game do to the control scheme and unique abilities.

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is the best GameCube game this year. It doesn’t quite surpass the original, but it’s excellent nonetheless. Even though the game does introduce some new weapons and play mechanics, it’s very much like its predecessor, taking some of the freshness away. Also, the Dark Aether parts of the game added quite a bit of backtracking and mapping which really took me out of the experience more than I’d have liked. Still, the game is better than almost any other released this year, so it’s definitely worth picking up. It’s just not quite as fine tuned as the previous effort. Retro’s dedication to the GameCube hardware shows just how good first person games can look on Nintendo’s console. If you enjoyed the original Metroid Prime, Echoes is a sure-fire bet. Even if you’ve never touched a Metroid game before, I highly suggest this game to anyone with a pulse. It’s worth owning a GameCube just to play both Metroid Prime games. What are you waiting for?