Metroid Prime 2: Echos Impression

[Dracos]

This is another one I didn't finish.  Bad me.

This is the latest in the Metroid Prime series by Retro studios for the Nintendo Gamecube.  I've heard good things about this series, so during one of my recent splurges, I picked it up on a whim and tried it out.

the first thing that deserves to be noted is that, like many games of late, the entire thing was beaten hard with a pretty stick.  It's lovely walking through the place.  They could have no enemies and it'd be pretty fun to explore.  In fact, I'd probably like it better =P

The game gives you lots of stuff to explore too with a scanning function and tons of well written backstory behind the whole game.  Something that you can sink your teeth into.  Plenty of fun to be had reading it all.

The game's premise is you, Samus Aran master bounty hunter at large, receive a distress call and go to check it out on some odd planet.  not original, but we don't care about that with metroid.  You quickly find that you are not really dealing with metroids (Booo) or the space pirates (double boo) but these weird shadow creatures who attack you early on, steal all your stuff, and then just leave you be.  Let me just say that these guys were my first problem with the game.  They aren't interesting.  Most of them don't have heads and are little more than formless blobs or sets of legs wandering around.  While this would be a cool mechanic for one or two enemies, it is is considerably less so for the major bad guys to be these silent, non-speaking 'villians' who are relegated to evil destroy everything omnivore thingees.  Meh.

Anyhow, the general gameplay is pretty smooth and fun with two real problems that eventually killed the game for me.

 The first is that they put in a really tedious beam mechanic where you have to track ammo for your various beams and use them to open doors (Every time, they never turn blue permanently >_<).  You got a light beam and a dark beam and you got to switch between them to keep them stored.  Problem?  Well virtually everything is weak against light and there's almost never any reason to use dark except refilling ammo.  Aside from the whole ammo bit for beam weapons being pretty tired.

 The second was that the enemy respawn rates were crazy.  Enemies would take a while to take down and felt like they respawned right after you walked out of the room.  This really made exploring or backtracking a lot more tedious than it needed to be with enemies never getting easy to just waste and keep going on.  They also had some weird stuff with their random encounter generating, including enemies that just simply weren't fightable in such terrain appearing, requiring backtracking and re-entering the room to force a respawn.

It was this last that really killed the game for me.  As much as I liked the atmosphere, I'd just gotten tired of killing the enemies a little more than halfway through.  Every fight took a bit to do and it just wasn't fun after a while.  The bosses didn't help, largely being 'you can kill me this way and only this way' bosses.

Pretty game.  Rental type pretty.

But not something that managed to keep the fun level positive the whole way through.

Dracos